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The Road Map to Alien Life Passes Through the ‘Cosmic Shoreline’ | Quanta Magazine

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NASA ’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to put the concept to the test.

The search is on for habitable alien worlds, and eventually for signs of life in their atmospheres.

To succeed, alien hunters will need to find planets with air. And the cosmic shoreline could show them where to start.

Astronomers have now identified nearly 6,000 planets orbiting a menagerie of alien suns.

JWST wasn’t initially designed to peer at exoplanets, which hadn”t even been discovered when it was conceived.

But it has particular trouble resolving dim, rocky planets that orbit bigger, brighter stars.

Astronomers using JWST to measure temperatures of TRAPPIST-1 b and c, the system’s innermost planets, have ruled out thick atmospheres on other planets such as Gl 486b and GJ 1132b.

For other cooler worlds like ours, finding air requires a different technique.

The cosmic shoreline is probably less of a tidy fence and more of a wild borderland, a planetary scientist said.