• Question: Have we found another planet with life signs on it apart from the one that we live on? If not then why and how long will it take before we do so?

    Asked by 47liger98 to Ashley, Bernard, Carsten, MariaMagdalena, Monique on 7 Nov 2015.
    • Photo: Monique Henson

      Monique Henson answered on 7 Nov 2015:

      At the moment, we haven’t yet found any evidence for life on other planets. We have found planets that may be habitable – by that I mean that their environment might be the right kind for life to exist there. We figure out if a planet might be habitable by seeing if it is rocky (rather than being a gas planet like Jupiter), looking at how far away it is from its closest star and seeing if it has liquid water on it. Finding a planet that fits this description doesn’t mean it has life on it, but it means that life might be able to survive there.

      I’m not sure how long it will take for us to find life on other planets. The chief scientist of NASA, Ellen Stofan, thinks we might find evidence for life on other planets in the next 10-20 years (you can see her talking about it here).

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