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MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW | Earth’s “fingerprint” could one day help us find a habitable exoplanet
Two astronomers, {Evelyn Macdonald, recent physics graduate, and supervisor Nicolas Cowan, associate professor}, based at McGill University in Montreal, pored over data collected by the Canadian Space Agency’s SCISAT satellite, which was originally launched to help us better understand Earth’s ozone depletion. Since 2004, SCISAT has made continuous observation of the light that passes through the atmosphere when Earth is in front of the sun.
Earth’s “fingerprint” gives clues into what we ought to look for as we study other exoplanet transits in greater detail and attempt to confirm their potential habitability, such as in the TRAPPIST-1 system.
