Who says aliens have to travel light years to visit Earth? Maybe they’re just taking a leisurely stroll on our cosmic block. In fact, they could be lurking in your backyard as we speak, sipping on a refreshing glass of intergalactic lemonade and trying to decide if they should abduct your cat or your neighbor’s dog.
So next time you’re outside, keep an eye out for little green men and don’t forget to say hi! They might just become your new best friends… or abductors.
Now seriously, the Universe could actually be teeming with life, and that assumption actually comes from an astronomical perspective. There are way too many galaxies out there, and that translates to trillions of trillions of stars, and God knows how many planets that are at least theoretically capable of hosting life.
So if aliens do exist, how could humanity ever find them? The answer might lie in a small laser device that Phys.org writes about.
An instrument weighing only 17 pounds could uncover alien life
A team from the University of Maryland developed a mini laser-sourced analyzer for NASA space missions. The device combines laser desorption mass spectrometry (LDMS) with a miniaturized version of the Orbitrap, techniques that have yet to be used in an extraterrestrial planetary environment. The invention is designed for space exploration and onsite planetary material analysis and provides the same benefits as previous models but is more streamlined and efficient.
The new device is significantly smaller and more efficient than previous models without sacrificing the quality of its analysis of planetary material samples and potential biological activity. The weight is only 17 pounds, and the device combines a pulsed ultraviolet laser and an Orbitrap analyzer to detect signs of life and identify material compositions.
Ricardo Arevalo, who is the lead author and an associate professor of geology at UMD, explained, as Phys.org quotes:
The good thing about a laser source is that anything that can be ionized can be analyzed. If we shoot our laser beam at an ice sample, we should be able to characterize the composition of the ice and see biosignatures in it,
This tool has such a high mass resolution and accuracy that any molecular or chemical structures in a sample become much more identifiable.
The new findings were published in the journal Nature Astronomy.
