Researchers have shown that if the James Webb Space Telescope was pointed at Earth from a distant star, it could detect the signatures of intelligent life in our planet's atmosphere.
The James Webb Space Telescope would be able to spot the signs of our civilization on Earth if it was spying on us from another star system in the Milky Way, a new study shows. The finding raises hopes that the state-of-the-art spacecraft could detect alien civilizations as it stares out toward distant worlds in our galaxy.
In the new study, uploaded to the pre-print server arXiv on Aug. 28, researchers took a spectrum of Earth's atmosphere and deliberately decreased the quality of the data to mimic how it would look to an observer dozens of light-years away.
Only around 20 exoplanets have been officially discovered within a 50-light-year radius of Earth, but based on the number of suspected stars in this region of space, experts predict that there may actually be as many as 4,000 exoplanets within JWST's reach, according to Project EDEN, an international astronomical collaboration dedicated to finding potentially habitable planets close to Earth.
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