Aliens could be evolving on nearby planets, scientists say

'Our closest neighboring worlds remain intriguing targets for the search for life beyond our solar system'

Life could be evolving right this minute on planets not all that far away, scientists have said.

Those mysterious worlds that are orbiting around stars just next door could serve as homes for life, despite the harsh environments that could be found there, they say.

Rocky exoplanets that look like our own have been a continual source of excitement about extraterrestrial life ever since they were discovered. But those hopes have been tempered by the harsh environments on those worlds, many of which are being bombarded by intense amount of radiation.

Proxima-b, for instance, is only 4.24 light years away, and looks similar to Earth. But it is also being hit by 250 times more X-ray radiation than we are, and the levels of ultraviolet radiation there could be deadly.

But a new paper suggests that it is possible to withstand such a bombardment. And their evidence is ourselves – humans have managed to flourish despite being hit by that kind of environment in the past.

Astronomers Lisa Kaltenegger and Jack O’Malley-James say that life on Earth arrived during a volley of radiation that is even more intense than seen on Proxima-b and other nearby exoplanets.

Around 4 billion years ago, the world is what the researchers describe as a hot mess. But it was at that same time that life managed to find a way to start up and flourish.

That means that other nearby planets could be seeing the same process. All of the four nearby exoplanets that are potentially habitable – Proxima-b, TRAPPIST-1e, Ross-128b and LHS-1140b – were studied and examined to compare with the Earth both now and in the past.

They found that the modelled planets were receiving far more UV radiation than is being emitted by our own sun today. But it is also significantly less than the Earth was receiving 3.9 billion years ago.

“Given that the early Earth was inhabited,” the researchers wrote, “we show that UV radiation should not be a limiting factor for the habitability of planets orbiting M stars. Our closest neighbouring worlds remain intriguing targets for the search for life beyond our solar system.”