Once life gains even the tiniest foothold on a planet, it may have the power to transform that world, forcing us to broaden our definition of “habitable,” new research suggests.
We don’t really know where life might arise. We have only one example of a life-hosting planet, Earth, which started to get interesting perhaps only a few hundred million years after it formed. We know that life on Earth requires a certain set of elements to perform its complex chain of energy production, that it needs liquid water as a solution, and that it can exist only in a relatively narrow range of atmospheric temperatures and pressures.
In our searches for life outside Earth, astronomers generally focus on an area called the habitable zone, a band of orbits around a star where liquid water can potentially exist on a planet’s surface. If a planet is closer to the star, water will evaporate from the heat; if it’s farther from the star, water will freeze into ice. Neither of those conditions are good for life as we know it.
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