{"id":225425,"date":"2025-11-19T05:25:42","date_gmt":"2025-11-19T11:25:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/11\/how-to-spot-life-in-the-clouds-on-other-worlds"},"modified":"2025-11-19T05:25:42","modified_gmt":"2025-11-19T11:25:42","slug":"how-to-spot-life-in-the-clouds-on-other-worlds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/11\/how-to-spot-life-in-the-clouds-on-other-worlds","title":{"rendered":"How to spot life in the clouds on other worlds"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/how-to-spot-life-in-the-clouds-on-other-worlds2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Cloud cover is bad for picnics and for viewing stars through a telescope. But an exoplanet with dense or even total cloud cover could help astronomers search for signs of life beyond our planet.<\/p>\n<p>Cornell researchers have created the first reflectance spectra\u2014a color-coded key\u2014of diverse, colorful microorganisms that live in the clouds floating above Earth\u2019s surface. Astronomers don\u2019t know if these bacteria exist elsewhere in the universe and in enough abundance to be detected by telescopes; on Earth they are not. But now, astronomers can use the color key in the search for life outside our world\u2014making an exoplanet\u2019s clouds, in addition to its surface and air, a promising realm for finding signs of life.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThere is a vibrant community of microorganisms in our atmosphere that produce colorful biopigments which have fascinated biologists for years,\u201d said astrobiologist Ligia Coelho, 51 Pegasi b Postdoctoral Fellow in astronomy in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&amp;S) and fellow at the Carl Sagan Institute (CSI). \u201cI thought astronomers should know about them.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Cloud cover is bad for picnics and for viewing stars through a telescope. But an exoplanet with dense or even total cloud cover could help astronomers search for signs of life beyond our planet. Cornell researchers have created the first reflectance spectra\u2014a color-coded key\u2014of diverse, colorful microorganisms that live in the clouds floating above Earth\u2019s [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":707,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1527],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-225425","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alien-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225425","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/707"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=225425"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225425\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=225425"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=225425"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=225425"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}