s3e5: Signals Through Silence

We've talked a lot about life in the universe in this season — from where we might look, to what it might conceivably be, to the question of what even we mean by the word "life" anyway. And now, finally, it's time to grapple with the huge problem of what astronomers are actually looking for: the signals, the signs, the smoking gun of life on another planet. We're talking biosignatures, and Emily has some bad news: turns out, it's really hard to take a precise measurement of a conclusive biosignature of exolife ... mainly because, it's not clear any such conclusive biosignature even exists. But she has some good news, which is that we're getting a lot better at detecting atmospheres on exoplanets — so there's still hope!

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Syzygy is produced by Chris Stewart and co-hosted by Dr Emily Brunsden from the Department of Physics at the University of York.

Some of the things we talk about in this episode:

• What Wiki says about Biosignatures

• The Just Wonderful JWST

• The Eyeball Planet LHS 1140 b

• The paper on Detection of an atmosphere on LHS 1140 b

• A good summary of the paper