A New Clue in the Search for Forests on Distant Planets
To find signs of plant life on other worlds, it helps to understand the history of our own.
Astronomers remotely detected signs of life on a planet for the first time in history in December 1990. “The Galileo spacecraft found evidence of abundant gaseous oxygen, a widely distributed surface pigment with a sharp absorption edge in the red part of the visible spectrum, and atmospheric methane in extreme thermodynamic disequilibrium,” astronomers wrote in a paper in Nature. “Together, these are strongly suggestive of life.”
It wasn’t exactly a major discovery. The planet in question was Earth; at the urging of Carl Sagan,
