Hubble just made a major breakthrough in the search for alien life

• NASA used the sunlight beaming through Earth's atmosphere and bouncing off of the Moon to analyze our planet's atmosphere.
• The experiment was a sort of proof-of-concept that suggests we may be able to detect life on other worlds by analyzing the light passing through their atmospheres.
• In the distant future, missions to exoplanets may be determined by how likely they are to support life, based on what we can see from afar.

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Hubble took advantage of a total lunar eclipse to do a bit of science that may one day be used to detect life on other worlds. As NASA reports in a new blog post and video, Hubble was able to use the Moon as a sort of "mirror" that reflected the light beaming through Earth's atmosphere. By analyzing the wavelengths of light coming through our planet's atmosphere and bouncing off the surface of the Moon, researchers were able to detect the presence of ozone in Earth's atmosphere.

We already knew that ozone surrounds the Earth, of course, but this observation was something of an experiment. The idea is that by analyzing the light coming through the atmospheres of distant exoplanets, we might be able to detect habitable worlds or even be confident that some of those planets are supporting life.

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Hubble just made a major breakthrough in the search for alien life originally appeared on BGR.com on Thu, 6 Aug 2020 at 20:24:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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