We will find aliens in twenty years! says the astronomer

Instruments such as the $10 billion (3,500 billion HUF) James Webb High-Powered Space Telescope,bio signaturesAbout to be discovered outer planets Its atmosphere contains gases such as oxygen given off by living organismswhich could indicate life, the scientist believed.

They can detect thousands of planets that harbor life

According to the working group consisting of British, American and Swiss experts, alien life could be found on thousands of planets in the next 10 to 20 years, which would be the largest discovery in human history. “The possibility that life exists in some form in the universe is very high. In fact, I would go even further I am saying that it is increasingly likely that life will be discovered on an exoplanet in my lifetimeProfessor Hinckley stated. But according to the astrophysicist, even if telltale signs of life are detected on distant worlds, this does not necessarily mean a confrontation with aliens – Daily Mail writes.

The video below, posted by the Destiny YouTube channel, shows that there are potentially life-bearing planets right next to us. In order to make the search for extraterrestrial life more systematic and targeted, scientists have developed a metric called the Earth Similarity Index., which measures the similarity of a planet or moon to Earth based on various parameters such as temperature, atmospheric pressure, and habitability. The index ranges from 0.0 to 1. A value between 0.8 and 1 indicates that the planet is similar to Earth in all respects.

In recent years, advances in technology have allowed us to discover several exoplanets and moons that are strikingly similar to Earth. One was found in 2019 and Teagarden bIt was called a super-Earth (1.05 times the mass of Earth), orbiting its M-type star every 4.9 days at a distance of about 0.0252 Sun-Earth. Teegarden is one of the closest stars to our solar system, located about 12.4 light-years away. And although the size of the red dwarf is ten times less than that of our Sun, its temperature does not exceed 2700 degrees Celsius, which is enough to provide enough heat for its two planets Teegarden B and Teegarden C. The two outer planets are similar to the inner planets of our solar system and only a little more massive than Earth. Both fall into the habitable zone, where liquid water might exist, but A Teegarden B looks more promising.

To be clear, the discovery of life on another planet does not necessarily mean that there is an alien civilization on another planet, nor that we will soon come into contact with these life forms in some form. Evidence for the discovery of life is likely to be found by observing the ratio and imbalance of different chemical elements and types of compounds. (such as ozone and carbon dioxide), which otherwise It would not exist in nature without perhaps the biological activity causing this imbalancehe added in his article for Spectator.

According to conservative NASA projections, one hundred million worlds in our galaxy could host alien life. And according to the space agency, we could find this life in the next 20 years, most likely outside our solar system. Instruments like the James Webb Space Telescope, which will launch in 2021, are already observing the universe in unprecedented detail. Its mission is to help humanity better understand how planets, stars, and galaxies form and evolve.

Other high-tech pieces for the spacecraft are already in the pipeline, Hinckley said NASA Already working on a mission Develop such a space mission by the 2040swhich searches for biosignatures on exoplanets.

Four classes of planetary systems have now been identified…and the solar system is particularly special

Space telescopes are already able to analyze starlight passing through a planet’s atmosphere to determine the planet’s chemical composition. In August, astronomers announced the James Webb Telescope Discover carbon dioxide In the atmosphere of a planet the size of Saturn, 700 light years away. This was the first time that scientists could say this with absolute certainty Gas has been detected on an exoplanet.

Special attention is paid toin the temperate zone“They can be found on planets where, according to scientists, life has the greatest chance of developing and thriving. Thus, the orbits of planets in this region are neither too close nor too far from the star.” Creating ideal conditions for the existence of liquid water, which is one of the most important components of life. It is believed that there may be trillions of habitable planets in the universe, and hundreds of millions in our galaxy alone.

TRAPPIST-1 in plain sight

According to Professor Hinckley, one of the best potential areas for life in the Milky Way is TRAPPIST-1 A planetary system about 40 light-years away and made up of seven planets roughly the size of Earth. They closely orbit a “very faint, cool star not much larger than Jupiter.” Three of the TRAPPIST-1 planets orbit the star’s habitable zone. Efforts to target these three planets have already begun using the James Webb TelescopeTo look for what scientists call “biosignatures,” Professor Hinckley said.

To date, scientists have discovered 5,332 confirmed exoplanets orbiting 3,931 planetary systems. “But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Just for comparison: There are about 100 billion stars in our Milky Way. Since we already know from many space missions that most stars host planets, this gives us a little hint about that.” How many outer planets It may exist in our galaxy. “Outside our galaxy, there are an estimated 200 billion galaxies in the universe, each of which may contain hundreds of billions of stars that have their own exoplanets,” the astronomer explained Scale Size.

last month dr. Emily Mitchell of the University of Cambridge He is so safe, It is very likely that they will find signs of extraterrestrial neighbors, because life is almost certainly very common in the universe. “We only have one biosignature, here on Earth. But according to my fellow optimists In 10 or 20 years, we will have thousands of biometric prints. And then we will be able to calculate how we relate to life on other planets.