Wednesday 14 September 2022 09:17 PM ALIENS could be discovered within 25 years when more powerful telescopes are ... trends now
A government scientist said that we can find alien life outside of our solar system in 25 years, but current technology such as the James Webb Space Telescope is not quite powerful enough to locate evidence of extraterrestrial life.
Sasha Quanz, an astrophysicist at Switzerland's federal technology institute ETH Zurich, made the comments at the recent opening of the university's new Center for the Origin and Prevalence of Life.
Although 5,000 exoplanets are known by scientists and there are billions yet to be discovered just within our Milky Way galaxy, we don't know a lot about the atmospheres of these far-off places.
'In 1995, my colleague [and Noble Prize laureate] Didier Queloz discovered the first planet outside our solar system,' Quanz said during the briefing, according to Space.com.
The 25-year timeframe he set himself for finding life outside the solar system is ambitious but not 'unrealistic,' according to Quanz.
A government scientist said that we can find alien life outside of our solar system in 25 years, but current technology such as the James Webb Space Telescope is not quite powerful enough to locate evidence of extraterrestrial life
Billions of exoplanets have yet to be discovered by scientists. Each of the more than 100 billion stars just in our Milky Way has at least one planet orbiting it
The James Webb telescope, which was not built expressly for viewing exoplanets but instead for seeing the universe's oldest stars, recently released its first direct image of an exoplanet orbiting a distant star - the massive gas giant HIP 65426 b, a planet that's 12 times the size of Jupiter.
Quanz, however, explained that Webb, although the most powerful observatory ever put into space, is not quite powerful enough to be able to capture the much smaller, Earth-like planets that orbit close enough to their stars so that liquid water might exist.
'[The HIP 65426] system is a very special system,' Quanz said. 'It's a gas giant planet orbiting very far from the star.
'This is what Webb
