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Imagine being able to look at starlight reflected off an alien sea.
Darren Williams (Penn State Erie) and Eric Gaidos (University of Hawaii), who address the question in a new paper, say it’s possible. And as we improve our instruments, potentially measurable variations might even include the seasonal blooming of land plants or oceanic algae or the coming and going of snow. All such fluctuations will vary depending on the planet’s obliquity and orbital inclination with respect to the observer. The staggering thing is the amount of potentially recoverable information from a source so dim in relation to its parent star that we cannot see it today.