- 3857 - LIFE ON OTHER PLANETS? From black holes to the search for life and beyond, all of astronomy's greatest mysteries are on the table and astronomers are already planning how to solve them, using tools that range from the biggest space telescopes to arrays of tiny radio telescopes scattered across a desert on Earth.
------------------------- 3857 - LIFE ON OTHER PLANETS?
- The James Webb Space Telescope might get
all the credit, but a whole new era of telescopes, in space and on the
ground, is set to revolutionize
astronomy.
-
- Exoplanet astronomers are searching for
planets around other stars that host conditions in which life can likely
thrive, and simultaneously figuring out how to recognize whether an extrasolar
planet can or does support life.
-
- Recognizing life and understanding a
planet's conditions are really complicated tasks. Not only do we need to look
for the actual signs of life, known as biosignatures, but we also need to
understand the context in which we spot those signs, the planet's environment,
even including the behavior of the star it orbits.
-
- Whereas JWST mainly uses transits, a
planet crossing in front of its star, to observe Earth-size exoplanets, the
“Habitable Worlds Observatory” will take a more direct approach, imaging the
planets themselves, even down to Earth-like sizes.
-
- "Extremely Large Telescopes" or
ELTs are under construction in Hawaii and Chile that will have mirrors around
98 feet in diameter three times larger than any other optical telescope in
existence.
-
- The coming decades also promise new ways of
seeing and hearing the universe, including the ability to detect more types of
gravitational waves, or ripples in the fabric of space-time.
-
- "LIGO [the Laser Interferometer
Gravitational Wave Observatory] is currently the only gravitational wave
detector to have made a direct observation of gravitational waves. However, LIGO is only looking at a small fraction
of the whole spectrum of gravitational waves.
There are plenty of other signals it's not able to observe.
-
- For these other gravitational waves,
distinguished by their lower frequencies and longer-lasting signals,
astronomers will need to wait for this space-based detector. Like a massive LIGO detector, LISA will keep
three satellites in a huge and perfect triangle as they all orbit the Earth
together.
-
- “Pulsars” are spinning dead cores of large
stars that each shoot two beams of light into space like a cosmic lighthouse.
Pulsars are often used to time events in the cosmos because they're so
predictable that their time-keeping would only be off by 100 nanoseconds over
an entire decade.
-
- As gravitational waves pass through pulsars,
astronomers can spot the tiny changes in the pulsar's regular rhythm. This
method promises to reveal colliding pairs of black holes in which each partner
is around a billion times the mass of our sun; the technique can also begin
watching a black hole tango up to 25 million years before the objects merge.
-
- Tens of radio telescopes across the globe,
from the “Deep Synoptic Array” in California to the “MeerKAT telescope” in
South Africa are undergoing upgrades and working together to gather the data
needed for pulsar timing to reveal the impact of gravitational waves from
supermassive black holes.
-
- From ELTs to mega-sized space telescopes
and beyond, scientists hope they will help answer our most fundamental
questions: where did we come from, and are we alone? It's a historic time for
astronomy, and for humankind as a whole.
-
February 1, 2023 LIFE
ON OTHER PLANETS? 3857
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--------------------- --- Thursday, February 2, 2023 ---------------------------
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