How close is the James Webb Space Telescope to finding life?

What a year of NASA’s James Webb Telescope tells us about the search for extraterrestrial life.

A combined optical/mid-infrared image, featuring data from both the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope, shows M74, otherwise known as the Phantom Galaxy, in this handout image released August 29, 2022.
A combined optical/mid-infrared image, featuring data from both the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope, shows M74, otherwise known as the Phantom Galaxy, on August 29, 2022 [NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope/Handout via Reuters]

The United States space agency NASA launched the James Webb Space Telescope, the largest telescope ever put into space, just over a year ago. Since then, we have been given a whole new picture of the universe – image after image of stars, planets and galaxies, farther into the universe than humans have ever seen. We talk to those who helped put together the telescope about what they have learned and find out how close it really is to detecting signs of life on other planets.

In this episode: 

  • Stuart Clark (@DrStuClark), astronomer and consultant at New Scientist
  • Knicole Colón (@super_knova), deputy project scientist for exoplanet science at NASA James Webb Space Telescope
  • Chris Gunn (@ChrisGunnPhoto), photographer at NASA

Episode credits:

This episode was produced by Chloe K. Li with Negin Owliaei, Ruby Zaman, Alexandra Locke, Amy Walters, Ashish Malhotra and Halla Mohieddeen. Aya Elmileik and Adam Abou-Gad are our engagement producers. Alex Roldan is our sound designer. Ney Alvarez is Al Jazeera’s head of audio.

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Source: Al Jazeera

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