The ELT's Spectrograph Could Sniff Out Biosignatures on Other Worlds
Before any major telescope commissioning, there are dozens of papers that attempt to define what we can expect from it. Were starting to see some come through for the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), which hopefully will get a more imaginative name when the 39m behemoth is officially commissioned in Chile in the 2030s. A new paper from Evann Kurzawa-Ferrandez and his co-authors at NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and available in pre-print on arXiv, showcases what kind of biologically relevant gases we can find on some of our nearest exoplanets.