The PLATO mission for 2026

The PLATO (PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of Stars) mission is a space telescope to search for exoplanets and also terrestrial exoplanets in habitable zones around stars similar to the sun. It will be launched by an Arian 6 and will go to the Lagrange point 2, it will be next to the James Web space telescope, that is 1.5 kilometers from the Earth, it will work for 4 years, although they can extend the mission up to 8 years, and it could detect and characterize planets like the Earth and stars similar to the Sun, which is what interests us.

Planets where liquid water can exist, it can precisely measure the radius, mass, and density of hundreds of exoplanets and determine their rocky and gaseous composition, that is, it can also study the atmospheres of these worlds. In fact, it is estimated that it will be able to study in its first four years, which later if others extend it to another 4 years it would be more, but in those 4 years it could study more than 200,000 stars.

Finding an exoplanet is complicated because finding a planet like the Earth that orbits a star like the Sun is complex, if we were extraterrestrials and looked at the sun and on top of that we were lucky enough that the Earth passed in front of the Sun, with which we can detect the Earth and analyze its atmosphere, even so with all that luck and without very advanced technology like that of the James Web or like that of this telescope that is going to be sent, because even so we would have to wait 365 days for the Earth to pass in front of the Sun, and it is not enough with a single pass, because in the first pass the data may not be precise or there are errors, you have to correct it with the second pass, contrast, wait for a third, a fourth to have more precision, it takes you 4 years to be able to accurately characterize a world like the Earth.

That's the complicated thing, and that is that we are relatively far from the sun and that is why there are so many worlds discovered orbiting red dwarf stars, to begin with, because a red dwarf is smaller than the sun, it is less bright and when a planet passes in front of it, it is easier to detect that mini eclipse that occurs, but it is also much closer to its star and a year on those planets can easily last 18 days, a month or two months at most, you have a lot of passes to analyze.

The calculation is that there are 400 million rocky planets like the Earth, orbiting in the habitable zone of stars like the Sun, because there are a few more stars like the sun. If we also add orange dwarfs, which are stars a little smaller than the sun, but much larger than red dwarfs, and they are much more numerous than yellow dwarf stars, which are the type of star of the sun, we would have another 800 million planets potentially habitable or with life. quietly, alone in our galaxy.

Now the question is, how rare is it for complex life to arise? I'm no longer saying bacterial life, complex animal life and intelligent life, how rare is it?

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