LIVE SCIENCE - NASA's Chandra X-ray space telescope has created a three-dimensional map of stars close to the sun that may help astronomers search for alien planets that could host life.
The map created by Chandra — which just celebrated 25 years in orbit but is facing a troubling budget crunch — could inform scientists which exoplanets to direct future telescopes toward to conduct searches for habitable conditions.
The stars mapped by the telescope are arranged in concentric rings around the sun, at distances between 16.3 light-years and 49 light-years. This is close enough that telescopes could collect wavelengths of light or "spectra" from planets in the habitable zones of these stars. The habitable zone or "Goldilocks zone" is a region around a star that is neither too hot nor too cold to allow liquid water to exist on a world's surface.
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"We don’t know how many planets similar to Earth will be discovered in images with the next generation of telescopes, but we do know that observing time on them will be precious and extremely difficult to obtain," team member and University of California, Riverside researcher Edward Schwieterman concluded. "These X-ray data are helping to refine and prioritize the list of targets and may allow the first image of a planet similar to Earth to be obtained more quickly."