![An artist's rendering of the <em>Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) is currently under construction at Cerro Armazones in Chile’s Atacama Desert. It has an instrument that would help find life beyond our solar system. Credit: ESO” width=”1280″ height=”800″ srcset=”https://www.spaceflightinsider.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/elt-schott-sunset-50k-cc2.jpg 1280w, https://www.spaceflightinsider.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/elt-schott-sunset-50k-cc2-300×188.jpg 300w, https://www.spaceflightinsider.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/elt-schott-sunset-50k-cc2-655×409.jpg 655w, https://www.spaceflightinsider.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/elt-schott-sunset-50k-cc2-768×480.jpg 768w, https://www.spaceflightinsider.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/elt-schott-sunset-50k-cc2-640×400.jpg 640w” sizes=”(max-width: 1280px) 100vw, 1280px”></p>
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Several missions that would detect life beyond our solar system are currently in development, Swiss astrophysicist Sasha Quanz said on the recent opening of ‘s .
Greater than 5,000 exoplanets have been discovered because the first one was present in 1995. The Milky Way galaxy incorporates over 100 billion stars, and astronomers consider most or all of those stars are orbited by a minimum of one planet.
To be considered habitable, a planet must orbit its star at a distance that permits liquid water to exist on its surface.
NASA’s (), launched in December 2021, has detected carbon dioxide and water within the atmospheres of several large exoplanets.
While it’s essentially the most powerful space telescope ever launched, isn’t designed to check smaller, Earth-like planets, versus gas giants. Nonetheless, several other instruments currently in development could have that capability, Quanz said.
He’s currently working on one in every of these — the () mid-infrared imager and spectrograph, generally known as .
, scheduled to be accomplished in 2028, is situated on the ‘s () facility in Chile. With a 130-foot (40-meter) wide mirror, might be the world’s largest ground-based optical telescope.
Regarding , Quanz said, “The first goal of the instrument is to take the primary picture of a terrestrial planet, potentially much like Earth, around one in every of the very nearest stars. But our long-term vision is to do this not just for just a few stars, but for dozens of stars, and to analyze the atmospheres of terrestrial exoplanets.”
As a ground-based telescope, might be subject to the results of Earth’s atmosphere, which could distort measurements of exoplanet atmospheres.
Because of this, scientists on the are discussing a brand new space telescope titled the or , with capabilities beyond those of .
First proposed in 2017 and never yet funded, but under development by ‘s latest center, might be able to probing Earth-like exoplanet atmospheres to go looking for molecules produced by biological processes.
“What we have no idea is that if these terrestrial planets have atmospheres and what these atmospheres are product of,” Quanz said. “We’d like to analyze the atmospheres of those planets. We’d like an observational approach that may allow us to take pictures of those planets.”