Lightning on alien worlds may fail to spark life, simulations suggest
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission.
Life as we know it may require lightning, as it's one of the few energy sources a planet has available to create complex chemical compounds. Now, new research has found that lightning, while not very common, can occur on tidally locked exoplanets like our nearest neighbor, Proxima b. But the peculiar nature of lightning on tidally locked planets poses some challenges for their ability to host life.
A typical lightning bolt can reach temperatures of up to 30,000 kelvins (over 50,000 degrees Fahrenheit). That's more than powerful enough to destroy common atmospheric gases and reassemble them into new compounds. On modern-day Earth, lightning breaks down molecular nitrogen and oxygen and creates nitrogen oxides.
On the early Earth, however — before the rise in atmospheric oxygen due to photosynthesis — lightning may have played a crucial role in creating many prebiotic compounds, which are molecules that form the building blocks of proteins.
We don't know if any exoplanets host life. We have yet to find an Earth twin with the right orbit around a sun-like star, but we have come close. Take Proxima b, an exoplanet that orbits the nearest star to the solar system. Proxima b is roughly the size of Earth and orbits its star, Proxima Centauri, at just the right distance to potentially support liquid water.
But Proxima Centauri is a red dwarf star, with just a fraction of the sun's brightness and size. Proxima b has an incredibly tight orbit, with an entire year lasting just 11 days. Because of its proximity to its parent star, Proxima b is almost certainly tidally locked, meaning it always shows one face toward the star, just like the moon always shows only one face toward Earth.
Because of its rotation, our planet hosts a rich weather system. This weather system makes lightning storms very common, with roughly 100 lightning strikes happening somewhere on the globe every second. But can a tidally locked planet create lightning storms?
To answer this question, a team of researchers led by Denis Sergeev at the University of Bristol in the U.K. created atmospheric simulations of a mock tidally locked planet, using the same kinds of simulations that climatologists use to study Earth's weather. In April, they submitted their paper for publication in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
The researchers found that the tidally locked planet could produce significant lightning storms, but that these storms were far different from those on Earth.
These planets around small stars hosted significantly fewer lightning strikes — only a handful of strikes per second, the simulations showed. And that was for planets with much thinner atmospheres than Earth's atmosphere — roughly a quarter of our planet's atmospheric pressure. Higher-pressure atmospheres suppressed the formation of convection cells that could drive cloud formation and generate the necessary friction to produce lightning. Atmospheres with pressures 10 times greater than Earth's could produce only a single lightning strike every few minutes.
Unlike on Earth, all the heat from the star pours onto one side on a tidally locked planet. That heat then flows through powerful jet streams that race from the permanent dayside to the nightside.
This powered strong weather mostly on the dayside, with lightning strikes clustered in a circular area, the researchers found. However, in some cases, lightning strikes happened mostly on the nightside, just past the day-night terminator line. It was only there that there was enough atmospheric activity to generate the conditions needed for lightning.
Related stories:
—How could life survive on tidally locked planets?
—Was life on Earth sparked by cloud-to-ground lightning strikes?
—The 10 most Earth-like exoplanets
But that doesn't mean that this lightning could necessarily be guaranteed to help produce life. For one, lightning strikes are far less common there than on Earth and thus may not be enough to generate sufficient prebiotic compounds. Another challenge is that the strikes are not distributed evenly around the globe. They tend to be concentrated on the dayside, which may be too hot to support life.
Still, the story of life on exoplanets, even tidally locked ones, is not over. And nature has shown time and time again that life … finds a way.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
21 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Why does NASA's Perseverance rover keep taking pictures of this maze on Mars?
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. If you've spent any time perusing the carousel of raw images from NASA's Perseverance Mars rover, you might have stumbled across an odd subject: a tiny, intricate maze etched into a small plate, photographed over and over again. Why is the Perseverance rover so obsessed with this little labyrinth? It turns out the maze is a calibration target — one of 10 for Perseverance's Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals instrument, otherwise known for its fun acronym, SHERLOC. This Sherlock Holmes–inspired tool is designed to detect organic compounds and other minerals on Mars that could indicate signs of ancient microbial life. To do that accurately, the system must be carefully calibrated, and that's where the maze comes in. Located on the rover's seven-foot (2.1-meter) robotic arm, SHERLOC uses spectroscopic techniques — specifically Raman and fluorescence spectroscopy — to analyze Martian rocks. In order to ensure accurate measurements, it must routinely calibrate its tools using a set of reference materials with specific properties. These are mounted on a plate attached to the front of the rover's body: the SHERLOC Calibration Target. "The calibration targets serve multiple purposes, which primarily include refining the SHERLOC wavelength calibration, calibrating the SHERLOC laser scanner mirror, and monitoring the focus and state of health of the laser," Kyle Uckert, deputy principal investigator for SHERLOC at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, tells The target is arranged in two rows, each populated with small patches of carefully selected materials. The top row includes three critical calibration materials: aluminum gallium nitride (AlGaN) on sapphire discs; the UV-scattering material Diffusil; and Martian meteorite SaU008, whose mineral makeup is already known and helps align wavelength calibration with real Martian geology. This is also where you'll find the maze. Why a maze? "SHERLOC is all about solving puzzles, and what better puzzle than a maze!" says Uckert. The purpose of the maze target is to calibrate the positioning of the laser scanner mirror and characterize the laser's focus, which requires a target with sharply contrasting spectral responses. The maze serves this purpose well." The maze is made of chrome-plated lines just 200 microns thick (about twice the width of a human hair) printed onto silica glass. "There are no repeating patterns and the spectrum of the chrome plating is distinct from the underlying silica glass," says Uckert. That makes it possible to measure the laser's focus and accuracy with extreme precision. If you look closely at the maze, you'll also notice a Sherlock Holmes portrait right at the center. While it's a cheeky nod to the instrument's name, it serves a practical function. "SHERLOC spectral maps can resolve the 200 micron thick chrome plated lines and the 50 micron thick silhouette of Sherlock Holmes at the center of the maze," Uckert notes. Like the portrait, the bottom half of the SHERLOC Calibration Target also serves a dual purpose: spectral instrument calibration and spacesuit material testing. It contains five samples of materials used in modern spacesuits, including some materials you might be familiar with, like Teflon, Gore-Tex, and Kevlar. And don't miss the "fun" target in this row — there's a geocache marker backing a polycarbonate target, and it does indeed have a tie-in to Sherlock Holmes. RELATED STORIES: — Perseverance rover's Mars samples show traces of ancient water, but NASA needs them on Earth to seek signs of life — Perseverance Mars rover finds 'one-of-a-kind treasure' on Red Planet's Silver Mountain — Perseverance Mars rover becomes 1st spacecraft to spot auroras from the surface of another world These materials are actively being tested under Mars conditions to determine how they hold up over time in situ, which is crucial for planning human exploration of the Red Planet. "Note that we use all of these materials to fine-tune SHERLOC," adds Uckert. "As a bonus, the spacesuit materials support unique science that will help keep future astronauts safe." Now, if all these Sherlock Holmes–related Easter eggs on the SHERLOC Calibration Target aren't enough for you, there's one final link. SHERLOC has a color camera as part of its instrumentation suite that sometimes images the target, and it's called the Wide Angle Topographic Sensor for Operations and eNgineering. Yes, SHERLOC's sidekick is called WATSON.
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Worsening climate outlooks raise the stakes for an agreement on the Colorado River
BOULDER, CO — Everyone who's haggling or agonizing over how to split up the drying Colorado River in coming decades is painfully aware that the river's flow has dipped below what previous generations thought would water an ever-growing West. That's now the good news. A leading Colorado River Basin climate scientist told hundreds gathered for a conference about how to stretch, share and save the river that the current warming trajectory will seriously strain their efforts at balancing supply and demand. The world is on track to exceed 3 degrees Celsius of global warming by 2100 — 5 degrees Celsius (or 9 Fahrenheit) over land — according to Colorado State University water and climate researcher Brad Udall. 'That's a world unlike anything we currently know,' Udall said June 5 at a University of Colorado Law School conference examining the river's woes, 'and it's going to challenge us on every front.' On the Colorado River front, warming equals reduced flows as the atmosphere, desiccated soils, thirsty forests and human irrigation demands all take their share to deplete water that could otherwise be stored in the nation's two largest reservoirs, Lake Mead and Lake Powell. This year's snowmelt runoff outlook, projected to reach just over half of the 30-year average by the time it effectively ends in July, is complicating efforts to reach consensus on interstate cutbacks. Any future reductions in flow will only add to the pain. Climate change is speeding faster than expected, with the likely effect of further tanking the river's bounty until it provides just two-thirds of the water that the negotiators of a century ago thought would support the growing region, according to Udall's worst-case scenario for the end of the century. And that doesn't account for water that the United States must provide to Mexico by treaty. In the language of water managers, it means a river that the interstate negotiators of a century ago asserted could provide 15 million acre-feet to the seven states that use it could instead average just 10 million acre-feet a year. Already, the megadrought that started in 2000 has dropped the average below 13 million. Mexico's share is 1.5 million. (An acre-foot is roughly 321,000 gallons, enough to support several households for a year, though more river water is consumed on farms.) Measuring flows: How much water flows down the Colorado River? The right answer is more important than ever Against today's startling water losses and tomorrow's even more frightening projections, the states are struggling to reach consensus on how to spread the pain among themselves after guidelines for navigating shortages expire next year. The Lower Basin states of Arizona, California and Nevada fully developed their half of the 15 million acre-feet that the 1922 Colorado River Compact granted them and have had to cut back. The four states upstream of them now face the prospect of never getting their full half even as the southwestern states ask them to consider cutting back from their existing uses in the driest of years. The Trump administration's Interior Department will likely need to step up as a moderator in a debate that to date has been left largely to the states, said Mike Connor, who led the department's Bureau of Reclamation in the Obama administration. The new administration is showing signs that it may begin to work on bringing the states together, Connor said, and it should help that it still has more than $1 billion in funds from the last administration's infrastructure allocation to help tackle drought. 'The federal government is the key mediator and facilitator,' he said. So far, though, the states at least publicly are far apart. The Upper Basin States of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming have said their cuts come in the form of dry winters that limit what farms and ranches can divert, and that it's up to the Lower Basin to cut more from what it takes out of the big desert reservoirs before they drain below useful levels. The Lower Basin states say they are willing to give up more in future years, but that trying to fill the gap all on their own could lead to unacceptable results such as a dry Central Arizona Project Canal cutting off Phoenix and Tucson. The rift has proved deep enough that most of the lead negotiators who normally appear together for panel discussions at this and similar annual conferences did not even show up. Preparing for a fight: Hobbs says Arizona will defend its Colorado River water, wants other states to accept cuts Conference attendees — the experts and advocates who work to protect the river and its various uses — must help give political cover to those negotiators who are responsible for protecting their own states' interests, said Anne Castle, a former Interior Department official and Upper Basin Commission chair who is now a fellow at the University of Colorado Law School. Their jobs are difficult, she said, and experts could help by making clear to their constituents that there's not enough water to go around, and all must use less of it. 'Some of what we thought were our legal entitlements and what we had expectations about using in the future … have to be moderated,' Castle said. Other speakers detailed how cities have adapted by growing while using less water, and how some, such as Phoenix, are able to essentially save water by growing because homes will use less water than the farms that they displace. But others pointed to a challenging future in which farms will likely have to cut back further to keep supplies flowing to cities. In all, according to water researcher Brian Richter of the global scarcity solutions organization Sustainable Waters, current rates of reservoir and groundwater drawdowns suggest that 15% of current use within the Colorado River Basin is unsustainable and will have to go. And that's at today's average rate of flow. If warming and drought continue to shrink the river, more cutbacks will be needed just to balance the annual supply, let alone the roughly two-thirds of storage capacity now unfilled in Lake Mead and Lake Powell. Want more stories about water? Sign up for AZ Climate, The Republic's free weekly environment newsletter To Udall, the water and climate researcher, the new 'anti-knowledge' Trump administration seems bent on worsening the problem by eliminating the science that the states and federal dam managers rely on to make informed decisions. The administration is crippling agencies that are critical to climate adaptation by 'going after anything and everything that has the word climate in it,' he said. 'It's insanity, what they're doing,' Udall said, especially given that warming is accelerating. 'There is no way this makes for a better world in which we live, a better world in which the Colorado River flows.' A Trump administration official, Acting Assistant Interior Secretary for Water and Science Scott Cameron, was scheduled to appear on the conference's second day, June 6. Brandon Loomis covers environmental and climate issues for The Arizona Republic and Reach him at Environmental coverage on and in The Arizona Republic is supported by a grant from the Nina Mason Pulliam Charitable Trust. Follow The Republic environmental reporting team at and @azcenvironment on Facebook and Instagram. This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: A warming, drying Colorado River increasingly vexes water negotiators
Yahoo
3 hours ago
- Yahoo
Scientists stunned after uncovering major flaw in futuristic energy tech: 'This effect is far from negligible'
Hydrogen fuel cells are often called the clean energy solution of tomorrow — powering everything from cars to homes with just hydrogen and oxygen while leaving behind only water. But a new study has revealed a surprising flaw that could be slowing down that future: a hidden energy leak that kicks in when things heat up. Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) took a closer look at a popular fuel cell material called barium zirconate. It's commonly used in high-temperature fuel cells, which convert hydrogen into electricity with little to no pollution. These types of fuel cells are exciting because they can outperform traditional gas-powered engines — but only if they run efficiently. Here's the catch: The scientists found that when the fuel cells heat up past 600 Kelvin (about 620 degrees Fahrenheit), they start leaking energy. And not just a little. Their simulations showed that high temperatures cause tiny vibrations inside the material's atomic structure — and those vibrations push electrons out of place. When electrons wander off, they leave behind "holes," which act like little energy drains inside the system. In fact, when the team accounted for these temperature effects, it found four times as many of these energy-wasting holes compared to what traditional models predicted. "Traditionally, models don't fully account for temperature-induced vibrations," said Shenli Zhang, LLNL physicist and first author of the study. "But our calculations show that this effect is far from negligible." This breakthrough, published in the PRX Energy journal, helps explain why fuel cells don't always live up to their full potential. But more importantly, it offers a roadmap for how to fix it. The researchers created a new simulation protocol that lets them calculate exactly how much energy is lost at different temperatures — and which materials might hold up better. That could be a game-changer as we race to build cleaner, more affordable energy systems. Hydrogen fuel cells have the potential to replace dirtier technologies in transportation, power generation, and even home energy systems. But every bit of lost energy means more cost, more fuel used, and less efficiency overall. Plugging these leaks could lead to better-performing fuel cells that save money and reduce pollution at the same time. And the best part? This isn't a far-off fantasy. The team created a new method to predict how heat causes energy loss in fuel cell materials like barium zirconate. This approach can now be used to test and improve other materials too, helping scientists design better fuel cells that work efficiently at high temperatures. "These insights help us quantify just how much electrical leakage is tied to temperature, and they give us a better handle on designing materials or operating conditions to minimize those losses," said co-author Joel Varley, LLNL scientist and project lead. Should the government continue to give tax incentives for energy-efficient home upgrades? Absolutely No Depends on the upgrade I don't know Click your choice to see results and speak your mind. It's a key step toward making hydrogen power more reliable and ready for real-world use. And while scientists are working on the tech behind the scenes, there are things that can be done on the individual level to take advantage of clean energy at home. Installing rooftop solar panels — or joining a local community solar program — can slash your monthly electricity bill and help transition your home to cleaner power. Services like EnergySage make it easy to compare quotes from trusted local installers and save up to $10,000 on installation. Cleaner, smarter energy is getting closer every day — and discoveries like this are certainly helping speed things up. Join our free newsletter for weekly updates on the latest innovations improving our lives and shaping our future, and don't miss this cool list of easy ways to help yourself while helping the planet.
