
Sept. 8, 2010
Feature Story
Volcanoes on Alien Worlds
Volcanoes display the awesome power of Nature like few other events. Now that astronomers are finding rocky worlds orbiting distant stars, they’re asking the next logical questions: Do any of those worlds have volcanoes? And if so, could we detect them? To answer these questions, a team of researchers with support from the NASA Astrobiology Institute (NAI) have shown that large-scale explosive volcanism can be remotely observed on exoplanets around the closest stars using sulfur dioxide as a chemical proxy.