Nasa’s James Web Telescope may not be best choice for exploring alien life
The upcoming European Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) may give us our best chance to search for biological signatures of nearby rocky planets over the next 20 years.
This is a new study that simulates the conditions needed to identify a planet outside our solar system like Proxima b that could support life, Space reports.
Thanks to this project, astronomers will be able to focus on the main target of the exoplanet in 2030 and beyond.
In addition to evaluating all the properties of this planet (such as mass, radius, and orbital period), they are also analyzing the atmosphere of the exoplanet world for more information.
For example, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) uses transmission spectroscopy to do this. Through the telescope’s lens, some of the star’s light passes through the Earth’s atmosphere as it passes or passes in front of the star.
The star may be absorbed by a molecule in the atmosphere. Remarkably, different molecules absorb different wavelengths of light, so each wavelength is a unique molecular imprint. This is how JWST recently discovered carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere of exoplanet K2-18b.
Although dozens of exoplanets have been imaged, including HD 950086b, they are all large, young planets and were still very hot when they formed.
Therefore, their infrared emissions are intense when they move away from their parent star. In other words, the world is invisible to us; Planets appear as small points of light, but their light patterns have negative absorption lines that interact with chemicals in their atmospheres.
Therefore, a very large camera is needed to obtain a sufficient signal-to-noise ratio to the background data of light from the earth to extract these spectral.