Aliens Mightn’t need oxygen to Survive: It is not uncommon for people now-a-days to hear a new theory about alien life everyday. A Japanese researcher came up with a new hypothesis suggesting that Aliens mightn’t need oxygen after all.
He also added that distant planets to have large quantities of abiotic (non-biologically produced) oxygen.
According to assistant professor Norio Narita from the Astrobiology Center of National Institutes of Natural Sciences (NINS), abiotic oxygen produced by the photocatalytic reaction of titanium oxide and known to be abundant on distant planets and the moon cannot be discounted.
“To search for life on extrasolar planets through astronomical observation, we need to combine the knowledge from various scientific fields and to promote astrobiology researches to establish the decisive signs of life,” Narita noted.
“Although oxygen is still one of possible biomarkers, it becomes necessary to look for new biomarkers besides oxygen from the present result,” he added.
The Earth’s atmosphere contains oxygen because plants continuously produce it through photosynthesis.
For a planet with an environment similar to the Sun-Earth system, continuous photocatalytic reaction of titanium oxide on about 0.05 percent of the planetary surface could produce the amount of oxygen found in the current Earth’s atmosphere.
“In other words, it is possible that a habitable extrasolar planet could maintain an atmosphere with Earth-like oxygen, even without organisms to perform photosynthesis,” the authors noted.
So there is that, if there is oxygen on a planet, it doesn’t compularily mean that bilogical life exist on that planet and the Vice Versa
