At Caltech’s Exoplanet Technology Laboratory (ET Lab) of Associate Professor of Astronomy Dimitri Mawet, researchers are fast at work developing a new strategy for looking for signs of life, such as oxygen molecules and methane, on other planets. If such chemicals are found, they would be strong indicators of life beyond Earth. But how are they able to detect this?
In two new papers scheduled to be published in The Astrophysical Journal and The Astronomical Journal, Mawet and his ET Lab team (whose work is supported by the Heising-Simons Foundation) demonstrates how a new technique called “high-dispersion coronagraphy” can be used to detect the presence of life on other planets. The team plans to test the technique at the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii in the coming year. But the true test will come with the planned Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) whose larger instrumentation will enable the study of potential Earth-like planets.
Mawet is also a research scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which is managed by Caltech for NASA. The Moore Foundation's chief program officer for science, Bob Kirshner, recently visited JPL and wrote about his experience in a piece titled Moonwalking in the Mars Yard.
Read more from Caltech here.
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