E.T. – The Voyeur
While clever people here on Earth are discovering new planets and systems it’s perhaps only human to wonder if anybody is looking back at us.
A team of astronomers, including a professor from MIT, has figured out just what those alien eyes might see using technologies that are being developed by regular Earth bound astronomers.
They reckon that E.T. could probably tell that our planet’s surface is divided between oceans and continents, and learn a little bit about the dynamics of our weather systems.
“Maybe somebody’s looking at us right now, finding out what our rotation rate is — that is, the length of our day,” says Sara Seager, associate professor of physics and the Ellen Swallow Richards Associate Professor of Planetary Sciences at MIT.
Seager, along with Enric Palle and colleagues at the Instituto de AstrofÃsica de Canarias, in Spain, and Eric Ford of the University of Florida have concluded that most of the planets astronomers have discovered beyond the solar system have not actually been seen; rather, they have been indirectly observed by looking at the influence they exert on stars that they orbit.
“The goal of [our] project was to see how much information you can extract” from very limited data, Seager says. The team’s conclusion: a great deal of information about a planet can be gleaned from that single pixel and the way it changes over time.
The way of analyzing the data that Seager and her co-authors studied would work for any world that has continents and bodies of liquid on its surface plus clouds in its atmosphere, even if those were made of very different materials on an alien world.
For example, icy worlds with seas of liquid methane, like Saturn’s moon Titan, or very hot worlds with oceans of molten silicate (which is solid rock on Earth), would show up similarly across the vastness of space.
Via MIT News
