Some of the world’s leading astronomers from Cambridge and Harvard have come together to finally solve two of science’s biggest questions: how did life originate and exist elsewhere in the universe?
They argue that the success of such a mission is much more likely today than it was a few years ago, thanks to powerful new telescopes that give them unprecedented opportunities to detect extraterrestrial life.
Thus, they believe they can detect “thousands” of distant planets with possible signs of extraterrestrial life over the next 10 to 20 years, using telescopes like the James Webb telescope to scan space for habitable worlds.
“We are living in an extraordinary time in history,” said Professor Didier Queloz, who won the Nobel Prize for discovering the first planet outside our solar system in the 1990s and is a key contributor to the new alien movement.
“Together, scientists will study the chemical and physical processes of living organisms and environmental conditions that are favorable for supporting life on other planets,” he said.
Professor Queloz said it would be “foolish to predict” when extraterrestrial life might be discovered, adding that a mission to bring rock samples back from Mars within a decade could provide early clues.
And he warned that “humanity still has a long way to go before we fully understand the fundamentals of what life is and how it is formed.”
But he hopes to make a significant leap in understanding in the coming years and decades.
“We’re working on it. I hope I see something important in my life. Will we find life on another planet? Maybe we’ll find it on Mars in ten years. Maybe in a few years someone with the James telescope Webb will detect an atmosphere similar to Earth,” said Professor Didier, 57.
“Or maybe we’ll find that most planets don’t have atmospheres and realize we’re pretty damn lucky on Earth.”
He added that scientists are looking for signs of terrestrial life, but said that life elsewhere in the universe could take on other forms because there could be more than one chemical “life-saving scenario.”
Meanwhile, Cambridge scientist Emily Mitchell, who is also part of a new effort to search for extraterrestrial life, said it is “highly likely” that astronomers will eventually find strong evidence that life exists outside of Earth, as it is likely that extraterrestrial life exists. quite often.” across the universe.
She spoke at the Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual conference in Washington DC, where the Origins Federation project, which also includes the University of Chicago and ETH Zurich in Switzerland, was announced today.
To date, more than 5,300 planets have been discovered orbiting other stars, called exoplanets, including one in another galaxy. Scientists said at the conference that there are likely “trillions more of them in the Milky Way.”
The James Webb Space Telescope can capture starlight passing through a distant planet’s atmosphere and analyze it for evidence that the atmosphere’s chemistry may have been altered by living organisms. These clues are called “biosignatures”.
The mere presence of oxygen, water, or methane is not enough to indicate the presence of life, since they can be obtained from other inorganic processes.
“But if you have oxygen, water and methane [together] you could say, “Yes, that’s how life is safe,” the doctor said. Mitchell
She and her fellow astronomers are trying to figure out if it was a coincidence that single-celled life evolved on Earth and evolved into complex animals over billions of years, or if the process repeated itself everywhere in space where conditions were right.
“Here on Earth, we only have one biosignature,” Mitchell said, “but if in 10 or 20 years, as my optimistic colleagues suggest, we have thousands of biosignatures, then we can start to solve this problem.” [question]”.
“There is huge potential: if we have enough biosignatures, we can calculate the numbers and try to figure out how we compare life on other planets,” she said.
Source: I News
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