Exoplanet Life Detection

• An astronomer at the University of California, Riverside, has tracked subtle changes in the pixels over time on a planet that he and his colleagues have concluded is Earth.
• This planet has oceans, continents, and clouds, rotates once every 24 hours, and has biosignatures that could be evidence of life.
• Detecting life on an exoplanet will be difficult, as the meager harvest of photons astronomers are likely to get from such a tiny, distant world will be swamped by its much brighter nearby star. However, the new generation of space telescopes heading toward the launch pad, including NASA's mammoth James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), have only an outside chance of probing an Earth twin in sufficient detail.

Test your knowledge about detecting life on exoplanets and the challenges involved, including the efforts of astronomers to analyze Earth-like planets in distant solar systems.