Habitable Worlds Observatory — a NASA space telescope whose launch is only planned in the future. However, scientists already believe that it will help them confirm or refute a number of theories regarding its origin.
Mystery of life
The possible discovery of life beyond the Solar System could be one of the greatest scientific sensations of recent decades. However, an even more spectacular scientific achievement would be to answer the question of the origin of life in the first place. And it is quite possible that we will have an answer to this question in the near future.
At least that is what representatives of the University of Arizona claim, who propose using the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) orbital telescope, which NASA plans to launch in the future to test numerous hypotheses about the origin of life, to find the answer to this question.
It is worth noting that HWO will not be fundamentally new. It will be another powerful telescope equipped with a spectrograph and launched beyond the Earth’s atmosphere. It will primarily search for biomarkers — special substances associated with biological processes — but will see the entire chemical composition of the alien planet as a whole.
Testing theories
It is precisely the ability to find life not on one planet, but on many at once, and to assess the conditions on them simultaneously, that instills scientists with optimism about finding answers to global questions. There are many theories about the origin of life, and most of them revolve around the question of whether special conditions are necessary for it.
For example, there is a theory that life inevitably arises where there is an aquatic environment and alkaline geothermal springs within it. Another hypothesis insists on ultraviolet radiation as a necessary condition for its development.
And in this case, HWO’s ability to see the physical and chemical conditions on the planet as a whole comes in handy. If it can gather a large enough sample of planets with biomarkers, this will help the scientist compare this fact with other conditions and understand which ones are actually important and which ones are not.
According to phys.org
