Is there life on Mars? Is there something more beyond the solar system? We might be able to answer these questions after 25 years, according to a researcher and reported first by Space.com.
Astrophysicist Sasha Quantz said this at the recent launch of the university's new Center for the Origin and Prevalence of Life. She works at the federal technological center ETH Zurich in Switzerland.
Technological Initiatives
At a news conference on Sept. 2, Quantz gave an overview of the technological initiatives that are now under development and could help scientists find an answer to the age-old question of whether or not we are alone in the cosmos.
Quantz noted during the briefing that in 1995, Nobel Prize laureate Didier Queloz identified the first planet outside our solar system, and today, over 5,000 exoplanets have been discovered, and astronomers are finding more of them regularly.
Since astronomers believe that every one of the over 100 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy has at least one companion planet, there are still a great number of undiscovered exoplanets waiting to be found, as noted by Space.com.
There are a huge number of exoplanets created. As a result, many of which, according to Quantz, are similar to Earth and are located at a distance from their host stars that is conducive to the development of life, including the existence of liquid water.
But Quantz said it is still unknown if these terrestrial planets have atmospheres. She highlighted the need for an observational approach allowing astronomers to capture pictures of these planets.
Is Webb Powerful Enough to Detect Life on Exoplanets?
The briefing was held only one day after the James Webb Space Telescope team published the first direct photograph of an exoplanet orbiting a far-off star.
This is the enormous gas giant HIP 65426 b, a planet 100 sun-Earth distances from its parent star that is 12 times the size of Jupiter.
Though Webb is the most powerful telescope ever sent into space, Quantz warns that it is not nearly powerful enough to view the much smaller, Earth-like planets that orbit their stars at closer ranges where liquid water may be present.
"The HIP 65426 system is a very special system. It's a gas giant planet orbiting very far from the star. This is what Webb can do in terms of taking pictures of planets. We will not be able to get to the small planets. Webb is not powerful enough to do that," Quantz said in a statement.
Other instruments are already being created to compensate for this weakness in the James Webb Space Telescope's capabilities.
The mid-infrared ELT imager and spectrograph (METIS), a pioneering instrument for the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), is being developed by Quantz and his colleagues.
ELT, which is now being constructed by the European Southern Observatory in Chile, will have a 130-foot-wide (40-meter) mirror when it is finished, making it the largest optical telescope in the world and could help in the discovery of life beyond the solar system in the future.
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Written by Joaquin Victor Tacla
