A major priority in space exploration today is to find out whether there’s life beyond Earth. But, solar flares from distant stars are getting in the way of answering that question.

Laura Flagg, a research associate at Cornell University and co-author on a new University of Colorado Boulder study, said one of the best ways to try to find life is to study planet atmospheres outside Earth’s solar system.

“We hope to look for signatures of life in these atmospheres,” Flagg said. “We’re not doing it yet, but eventually.”

Flagg said there are biosignatures in atmospheres, like oxygen, that can indicate possibility of life.

“It was very clear from the new data we had gotten from about a year ago that our inability to characterize stellar flares was preventing us from studying exoplanet atmospheres,” Flagg said.

Ward Howard, lead author and NASA Sagan Fellow at CU Boulder, said researchers can’t study the atmospheres of planets without understanding the solar flares that block data collection.

Howard and Flagg studied TRAPPIST-1, a small star 40 light years from Earth with seven known planets that orbit around it. It’s an ideal system to study because it’s relatively nearby, Howard said.

The TRAPPIST-1 star emits large solar flares, or intense bursts of radiation, consistently.

The flares contaminate two out of every three observations the James Webb Space Telescope makes of the system, and that contaminated data is critical to understanding if any of the planets that orbit the TRAPPIST-1 star could support life.

“If we want these missions like JWST to be able to succeed in their $10 million science, you have to have a way of being able to separate the planet from the star,” Howard said.

Using the Webb telescope, the researchers observed flares from TRAPPIST-1 for the first time ever in certain wavelengths of infrared light.

The group was able to separate the light coming from TRAPPIST-1’s flares from the star’s day-to-day glow.

Drawing on that data, the team was able to remove about 80% of the light from the flares from their observations.

It’s not a perfect solution, but it’s a step forward.

Howard said it’s very likely that humanity is three to five decades away from finding out whether there’s life that exists on planets other than Earth.

He said the question of life beyond Earth and wanting to understand humanity’s role in the universe gets to the root of what it means to be human.

“It’s part of what it is to be human to explore and to wonder,” Howard said. “I think wonder is an integral part of humanity.”

A 2020 survey from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine identified scientific priorities for the next 10 years of astronomy.

Howard said NASA missions are motivated by that study, which prioritizes discovering potentially habitable worlds.

“That’s where it says one of the three primary things the United States should be investing in right now in terms of its astronomical future in the next decade … is to observe the atmospheres of Earth-like planets around other stars to help answer the question of if we’re alone,” Howard said.

The results of Howard and Flagg’s study should help astrophysicists collect clearer and more accurate data on TRAPPIST-1’s seven planets, a step forward in searching for the possibility of life.

“Flares are a big issue and we have only begun to study the physics of flares and infrared and we have a long way to go before we really understand them,” Flagg said.