No one has yet discovered life on Mars. However, according to one scientist, over the next 25 years, it could be possible to find proof of it on worlds outside the solar system.
Astrophysicist Sasha Quantz made the claim during the university's newest Center for the Origin and Prevalence of Life's recent opening. She is employed with the Swiss federal technology institute ETH Zurich.
How to Find Life in Mars, Galaxy and Beyond
On Sept. 2, Quantz provided an outline of the technology projects that are now being worked on and may assist researchers in determining whether or not we are alone in the universe.
Didier Queloz, a Nobel Prize winner, discovered the first planet outside our solar system in 1995. As of today, more than 5,000 exoplanets have been found. Astronomers are discovering new ones daily, according to Quantz.
According to Space.com, many unknown exoplanets are still waiting to be discovered since astronomers think that each of the over 100 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy has at least one partner planet.
Numerous exoplanets have been produced. Since many of them are comparable to Earth and are situated at a distance from their host stars that is favorable for the evolution of life, including the existence of liquid water, Quantz claims that many of them are similar to Earth.
But Quantz noted that it is still unclear if the atmospheres of these terrestrial planets exist. She emphasized the demand for a method of observation that would enable astronomers to take photos of these worlds.
NASA James Webb Space Telescope Not Yet Powerful Enough to Find Life on Exoplanets
The James Webb Space Telescope has already made some advances in exoplanet research, including detecting carbon dioxide and water in the atmospheres of several of them. The James Webb Space Telescope was not designed to study exoplanets but to search for the universe's oldest stars.
Although Webb is the most powerful telescope ever sent into space, Quanz warned in another report that it is not nearly strong enough to view the much smaller, Earth-like planets that circle their stars at closer ranges where liquid water can exist.
This shortcoming of the James Webb Space Telescope's capabilities is already being made up for by other equipment.
Quantz and his team are creating the mid-infrared ELT imager and spectrograph (METIS), a ground-breaking instrument for the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT).
The 130-foot-wide (40-meter) mirror that ELT, which the European Southern Observatory in Chile is currently building, will have when it is done would make it the largest optical telescope in the world and might aid in the eventual finding of life outside of our solar system.
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