[troutman]

Originally Posted by GreenLantern

Right and they talked about identifying water, carbon dioxide etc.. whatever method they are using to detect this, that is what I am looking forward to seeing. There has to be some kind of reading, some kind of data they can produce, picture was a general and a bad term I should have just said proof. Whatever they are using as proof, that is what I look forward to seeing.

http://www.planetary.org/news/2008/1...n_Dioxide.html

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has discovered carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of a planet orbiting another star. This breakthrough is an important step toward finding chemical biotracers of extraterrestrial life.

This successful demonstration of looking at near-infrared light emitted from a planet is very encouraging for astronomers planning to use NASA's James Webb Space Telescope after it is launched in 2013. These biomarkers are best seen at near-infrared wavelengths. Astronomers look forward to using the Webb telescope to look spectroscopically for biomarkers on a terrestrial planet the size of Earth or a "super-Earth" several times our planet's mass.