City Lights on Other Planets

In a scientific paper with the Stanford undergraduate, Elisa Tabor, we <a href="https://arxiv.org/pdf/2105.08081.pdf" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">showed</a> that the recently launched <a href="https://www.jwst.nasa.gov/" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">James Webb Space Telescope</a> could potentially detect city lights on the permanent nightside of Proxima b. Even if the artificial illumination is as faint as our civilization currently utilizes on the nightside of Earth, Webb could detect it as long as it was limited to a frequency band that is a thousand times narrower than the starlight. Future space telescopes, like the proposed <a href="https://asd.gsfc.nasa.gov/luvoir/" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">Large Ultraviolet Optical Infrared Surveyor</a>, will be sensitive to even lower levels of artificial illumination on the nightside of Proxima b. In another <a href="https://arxiv.org/pdf/1702.05500.pdf" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">paper</a> with my former postdoc, Manasvi Lingam, we showed that a substantial coverage of Proxima b’s dayside with solar panels is detectable on its own, based on its characteristic spectral edge in reflecting starlight. <a href="https://avi-loeb.medium.com/city-lights-on-other-planets-5953e2f5c05f">Read More</a>