Life on Earth changes dramatically with the seasons — so much so that spotting Earth’s seasons from space is easy. Spring and summer are generally green, Autumn turns brown, and winter is white — in some parts of the world anyway. Could you detect seasons on exoplanets? And if so, could you use that as a signature of extra-terrestrial life? A tip from one of our Patreon patrons sent us in search of exoplanet seasonality, via all sorts of other biosignatures, from the technological (UFOs?), to the physical (fossils), to the atmospheric (chemicals in the atmosphere), and finally to the time-dependent (seasons).
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Syzygy is produced by Chris Stewart and co-hosted by Dr Emily Brunsden from the Department of Physics at the University of York.
On the web: syzygy.fm | Twitter: @syzygypod
Things we talked about in this episode:
The exoplanet seasonality paper
A good article about the research
Plate Tectonics with MinuteEarth