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Is our solar system a cosmic rarity or a galactic place? How do earth-like planets form and how do they determine if they are habitable? Is there life on other worlds?
According to a new report mandated by Congress, NASA must answer these important questions.
Author of the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine, the document calls on the American space program to develop an advanced telescope to better study exoplanets.
Researchers have already detected more than 100 potential exoplanets – globes that encircle a star other than the Sun -, one of which is orbiting the fourth star closest to our solar system (about 8 light-years from Earth).
But this is not enough for NASEM, the National Academy of Sciences of the United States.
"Our current knowledge of the range of features of planets outside the solar system is largely incomplete," said the committee in a press release describing two "overriding" goals:
- Understand the formation and evolution of planetary systems as products of star formation and characterize the diversity of their architectures, compositions and environments
- Learn enough about exoplanets to identify potentially habitable environments and search for scientific evidence of life on worlds revolving around other stars
"A holistic approach to studying habitability in exoplanets, using both theory and observations, will ultimately be needed to look for evidence of past life and present elsewhere in the universe," said Nasem.
It's easier said than done, though.
The development of an advanced space telescope, with instruments such as coronagraph or stars, as the report suggests, is costly and time consuming, and will not produce substantial results for years.
But the nonprofit group is determined to dig deeper and make contact, no matter the cost (which the National Science Foundation will help, it seems, to cover).
"While missions like the Kepler spacecraft have characterized a remarkable population of planets relatively close to their stars, our knowledge of worlds in the far reaches of the universe is sorely lacking," said the National Academies.
New tools, such as the upcoming Magellan Giant Telescope (GMT) and the proposed Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), are "conditions for progress". The authors also want NASA to make the wide-field telescope available.
This report, as pointed out by Gizmodo, could be the golden ticket of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration for government funding.
The study of exoplanets has seen remarkable discoveries over the last decade, including 15 new orbs that can house extraterrestrial life and so-called "fingerprints" that help astronomers identify distant worlds. Discover more here
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