Ignasi Ribas, Spanish astronomer searching for Earth’s twin planets.

Jordi Font and Alex Gutierrez

Barcelona (Spain), April 28 (EFE).- Spanish astronomer Ignasi Ribas is leading a project with European foundations to introduce improvements using artificial intelligence that speed up the ability to identify one or more of Earth’s twin planets in which it can find life: “Models they tell us they are there, but they are the hardest thing to see.”

“He is not looking for a needle in a haystack,” Ribas, director of the Institute of Space Research of Catalonia (IEEC) and researcher at the Institute of Space Sciences of the Supreme Council of Scientific Research (ICE-CSIC), explains in an interview with EFE).

With an extensive career in the search for exoplanets – those orbiting stars other than the Sun – Ribas has published more than 300 research papers and recently received €2.5 million from the European Union (EU) to boost discovery opportunities. planets like Earth and determine whether there is life on them.

The scientific community has been searching for planets for more than three decades: “We have found many, more than 5,000, but we have not been able to find true Earth twins orbiting a star like the Sun.”

And there are “a lot of planets” in the Universe, since, according to the astronomer’s estimates, “there are as many stars as there are planets, that is, there are hundreds of billions of them.”

Mathematical models show that “15 percent of Sun-like stars may have Earth-like planets, which is a lot of Earths in the galaxy.”

Research published in 2020 using data from NASA’s Kepler space observatory suggests there will be about 300 million planets in the Milky Way alone that could be habitable and similar to Earth in composition, temperature and water-hosting capacity.

The huge challenge is to be able to identify and study exo-Earths, and that is the goal of the project led by Ribas, with a new injection of European funds.

Except in very specific cases, what scientists observe with telescopes on Earth and in space is not a photograph of the planet, but the effect it has on the star, so they measure the light from the stars.

But stars like the Sun are variable, having moving spots and regions that are brighter than the rest of the star.

These elements act as a kind of “noise” that makes it difficult to observe the planet as it passes in front of its star, known as a transit, and also complicates the study of small vibrations of the planet as it orbits its star. star, which is known as the radial velocity.

The goal of the project, led by Ribas, is to “overcome these ‘noise’ obstacles and clean up the data to find these tiny signals associated with the planet.”

His research team will do this by creating a “super complex” artificial star, using artificial intelligence (AI) to simulate the “millions of ways a star can change.”

As if it were a Photoshop filter that sharpens an image, all of this AI-generated information will serve to “filter the data” obtained from real stars to figure out how much of the variation in observations is due to them. to the activity of a star and others to the presence of a planet.

Over the course of five years, Ribas’ team will develop all of these data cleaning techniques, awaiting further developments in knowledge.

“It is quite possible that during this period we will not yet be able to find exo-Earths, because we need to accumulate data for years, but we will have all the ready-made equipment to clear this data from telescopes on Earth and in space,” he assures.

While exo-Earths may be discovered, Ribas makes clear that this is an “academic exercise” to better understand the universe and advance scientific knowledge, but not so that humanity can change worlds, as if it were a “Plan B” for Earth .

“To think that humans, when the Earth is no longer habitable, peaceful or interesting, will go to another world to colonize it is unattainable because it is unimaginable time travel, so it is still science fiction,” he emphasizes. . Ribas. EFE

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