• Question: Do you think there is life on other planets? why?

    Asked by amy to Heather, Helen, Hugh, Jane, Julian on 11 Nov 2014. This question was also asked by Josie87.
    • Photo: Julian Onions

      Julian Onions answered on 11 Nov 2014:

      I think there is almost certain to be life on other planets.

      We know from the Kepler mission that planets around other stars are very common, and there are 100 billion stars in our galaxy, so given we know life can start on Earth, it would be very unusual not to have life on some of those other planets.

      We may also yet find bacterial type life on other local planets and moons. Mars and Europa are firm favourites, but even high in the atmospheres of Jupiter and Venus has been considered. So I think we will find life elsewhere.

      Intelligent life is another issue, and we have no signs of intelligent life outside the Earth (and some days little on the Earth!), so that may be a more tricky thing to evolve compared to single celled bacteral type life.

    • Photo: Heather Campbell

      Heather Campbell answered on 11 Nov 2014:

      I think there has to be, there are so many thousand of other planets out there in our galaxy (and there are millions of other galaxies in the Universe) it would be pretty incredible if our planet was the only one with life.

      But that life might be very different from ours, it might have evolved in very different ways.

      Astronomers are searching for planets in the habitual or “Goldylocks” zone around other stars in the hope of finding life. The “Goldylocks” zone is the area around a star where liquid water can survive, which we think is the best chance for life. Astronomers are using space missions such as Kepler to search from these planets, and ground bases telescopes, such as one in Chile with has a specially spectrograph dedicated to looking for planets called High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS).

    • Photo: Helen Johnson

      Helen Johnson answered on 12 Nov 2014:

      Yes! Maybe not in our own solar system, but definitely out there somewhere. There are billions of galaxies, with hundreds of billions of stars, and we already know lots of stars have planets around them – some which could potentially host life. Lots of things have to come together to be able to have life on any planet, though, so I think we should feel pretty special either way.

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