Are We Not Alone? Scientists Develop A New Way To Filter Out Habitable Alien Planets

Scientists from all around the world are now working on a New Way to filter out Habitable Planets that could support "Alien Life". Based on the new criteria, there may be far fewer suitable planets than were previously estimated.

According to ScienceAlert, the new study modifies the current estimates of planetary habitability based on the so called Goldilocks zone by taking into account another crucial factor: the internal temperature of the planet.

Why the modification?

"The problem isn't so much with the Goldilocks zone (being the right distance from the Sun to sustain life) itself," says geophysicist Jun Korenaga from Yale University, "but with our understanding of how planets regulate their temperature by a process called mantle convection."

The mantle convection describes how underground tectonic movements alternately heat and cool the internal temperature of a planet. Scientists used to think that most planets were capable of self-regulating their temperature in a way that could lead to sustained life in some Planets.

Korenaga's new study however, suggests we might be mistaken as the initial internal temperature of the planet when it first forms has a far greater influence on its potentially habitability than any self-regulation that goes on afterwards.

"If you assemble all kinds of scientific data on how Earth has evolved in the past few billion years and try to make sense out of them, you eventually realize that mantle convection is rather indifferent to the internal temperature," Korenaga says through Yale News.

What's the New Criteria?

Using a new mathematical framework to calculate how this self-regulation works, Korenaga suggests that Earth-like planets are unlikely to affect their own internal temperatures in this way, but does depend upon the initial temperature of the world when it first forms. "The lack of the self-regulating mechanism has enormous implications for planetary habitability,"  Korenaga added.

NASA's Kepler Space Telescope mission has just announced the discovery of 1,284 new exoplanets - nine of which are considered potentially habitable. While it is disappointing that the number of potentially habitable planets are fewer than we thought, thanks to Korenaga's findings (published in Science Advances), this research could actually help narrow down the search.

"Despite the expectations of huge planet diversity and the implications, there will still be a large number of planets that are habitable no matter what we think is required." Planetary scientist Sara Seager from MIT told Business Insider.