What Would Earth Look Like from a Distant Star?

As the number of discovered extrasolar planets grows, astronomers begin looking at the next step: finding rocky Earth-like planets. In addition, astronomers would ideally like to block out the parent star and detect some of the reflected glow from the planet’s atmosphere in an attempt to characterize the chemical makeup. But what would an “Earth-like” planet’s reflected light look like? To answer this, a new paper explores what Earth should have looked like at various points in our planet’s history.

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by Jon Voisey on October 7, 2011

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