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Astrobiologists Identify Five Greenhouse Gases that Would Be Giveaways of Terraformed Exoplanet
Top Stories Tamfitronics The five artificial greenhouse gases identified by University of California, Riverside astrobiologist Edward Schwieterman and his colleagues would be detectable even at relatively low concentrations in the atmospheres of exoplanets using the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope and future space-based telescopes.An illustration of various planetary technosignatures, including artificial atmospheric gases. Image credit: Sohail Wasif / UC Riverside.“For us, these gases are bad because we don’t want to increase warming,” Dr. Schwieterman said.“But they’d be good for a civilization that perhaps wanted to forestall an impending ice age or terraform an otherwise-uninhabitable planet in their system, as humans have proposed for Mars.”“Since these gases are not known to occur in significant quantities in nature, they must be manufactured.”“Finding them, therefore, would be a sign of intelligent, technology-using life forms. Such signs are called...
