This New Telescope Could Detect Alien Life Within Hours
Finding Biosignatures Faster Than Ever Before
The search for life beyond Earth is about to get a serious upgrade. Once operations begin in Chile, the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) might give us answers far quicker than previously thought possible.
With its cutting-edge design and enormous light-collecting power, the ELT is set to become one of the most advanced tools ever built for exploring the cosmos. Scientists have long been interested in finding chemical signs - called biosignatures - that might point to life on other planets.
But detecting these markers usually takes a lot of time and patience. Current methods often require weeks, months, or even years of observation to collect enough data. That could soon change.
According to a new study published on March 11, 2025, by a team from the University of Washington and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, the ELT could identify signs of life in just a few hours. That’s a significant step forward.
The researchers focused on Proxima Centauri b, one of the closest exoplanets to Earth. They found that the ELT could potentially detect gases linked to life, like oxygen, methane, carbon dioxide, and even dimethyl sulfide, after only 10 hours of observation.
“For the most accessible nearby target, Proxima Centauri b, our results suggest that we may be able to rule out a sub-Neptune atmosphere in as little as a single hour of observing, and two biosignature disequilibrium pairs (O₂/CH₄ and CO₂/CH₄) may be accessible in about 10 hours for the most optimistic scenario,” the paper explained.
Detecting life-signaling gases can reveal a planet's habitability in just one hour.
That’s a big deal. These disequilibrium pairs, gases that don’t usually coexist unless something, possibly life, is producing them, are one of the most promising indicators we can look for.
Spotting them so quickly would give astronomers a serious head start in determining whether a planet could be habitable or even inhabited. And it’s not just smaller, rocky planets like Proxima Centauri b that the ELT could observe.
For larger planets, especially ones similar in size to Neptune, the wait time could be even shorter. The study estimates that the telescope might pick up atmospheric details from these bigger planets in as little as one hour. That kind of speed opens up a lot of possibilities for studying multiple targets and refining our understanding of planetary systems.
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Another key advantage of the ELT is its ability to study both transiting and non-transiting exoplanets. A transiting planet is one that passes directly in front of its star from our point of view.
When that happens, the starlight filters through the planet’s atmosphere, and the ELT can analyse the resulting spectrum to figure out what gases are present. It’s a technique that’s been used before, but the ELT’s sensitivity means it could work much faster and with more detail.
But the real game-changer is its ability to study non-transiting planets too, ones that don’t pass in front of their stars. These are harder to examine with traditional tools.
Still, the ELT will be able to detect the faint reflected light from the planet’s surface and use that to analyse its atmosphere and surface composition. That opens up a much wider range of planets to study, not just the lucky ones that happen to line up just right.
All of this means the ELT could soon become our best bet for finding out if we’re alone in the universe - or not. It won’t give us all the answers overnight, but it’ll certainly speed up the search.
And in a field where waiting years for results has been the norm, cutting that down to just a few hours is a welcome change.
Damjan
