Life probably exists beyond Earth. So how do we find it?
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2019/03/extraterrestrial-life-probably-exists-how-do-we-search-for-aliens/
Source: By Jamie Shreeve, Spencer Lowell, Dana Berry, National Geographic
Excerpt: Sara...Seager, 47, is an astrophysicist. Her specialty is exoplanets, namely all the planets in the universe except the ones you already know about revolving around our sun. On a blackboard, she has sketched an equation she thought up to estimate the chances of detecting life on such a planet. Beneath another blackboard filled with more equations is a clutter of memorabilia, including a vial containing some glossy black shards. ...When Seager entered graduate school in the mid-1990s, we didn’t know about planets that circle their stars in hours or others that take almost a million years. We didn’t know about planets that revolve around two stars, or rogue planets that don’t orbit any star but just wander about in space. In fact, we didn’t know for sure that any planets at all existed beyond our solar system, and a lot of the assumptions we made about planet-ness have turned out to be wrong. ...Today we have confirmed about 4,000 exoplanets. The majority were discovered by the Kepler space telescope, launched in 2009. ...Her current focus is the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), an MIT-led NASA space telescope launched last year. Like Kepler, TESS looks for a slight dimming in the luminosity of a star when a planet passes—transits—in front of it. TESS is scanning nearly the whole sky, with the goal of identifying about 50 exoplanets with rocky surfaces like Earth’s that could be investigated by more powerful telescopes coming on line, beginning with the James Webb Space Telescope, which NASA hopes to launch in 2021. [More topics: chronographs (direct imaging of exoplanets, the Subaru 8.2 meter telescope on Mauna Kea Hawaii, and NASA project Starshade), Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), and the possibility of actually traveling to a nearby star system (Alpha Centauri)
Source: By Jamie Shreeve, Spencer Lowell, Dana Berry, National Geographic
Excerpt: Sara...Seager, 47, is an astrophysicist. Her specialty is exoplanets, namely all the planets in the universe except the ones you already know about revolving around our sun. On a blackboard, she has sketched an equation she thought up to estimate the chances of detecting life on such a planet. Beneath another blackboard filled with more equations is a clutter of memorabilia, including a vial containing some glossy black shards. ...When Seager entered graduate school in the mid-1990s, we didn’t know about planets that circle their stars in hours or others that take almost a million years. We didn’t know about planets that revolve around two stars, or rogue planets that don’t orbit any star but just wander about in space. In fact, we didn’t know for sure that any planets at all existed beyond our solar system, and a lot of the assumptions we made about planet-ness have turned out to be wrong. ...Today we have confirmed about 4,000 exoplanets. The majority were discovered by the Kepler space telescope, launched in 2009. ...Her current focus is the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), an MIT-led NASA space telescope launched last year. Like Kepler, TESS looks for a slight dimming in the luminosity of a star when a planet passes—transits—in front of it. TESS is scanning nearly the whole sky, with the goal of identifying about 50 exoplanets with rocky surfaces like Earth’s that could be investigated by more powerful telescopes coming on line, beginning with the James Webb Space Telescope, which NASA hopes to launch in 2021. [More topics: chronographs (direct imaging of exoplanets, the Subaru 8.2 meter telescope on Mauna Kea Hawaii, and NASA project Starshade), Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), and the possibility of actually traveling to a nearby star system (Alpha Centauri)