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Looking for life

A team from the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has pioneered a new technique to look for alien life.

The team has developed a method which doesn’t look for alien life directly, but instead looks at planet landscapes and tries to identify signs of influence from life forms.

Focusing on the idea of ‘chirality’ or handedness, NIST believes that – as substances critical to life favour a particular handedness – it may be able to detect the influence of this chirality from a great distance.

Commenting on the technique T.A. Germer, a physicist from NIST, commented: “You don’t want to limit yourself to looking for specific materials like oxygen that Earth creatures use, because that makes assumptions about what life is…But amino acids, sugars, DNA—each of these substances is either right- or left-handed in every living thing.”

The team plan to refine the technique on Earth, before gazing at faraway planets: “We need to be sure we get a signal from our own planet before we can look at others,” he says. “But what’s neat about the concept is that it is sensitive to something that comes from the process behind organic self-assembly, but not necessarily life as we know it,” concluded Germer.

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