Cornell Astronomer Hoping the James Webb Will Confirm Alien Life in 2025

Get ready.

Tourist Trappist

The odds of us finding extraterrestrial life anytime soon are pretty slim. But if there's anything that can deliver us a sign of aliens, you'd put your money on it being the James Webb Space Telescope.

As the world's largest and most powerful orbital observatory, the James Webb has had its sights set on the star TRAPPIST-1, a cool red dwarf that's only 41 light years away. The star is surrounded by seven rocky, Earth-sized exoplanets — three of which orbit within TRAPPIST-1's habitable zone, where conditions are just right to support liquid water, and thereby life.

Encouragingly, the James Webb has already taken temperature measurements on one of these exoplanets, which is the first time that any radiation has ever been picked up from an Earth-like planet beyond our Solar System, ever.

With any luck, the telescope's next glimpse at the TRAPPIST-1 system could be a SETI breakthrough.

"In 2025, the JWST will likely shed more light into these tantalizing detections, and hopefully confirm, for the first time ever, if there is life on alien worlds light-years away from our own," Lisa Kaltenegger, a founding director of the Carl Sagan Institute and a professor of astronomy at Cornell University, writes in Wired.

Unbearable Lightness

Exoplanets are incredibly hard to find — let alone closely examine — because they produce virtually no light of their own and get outshined by nearby stars.

Cool red dwarfs like TRAPPIST-1 make good study candidates, however, because their light is fairly faint. Still, the challenge remains significant, not least of all because red dwarfs are much more volatile than stable stars like our Sun.

And according to Kaltenegger, the next set of observations astronomers have in mind are going to be a tall order even for the James Webb: studying the composition of the nearby planets' atmosphere.

"Every time a planet passes between us and its star — when it transits — the starlight gets filtered by the planet's atmosphere and hits the molecules in its path, creating spectral absorption features we can search for," she explained.

"The JWST will need to collect enough data from several planetary transits to suppress the signal from the host star and amplify the molecular features in the incredibly thin atmosphere of the rocky exoplanets."

Back Up Option

If astronomers detect the right molecules, it could be an indication of the presence of alien lifeforms. The more likely success scenario is that we confirm that the planet harbors water, which would be an astounding discovery in its own right.

But if TRAPPIST-1 lets us down, there's also a tantalizing SETI prospect right in our own Solar System. Jupiter's fourth largest moon Europa is believed to harbor a subsurface ocean many times more voluminous than all the seawater on Earth.

NASA's Europa Clipper space probe, launched this October, is expected to reach the chilly, liquid world by 2030. Once there, it will extensively image Europa and perhaps send us back promising signs of its potential habitability. Or hey: maybe even aliens.

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