The researcher from the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands (IAC), Enric Pallé, has said in an interview with EFE that the answers to the question of whether we are alone in the Universe have always come from philosophy and religion, and now, he added, "we are approaching a scientific answer."
Enric Pallé stated that 30 years ago "everything" was philosophy, since no planets outside the solar system were known, and now it is known that for each star there is at least one, so that when you look at the sky you see more planets than stars.
And it is also known statistically that the number of potentially habitable planets, that is, those that resemble Earth and meet the conditions for life, are hundreds of billions in the Milky Way.
With which, Enric Pallé has declared, "we are approaching" the answer to whether life is something that always happens, or under certain conditions, something that, he added, will be known as soon as the atmospheres of those planets begin to be measured.
Measurements that will be made through the Spear project that the European Research Council has selected for the next five years with an allocation of 2.5 million euros, and that Enric Pallé will direct with the intention of generating a code that is capable of exactly reproducing the conditions of a 40-meter diameter telescope being built in Chile.
Enric Pallé explained that right now the largest telescope in the world has a diameter of ten meters and is in La Palma, while the 40-meter diameter one, called extremely large, is scheduled to be completed in 2028 or 2029 financed by all the countries of the European Southern Observatory (ESO for its acronym in English).
The light photon collecting capacity of that telescope will be 16 times more powerful than the ten-meter diameter one, Enric Pallé pointed out, who commented that they wanted to make a 100-meter diameter telescope but today it is technically "impossible".
He continued that 40 meters in diameter is the minimum size to see planets like Earth, that is, of a size and composition like Earth's.
Enric Pallé pointed out that all planets that have a size like that of Earth are rocky and may or may not have an atmospheric layer, and when talking about them being similar, reference is also made to the fact that they are at an adequate distance from their star so that there can be liquid water on their surface.
With the extremely large telescope, between 30 and 40 planets similar to Earth that are a few light years away can be explored, Enric Pallé pointed out, who recalled that the current census of exoplanets in the Milky Way is about 7,500, but that about 45 meet the similarity conditions.
With the 10-meter diameter telescope, phenomena that can be studied with the 40-meter one are not observed, and to carry out these studies it will be necessary to improve the precision of some techniques and use more complex mathematics than the current one, he added.
Enric Pallé will lead a team made up of about 14 people between doctorates and doctoral students with the intention of introducing different mathematical techniques and artificial intelligence to create millions of possibilities of how the atmosphere of those planets may be changing when observations are made, and create models that learn and remove the fluctuations of the Earth's atmosphere during observation.
80% of the budget for this project will be used to hire personnel who will seek to approach the problem from various angles to generate a code that is capable of reproducing "exactly" the capabilities of the 40-meter diameter telescope.
And how to effectively reduce the data that this telescope will obtain to see the signals, which is about "getting ahead of what will be seen with the telescope", since in about five years it will begin to provide data and we must be prepared to know how to deal with them, Enric Pallé stressed.
He also highlighted that, although the telescope works perfectly, with current knowledge "we would not be able" to extract the signal from the planet, and therefore we must get ahead.
