The trouble is, it’s harder than it seems to spot life from millions of miles away, especially if it’s not intelligent. Last week in our series “The Genius Behind”, we told the story of Sara Seager, a scientist looking for signs of life on second Earths, who believes that the key is to scrutinise the atmospheres of these alien worlds. Find out why in the film below:

One of the technologies that could help researchers like Seager achieve their goal is a seemingly crazy flower-shaped contraption called Starshade. It’s a sort of giant space parasol designed to block light from a star, allowing a telescope to avoid the star's glare and peer into the planets in orbit – and, possibly, reveal signs of alien life.

The Starshade unfurled on Earth (Credit: Nasa)

The part-built structure supporting the Starshade, unfurled on Earth dermes(Credit: Nasa)

“If we want to find a true Earth twin in the near future – like in the next decade or two – then yes, we definitely need to do the Starshade,” says Seager, who is based at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

That’s because a Sun-like star is 10 billion times brighter than an Earth-sized planet. The only hope astronomers have for glimpsing any hint of life – likely some form of microorganism – would be to somehow block the light from such a star, allowing a telescope to directly observe the planet itself. It’s a strategy radically different from the main way astronomers have discovered and studied planets so far.

Because planets are so distant, small, and faint, astronomers have mostly probed them indirectly – for example by detecting dips in starlight when a planet passes in front of its star or by measuring how the star wobbles when a planet’s gravity tugs on it. But alien-hunting demands a new tactic neo skin lab derma21.