Alien Life Could Be Found By Simply Changing The Shape Of Telescopes

Since Galileo perfected the telescope and used it to look at the stars, we have made a giant leap forward in terms of technology. Materials, sizes, locations, and configurations have changed, but ultimately, a telescope has a mostly circular setup where mirrors and lenses magnify and direct light on detectors. A new paper argues that this setup might not actually be optimal for finding exoplanets that might host life. And they have a better solution: an extremely rectangular telescope. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.

Advanced telescopes are engineering marvels. Think of Hubble, JWST, the Very Large Telescope, or the shiny new one, the Vera Rubin Observatory . Magnificent instruments. Still, every human invention has i