Putting this huge telescope into space and having it operate with a level of sensitivity that will allow us to observe the Universe in infrared is making astronomers and other scientists excited about what we will discover. It’s not just the size of the telescope that matters. It’s the fact it will operate at super cold temperatures to ensure that its infrared imaging will not be contaminated by its heat sources or any nearby objects, like the Earth, Sun, and the Moon.
The telescope launched on Christmas day last year. In recent weeks it arrived at its destination, a LaGrange point 1.5 million kilometres (just under 1 million miles) from Earth where it will orbit the Sun and remain directly aligned with Earth. NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Canadian Space Agency are all now putting the telescope’s instruments and systems into operation with the first test images sent in the last couple of weeks. Everything is a go for the real work for the telescope to begin by summer. Then it will add to the space knowledge we have already gained from Spitzer and Hubble (the latter still is in operation after 31 years) and will begin to meet its specific mission goals which include:
When I was a child I had three telescopes (don’t ask me why). Looking at the night sky was something of an adventure for me. And like Carl Sagan I kept wondering how we could be alone in the vastness of a Universe filled with so many stars. Some of them were like our Sun. Others were binary systems. And what I didn’t know as a teenager was that planets were circling these stars just like Earth circled the Sun.
When I was a teenager, we didn’t know that the building blocks of life were floating in the near-vacuum of space. Panspermia was science fiction. The notion that life may have come from space dust and organic molecules seeding planets.
In the last few weeks, a study that looked at data coming from one of two NASA rovers on Mars has suggested organic chemistry is very much in process on Mars and that there very well may have been life on that planet sometime in its past and possibly even today.
That’s what makes the fourth objective of the James Webb mission so exciting to me. If we measure the composition of exoplanet atmospheres we may have the answer to the question, “Are we alone in the Universe?”
The numbers favour we are not. A quick calculation supports this conclusion.
If you are studying astrophysics, astronomy, or exobiology, these are exciting times to look at the night sky. With James Webb,
With James Webb this summer we’ll just be getting started. It should make the coming decades of the 21st century very exciting as we look to the stars.
]]>But SETI scientists in making their prediction of within 25 years are not talking about a technology-literate, sentient form of life. They are simply stating that we will find recognizable living things in space in this next quarter century. This prediction was confidently stated on March 10 at Innovation Union – A Europe 2020 Initiative, by Dr. Seth Shostak, Senior Astronomer, SETI Institute, a radio astronomer who graduated from Princeton University and California Institute of Technology. Those are decent credentials so we can state that this prediction about alien life being discovered comes from a knowledgeable source.
What is putting confidence behind the words is the discovery of thousands of exoplanets, many located in habitable zones circling stars that are light years away from Earth. At the same time the evidence on Mars is persuasive enough to suggest that at some point in the past our neighboring planet was habitable for several hundred million years.
So how will we discover this space life? So far SETI has been looking for radio signals coming from space that are consistent with a pattern we would consider to be some kind of message, a beacon stating “I’m intelligent. Can you hear me?” The search which has been going on for approximately a half-century has yet to achieve a eureka moment.
But Shostak argues that our first discovery will more than likely be microbial and that we will probably find it right here in our neighbourhood, on Mars or on one of the moons of Jupiter.
And our second discovery will happen as we survey the many exoplanets we are discovering. Increasingly sophisticated sensors will give us a sniff of these planets atmospheres and he is confident we will discover the gases that living processes create.
Shostak states, “there are 150 billion galaxies other than our own, each with a few tens of billions of earth-like planets. If this is the only place in the universe where anything interesting is happening then this is a miracle. And 500 years of astronomy has taught us that whenever you believe in a miracle, you’re probably wrong.”
