Aliens could be a little easier to find thanks to new oxygen reaction discovery

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‘What oxygen is to the breath, such is hope to the purpose of living.’

This is what Emil Brunner, a Swiss theologian, has written in his book Eternal Hope.

The bloke was gettin' at the point that oxygen's the key to discoverin' life elsewhere in the universe.

Oxygen's considered one of the crucial elements for life on this planet, because most oxygen's produced by living things.

Scientists have found a new way for oxygen to form in planets with atmospheres loaded with carbon dioxide, without needing living creatures.

The team investigated unconventional pathways for molecular oxygen formation by smashing carbon dioxide with helium gas.

This oxygen-making process is called an 'non-biological' process, or one that doesn't include living things.

The filling of Earth's skies with oxygen, roughly 2.1 to 2.4 billion years ago, has long been one of Earth's greatest unsolved mysteries. Before what geologists call the Great Oxidation Event, most of Earth was swamped with that pungent greenhouse gas CO2.

There was a hint of oxygen in the air in the ancient days after sea-dwelling microbes developed the ability to photosynthesize. After having a bite of sunlight, they released free oxygen.

Most of this oxygen didn't last all that long. With all the volcanoes erupting at the time, hydrogen would've gobbled up most of it.

But after a few hundred million years, the planet started to cool down, allowing our oddly oxygen-rich atmosphere to take shape.

Shan Xi Tian and Jie Hu from the University of Science and Technology of China thought it'd be worth investigating how the helium generated by the interaction between the solar wind and a planet's atmosphere might produce oxygen.

During this interaction, the helium makes ions – charged particles that act like wrecking balls and knock out CO2, smashing it into other molecules.

‘This reaction should be observed in the upper atmosphere of Mars because heaps of He+ ions (thanks to solar winds) and CO2 are found there,’ said Hu.

But while O+, O2+, and CO2+ are generated, O2 isn't, at least not on Mars.

So Tian and Hu went to work with three techniques in their toolkit to trial their concept.

The first one's time-of-flight (TOF) mass spectrometry, where particles are ionised and given the same nippers to begin with. The amount of time it takes for them to travel the same distance is used to figure out their mass.

The pair then employed a 'crossed-beam apparatus’, capable of smacking two molecules together, and ‘ion velocity maps’ to capture and record the tracks and velocities of the ions.

‘We found a unique pathway to produce O2 from molecular CO2,’ Tian said. ‘Namely, through the reaction of helium ions with carbon dioxide.’

That's a nutshell, their research discovered that there's a possibility oxygen-supporting planets can exist on planets with a carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere when there are no living organisms around just yet.

Dave Benoit, a senior lecturer in Molecular Physics and Astrochemistry with the EA Milne Centre for Astrophysics at the University of Hull, now says the search is on for planets where this could realistically occur.

‘This new mechanism will likely be included in future models used to predict the atmospheres of other planets,’ Benoit said to Space.com, ‘and will also help us understand the amount of oxygen we might find in those places.’

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