The search for alien life is taking a shortcut. The Hubble Space Telescope is set to spend hundreds of hours over the next year running reconnaissance on a shortlist of worlds to identify those we should scour for life first. This latest effort aims to take advantage of Hubble's successor, the James Webb Space Telescope. Set to launch in 2018, JWST will have unprecedented power to detect the atmospheres of faraway planets for biosignature gases that would suggest they host living, breathing organisms.
展开▼
