Hubble Telescope Archives - Argyll Free Press

The search for extraterrestrial intelligence is a heavily treaded but equally unsatisfying road. Mankind has been attempting to find signs of other life forms in the universe as we know it for as long as it realized planet Earth is neither the center of the universe nor a plane surface floating somewhere in space. But not many worlds that could nurture any life whatsoever have been found so far, never mind ones that could allow species to develop to the point of becoming highly intelligent extraterrestrials.

But mankind continues to hope nonetheless, much too disheartened by the idea that our species may have just been that one happy accident that brought us into existence. And come to think about it, it a very difficult to grasp idea – the enormity of the universe only allowing the ‘flaw’ that created humans to only form in one single place. While scientists are very much aware that planet Earth and its inhabitants were the result of an abysmally low chance and mix of factors, it’s near impossible to consider it was the one and only.

So scientists now attempt to apply a different kind of thinking in their search for intelligent aliens. To be more precise, they start off with the belief that we should ‘put ourselves in the shoes of the aliens’ if we are to find them. By interpolating the very methods we employ to look for other intelligent species, so could other species.

Thus, by making use of the concept of the ‘transit method’, we may end up more successful than before. While there have been a number of ‘habitable’ planets detect via the Hubble Space Telescope or the Kepler Telescope, it’s certain many other have been missed. The transit method is a way scientists can detect previously unobserved planets by studying a star’s small drop in brightness that would normally occur when one of the orbiting planets passes in front of the star.

Scientists believe that as long as aliens exist in a form that is at least as intelligent as mankind, chances are they would employ the same methods of detecting other life forms such as us. In other words, even if they do not use the exact same ways of detecting planets as we do, they are still limited by the same physical principles. That way, by detecting what zones of the universe our planet can be detected that way, we could narrow down our search.

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It would seem that the grounded FAST telescope is not the only one aspiring to places further away as NASA is building an improved Hubble telescope, featuring a field of view 100 times wider than before. The new telescope being built by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has been dubbed the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) and is expected to be put to work in mid-2020s.

The space telescope is being built with the aspiration of searching for alien worlds beyond our solar system as well as a further study of dark energy and dark matter and their mysterious effects. The two objectives may seem wildly different from one another, but the former comes as a complement to already existent Kepler mission as well as the upcoming Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite project. The latter is simply a continuation of what scientists have been interested and baffled by for years.

Thanks to its construction, the WFIRST telescope will feature a new, wide-field survey tool that is accompanied by a coronagraph instrument that helps filter out effects such as glare from stars and reflected light. These usually make it hard for researchers to spot things such as dark matter and dark energy. But removing that factor also helps produce measurements of chemical composition of atmospheres of other worlds.

WFIRST will be able to measure with much better precision not only distances, but also tri-dimensional positions and shapes of distant galaxies, providing scientists with much better insight regarding the evolution and workings of the universe.

Once completed and sent out in outer space, the WFIRST telescope will take its position in the Earth-sun L2, a location that is considered a balance point situated at approximately 1 million miles from our planet, in a directly opposite orientation in relation to the sun.

The WFIRST telescope will be taking onto multiple quests of discovery, and thanks to the improved capabilities that it comes will, will certainly open up new paths of research for scientists, even in topics such as the growth of cosmic structures, cosmic expansion that is believed to happen with time, physics of atmospheres, and other top priority tagged issues of the astronomical community.

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New Theory Regarding How to Find Intelligent Aliens

NASA Is Building An Improved Hubble Telescope

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