New discovery sets humanity up to image “alien Earth”

For as long as humanity has been looking up at the heavens, we’ve been pondering some of the biggest questions of all. It’s only over the past few hundred years that science has caught up to our vast imaginations, and has begun answering those questions for the first time in our civilization’s history. We know what the stars are: they’re much like our own Sun, except very far away. We know that the majority of them have planets, and that some of those planets are Earth-sized. We know that those worlds are composed of very similar ingredients to our own Solar System’s planets, and that they are governed by the same underlying laws of nature.
But are any of those worlds actually inhabited?
Here, as the end of 2025 approaches, that’s still a great cosmic unknown. We don’t yet know whether we’re alone in the Universe or not, and if not, how common or rare life actually is. While we can send orbiters, landers, and rovers t