EPOXI Team Develops New Method To Find Alien Ocean

Matt_dk writes "Astronomers have found more than 300 alien (extrasolar) worlds so far. Most of these are gas giants like Jupiter, and are either too hot (too close to their star) or too cold (too far away) to support life as we know it. Sometime in the near future, however, astronomers will probably find one that's just right — a planet with a solid surface that's the right distance for a temperature that allows liquid water — an essential ingredient in the recipe for life. Now scientists looking back at Earth with the Deep Impact/EPOXI mission have developed a method to indicate whether Earth-like extrasolar worlds have oceans."

Comments

Re:water esential for life?

[jschen]

and how do you define life anyway?

Good question. There's lots of ways, but my personal preference in this context is a system that expends energy in order to combat entropy. Once you stop combatting entropy, you head towards thermodynamic equilibrium, and are dead. This definition may be overly broad (by that definition, my computer's memory chips are alive), but I suspect that if we find something that meets these criteria, it will be associated with life.