Are we alone in the universe?
(the opinions of the scientists )
I think the universe is so big there has to be life out there you think about just the size of our Milky Way galaxy that has a few hundred billion stars and this is just in our Milky Way. However, we know now that there are several hundred billion other galaxies.
Astronomy really gets to the heart of our big questions.
That is not just our questions as scientists but also our questions as human beings: Where do we come from and how do we get here and, then, of course, the big one; Are we alone.
Every assumption that man has ever made about space has been wrong from the very early days. When we thought that, we were the center of the universe and we thought the Sun was the center of it. The earth was flat so there was, absolutely, no reason why we cannot think we are wrong and we think we are the only life out there.
The James Webb Space Telescope is specifically going to have capabilities to study the atmospheres of exoplanets and that is, really, hard to do.
We start with visible light, red light that you could see but we go out to 28 microns wavelength, which is much longer than your eyeball can pick up and that is heat radiation so we will be able to pick up heat radiation from distant things that the Hubble cannot detect.
It turns out the infrared wavelengths are great wavelengths for looking for chemical signatures. Many of the kinds of things, that you know, that life would be evidence of things like methane and water have spectral bands in the infrared so it turns out that Webb actually, in some ways, the wavelength WISE is so ideal for searching for chemical signatures.
Finding a planet that would be definitely capable of supporting life it is obviously a big goal and then would be really exciting and so once we found those sorts of planets and the next step would be building bigger telescopes.
After the Webb telescope, of course, we could build a bigger telescope that is capable of finding the signs of life oxygen and the other chemical elements and compounds that we have in our own atmosphere we can look at that in some other planet and say “that is a lot like home.”
The universe is huge and vast, there has to be life out there.
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Science