A team of Israeli and American scientists says they have found a new way to search for life beyond Earth.

The team’s peer-reviewed study, which introduces a breakthrough method for detecting alien life by analyzing the diversity of molecular groups, was led by the Weizmann Institute of Science and appeared in Nature Astronomy.

“We’re talking about the building blocks of life,” lead researcher Dr. Gideon Yoffe, a postdoctoral fellow under the supervision of Prof. Yohai Kaspi and Prof. Itay Halevy of Weizmann’s Earth and Planetary Sciences, told The Times of Israel in a teleconference call. “This is what we’re looking for in the solar system and beyond.”

The team plans to use this method on Eureka, an Israeli spacecraft concept currently being planned by Weizmann researchers with the Israeli Aerospace Industry.

Eureka is scheduled to explore the smallest of Jupiter’s four large moons, Europa, in search of signs of life in the early 2030s.

“Our approach is among the very few ways to examine whether molecules, which form both through biological and nonbiological processes, were created by life,” Yoffe said.

The study also included Dr. Fabian Klenner of the University of California, Riverside, and Dr. Barak Sober of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Searching for extraterrestrial life

In the past five decades, scientists have searched for biosignatures, chemical or physical traces known as the fingerprints of life. These traces help scientists distinguish living matter from nonliving chemistry.

“These carbon-based molecules make proteins, DNA, cellular membranes, on which all life on Earth is based,” Yoffe said.

There are various methods to determine whether a biological process generated these molecules, but currently, they aren’t feasible for measuring in space.

Spacecraft are unable to bring a lot of heavy scientific equipment into space, he said. In addition, extraterrestrial samples of organic material can degrade, become contaminated, or be very scarce.

“Many current methods of searching for extraterrestrial life are limited because they require either complicated processing of organic material or highly specific analytical methods,” Yoffe said. “This work cannot currently be performed in outer space at a reasonable cost.”

But........

© The Times of Israel