Hubble rounds up the first worlds we’ll check for alien life

By Joshua Sokol:

The search for alien life is taking a shortcut. The Hubble Space Telescope is set to spend hundreds of hours over the next year running reconnaissance on a shortlist of worlds to identify those we should scour for life first.
This latest effort aims to take advantage of Hubble’s successor, the James Webb Space Telescope. Set to launch in 2018, JWST will have unprecedented power to detect the atmospheres of faraway planets for biosignature gases that would suggest they host living, breathing organisms.

But competition for JWST time will be fierce. And there may not be time for much of a learning curve. The $8 billion telescope is supposed to last at least five years, but if something breaks, it can’t be fixed. That’s why it’s important that Hubble narrows the field for JWST now.

This list is just the beginning. According to exoplanet astronomers, another world that would be amenable to this sort of study has been discovered, although not announced yet. And a major influx of new targets is expected to come when the TESS mission launches, also in 2018.

Here’s an early look at Hubble’s itinerary.

The training wheels
Some of JWST’s first observations will probably include a well-behaved planet to establish what the new telescope can and can’t do.

“A training set is probably a good way of looking at it,” says Kevin Stevenson at the University of Chicago. Using Hubble, Stevenson’s team hopes to find the perfect planet for to practise on.

This won’t be a place to look for life – they are picking between 12 hot Jupiters, gas giants very close to their stars. But these planets pose the same problems as life-hunters face on temperate rocky worlds, such as how to identify specific molecules that might hint at habitation and what to do if the planet is too cloudy.

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