POPULAR SCIENCE - We’re used to thunder and lightning here on Earth. But what might they be like on another planet? We know other worlds in the solar system have lightning strikes, for example, high in the clouds of Jupiter or during dust storms on Mars. Now, astronomers are thinking about lightning on planets beyond the solar system–and its effects on the signs of life on those planets.
In a new research paper accepted to the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, a team of astrobiologists investigated how lightning might change some of the biosignatures—chemical signs of life—we could look for on other worlds.
Lightning appears to us as a bright flash, usually during a big rainstorm, and it’s caused by electricity in the atmosphere discharging between clouds or to the ground. It also “influences the chemistry of planetary atmospheres, including, as we all know, on Earth,” explains co-author Edward Schwieterman, an astrobiologist at the University of California, Riverside. Lightning even may have played a role in how life got started on our planet—astrobiologists think it could have brought together some of the molecules that eventually became amino acids in our bodies.