Georgia State lab works on telescope to search for extraterrestrial life

Lenses in the Georgia State University lab where a team is working on a telescope to search for life on planets orbiting other stars.

(Matthew Pearson/WABE)

In a windowless couple of rooms in the basement of a building on Georgia State University’s Downtown Atlanta campus, students, professors and researchers navigate between tables piled with computers, mirrors, lenses and lasers.

They’re building pieces of a telescope. If the telescope they’re designing now works, they plan to build an even bigger one. That larger one, the ExoLife Finder, or ELF, will be used to search for signs of life on planets outside our solar system.

“This is like a holy grail problem,” Professor Stuart Jefferies said.