As noted by the team behind the revolutionary project, their Telescope will be the world’s first and only telescope capable of imaging oceans, continents, and life on nearby exoplanets. Designed from the ground up, ELF is a new way to build affordable large-scale telescopes for exoplanetary research. Highly specialized to see exoplanets up to 120 trillion miles (24 light years) away from Earth, ELF is designed for detecting the energy signature of life or life’s likely chemical fingerprints in the atmosphere from water (H₂O), oxygen (O), methane (CH₄), and ozone (O₃), or on the surface from photosynthetic bio pigments.
This groundbreaking
telescope would have the ability to see up to 120 Trillion miles into outer
space and discover life beyond Earth.
Dubbed as
ELF—which stands for ExoLife finder—the telescope would search the universe for
‘chemical fingerprints’ of life on the surface of distant alien worlds. The
telescope would have the capability of snapping images go distant alien
continents and oceans.
The best
part, you can be a part of it. The project is currently on Kickstarter raising
funds.
Once the
telescope is constructed, it will start searching the cosmos with one main
goal: Finding alien life, whether it’s small or big.
In order to
do so, it will start off by exploring its first target—an alien world located
in the Proxima Centauri system dubbed as Proxima B thought to orbit its host
star within its habitable zone.
This star
system is our closest neighbor located around 4.2 light-years away.
This massive
alien hunting telescope will be composed of sixteen 5-meter mirrors, based on
printed mirror technology according to reports from the Planets Foundation.
Once
finished, the telescope is expected to be 25 meters wide and will be located in
the Atacama Desert in Chile.
According to
initial reports, the ELF telescope would have the ability to explore distant
alien worlds located within 25 light-years from our sun.
Most
excitingly perhaps, it will have the ability to explore the nearby Alpha
Centauri System.
Alpha
Centauri is of great interest for Astronomers.
Once the ELF
telescope is finished, experts plant to search the neighboring star system and
its possible planets for evidence of life as we know it.
Experts will
use the telescope to sniff out energy signatures of life in its atmosphere, as
well as search the planets’ atmosphere and detected water, oxygen, methane as
well as ozone.
However,
astronomers note how their revolutionary telescope could even detect
photosynthetic organisms or even traces of thermal waste at the surface of the
planets from advanced alien civilizations.
Dr. Svetlana Berdyugina, Director of the Kipenheuer Institute for Solar Physics and Planets Foundation, as well as the co-founder, said: "We aim to find life on nearby planets outside the solar system, also known as exoplanets."
"We have designed a revolutionary telescope with a number of metamaterials, making our mirrors incredibly light and also reducing the cost of our telescopes by a factor of 10. Our powerful new telescope ExoLife Finder, or ELF, will be able to see planets up to 120 trillion miles away, and will image oceans, continents, and life on exoplanets," added Berdyugina.
Currently,
the team behind the project has raised around $17,000 toward their initial goal
of $35,000. They hope to meet their initial goal by October 2017.
$35,000
isn’t the price for the telescope.
- Telescope Summary
- Total Cost: $130 million USD
- Time To Build: 60 months
- Planned Location: Atacama Desert, Chile
You can find
out more about the telescope by visiting their Kickstarter page, and
planets.life
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