A GIANT telescope now being built could hunt for alien life by detecting oxygen on exoplanets.
On Earth, plants and some bacteria are the only sources of large amounts of atmospheric oxygen. Existing telescopes can look at the light that passes through exoplanet atmospheres and tease out their make-up, but observations made from the ground struggle to filter out Earth’s oxygen. And space missions intended to hunt for distant oxygen have been cancelled.
A team in the Netherlands has now calculated that the European Extremely Large Telescope, due to be completed in the next decade, will have high enough resolution to spot alien oxygen (Astrophysical Journal, doi.org/kh6).
This article appeared in print under the headline “Bigger eye will spy alien oxygen”