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SScientists in search of extraterrestrial life are eagerly awaiting the launch of a new aid: the James Webb Space Telescope, which is lagging far behind.
People involved in the quest for extraterrestrial intelligence, members of what is commonly referred to as the SETI community, see Webb as the most powerful tool for looking into the confines of the world. universe.
Webb is "an incredibly complex instrument and a telescope a hundred times more sensitive than Hubble," said Bill Diamond, president and CEO of SETI Institute. Washington Examiner. The James Webb Space Telescope is the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope launched in Earth orbit in 1990.
Webb will be NASA's most powerful telescope, built around a 6.5-meter diameter primary mirror made up of 18 hexagonal beryllium mirror segments covered in gold. As such, the area of Webb's main mirror – and thus its light collection capacity – will be almost seven times larger than Hubble's and his 2.4-meter mirror.
"We can not even begin to imagine how much we will still learn," Diamond told Webb.
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Originally scheduled for launch in 2007, Webb has experienced many delays and cost overruns. NASA has announced the latest delay this summer, pushing the takeoff date to March 2021.
Although Webb's primary goals include studying the formation of the universe, stars, and planets, they do not specifically look for life elsewhere in the universe. But Diamond notes that, when it will be operational, the space telescope will examine various factors critical to Drake's equation, which identifies all relevant variables to search for state-of-the-art civilizations in the galaxy of the Milky Way and evaluate the number.
By probing the atmospheres of exoplanets, or planets outside our solar system, Webb will be able to detect biosignatures, based on the identification of elements and molecular compounds associated with the building blocks of life. .
If NASA sees anything of interest to SETI's scientists when it examines the atmospheres of planets or moons, Diamond says that this is when the astrobiology and SETI communities "will go into city".
"I think there will be a lot of time proposals on the telescope to examine the exoplanets," Diamond predicted, referring to specific requests for comments from his SETI colleagues.
Mentioning the exciting scientific discoveries of recent years, including liquid water on Mars and other places like the frozen moons of Enceladus and Europe that have the ingredients for life as we know it, Diamond hopes that humanity will find evidence of extraterrestrial life in the form of: tiny microbes within our own solar system in his life.
As for life in the galaxy in general, where astronomers believe that there are hundreds of billions of stars and as many planets, Diamond claims that there are too many candidates on a habitable planet for that there is no life somewhere, including intelligent and perhaps also technological life.
"We are aggrieved by the limits of our knowledge," Diamond said about the almost unfathomable magnitude of the Milky Way.
When it comes to possibly finding intelligent extraterrestrial civilizations somewhere in the universe, Diamond says "it's a problem of time as well as space" because, as he suggests, a given technological civilization might not last or remain detectable only ten thousand years later. or so The beginning of technology is vaguely defined as the invention of radio and the manipulation of the electromagnetic spectrum. "The last variable of the Drake equation – the variable" L "is an expression of the duration of the duration of civilizations, or remains detectable from the beginning of the technology. Drake estimated this value at 10,000 years. We have been in our technology phase for about 100 years and we are facing a growing number of challenges related to our long-term sustainability! Said Diamond.
But "the chances of finding extraterrestrial life only improve with the wider technology available to scientists," including the James Webb telescope.
"It could happen tomorrow, it could happen next week or in the next decades," he added.
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