Is there anybody out there?

Stuart Jefferies’ first time through the looking glass?

He huddled with a friend at the bottom of Haleakala Crater in Hawaii. Camping. Late 1980s.

“My friend had brought his eight-inch telescope with him,” Jefferies remembers. “We looked at Saturn.”

Since that magical night, the Georgia State University professor of physics and astronomy has been peering through bigger and better telescopes into the mysteries of the universe.

Jefferies' lifetime of stargazing and a study of physics have now led him and Georgia State University into collaboration with a team of star worshippers like few others. Their project is audacious. It has the potential to change — completely — the way humankind views its place in that universe.

“Our Georgia State team is helping to build a new kind of telescope,” Jefferies says. “It will be dedicated to one purpose.

“We’ll be looking for life in the stars.”

THE ELF

The revolutionary and evolutionary telescope is called ExoPlanet Life Finder, or ELF.

Using pioneering technology at a base of operations in the Canary Islands, ELF’s scientists, collaborators and institutional partners plan to zoom in on a historic milestone: humanity’s first scientific contact with potentially habitable worlds beyond our solar system.

The ELF, as designed, will be powerful enough to detect oceans and continents on distant planets, and even forests or the light of alien cities, if those exist. The instrument will also have the means to help scientists identify distinct biological signatures that may indicate life — at least, life as we know it — on exoplanets, those worlds beyond our solar system.

The ELF will be able to study other star systems with planets as distant as 30 million light years. That’s 176,358,761,195,508,231,926 miles from our blue planet.

It’s within reach.

“With funding, and absent potential hitches, ELF could start looking deep into space by 2035,” says Jeff Kuhn, director of the ELF project and an accomplished space scientist with whom Jefferies and the team at GSU collaborate.

“And by 2036 we could be seeing our first signatures of life beyond planet Earth.”

MORE PLANETS THAN STARS

Only a few decades ago, many scientists doubted that planets other than Earth existed in the universe. That changed in 1995 when two Swiss astronomers, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz, discovered 51 Pegasi b, the first planet orbiting a star outside our solar system. For the accomplishment, Mayor and Queloz received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2019.

Since that eureka moment, nearly 6,000 new planets have been identified, and the number rises by the month. Scientists now suspect that the Milky Way, our galaxy, actually has more planets than its (estimated) 400 billion stars.

Out past the Milky Way? The universe could hold as many as 2 trillion more galaxies, each with its own multiple billions of stars — and each, perhaps, with even more planets than stars.

Is it possible, even probable, that among those countless planets some form of life awaits discovery?

SOMETHING NEW UNDER THE SUN

“The ELF truly represents something new under the sun,” Kuhn says.

“Our approach to detecting exolife diverges radically from current efforts by NASA, the European Space Agency and conventional observatories,” Kuhn explains.

“While planetary probes may someday detect nearby microbial life, the ELF is purpose-built to identify biosignatures — and thermal traces of advanced civilizations — on exoplanets orbiting nearby stars.

“It’s unlike any telescope ever invented.”

Kuhn knows. Among other instruments, he contributed to the design of the largest solar telescope in the world — the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope on the island of Maui, Hawaii — and to the powerful Giant Magellan Telescope, currently under construction at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile’s Atacama Desert.

“The ELF won’t be like any existing general-purpose telescope,” Kuhn explains. “Every part of its design is optimized for the direct imaging of planetary surfaces. Global advances in photonics, machine learning and automated optics manufacturing have made this leap possible.

“Now is the time to build the ELF.”

A foundation already has been laid in place.

With seed funding from the European Union, a Spanish research organization called the IAC (Instituto de Astrofisica de Canaria) is collaborating with Georgia State University — which is leveraging funding from a partnership with the Air Force Office of Scientific Research — to support the construction of a prototype of the ELF, at about 1/10th scale.

This working model, called the SELF (short for “Small ELF”), will see first light in 2027.

15 EYES THAT NEVER SLEEP

What makes the SELF/ELF telescopes different?

For starters, it has 15 eyes, not just one.

The SELF prototype, as described by journalist Verónica Pavés in a May 2025 article in El Día, “… will have 15 mirrors of 0.5 meters in diameter, linked together through cables that will function as a hive mind.” That is, it will have a sort of collective intelligence.

Artificial intelligence will instruct the SELF (and later the ELF) to constantly adjust its exquisitely precise mirrors to concentrate light on the telescope’s focal point, always keeping images as sharp as possible. The SELF/ELF will also employ a mechanical structure that has never existed until now — AI-guided cables that adjust their tension to always keep mirrors in perfect position.

“What we’ve been doing is looking at the technology of merging light from separate apertures, like a whole bunch of telescopes you combine,” Kuhn explains.

“Think of the ELF as a collection of off-axis telescopes, carefully arranged, and using photonic technology to constantly correct for atmospheric interference. It will have curved mirrors accurate to 1 millionth of an inch, a precision possible at last with machine learning.

“We’re at a time when a convergence of technologies has made this entirely new kind of telescope possible.”

GEORGIA STATE UNIVERSITY AND THE ELF

Stuart Jefferies first interacted with Kuhn at solar physics conferences in the early 1990s. Jefferies’ career had followed the Sun after early interests in physics.

As he tells it, “My journey into solar physics has been a stroke of fortune, filled with MacGyver moments.”

Born in England, Jefferies earned his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering at the Imperial College of Science and Technology at the University of London. He initially planned to work at a nuclear reactor in Russellville, Ark., but he happened to answer a newspaper ad at Birmingham University in England asking for someone to help set up solar observatories around the world. He had little experience, but he won the job — a “crash course in solar physics,” he says.

Jefferies became a globetrotter in pursuit of knowledge — his work taking him from country to country, and as far as the bottom of the world. He eventually landed in Hawaii as a researcher at the Mees Solar Observatory atop Mt. Haleakala — the same place where he’d first looked through a telescope at Saturn with his friend.

Kuhn was there at the same time.

In Hawaii, each had independently developed similar ideas for the design of a future telescope. Kuhn focused on designing an instrument to detect exo-life, Jefferies on maximizing imaging resolution for satellites in space.

They put their heads — and plans — together in 2019.

“That year,” Jefferies says, “the U.S. Air Force asked for proposals for a newly created branch of the military, the Space Force, which had planned a Space University Research Initiative. Jeff and I decided to join forces for the proposal, with colleagues from the University of Minnesota and Georgia Tech.”

Their project proposal focused on an ELF-type telescope design and its potential advantages to the Department of Defense. During this same time, Kuhn received funding from Spain to build the SELF prototype.

The stars began to align.

“Researchers from our team at Georgia State University started working closely with the team in the Canary Islands at LIOM (Laboratorio de Innovación en Optomecánica), a research arm of the IAC,” Jefferies says.

The IAC is a powerhouse of space exploration and among the world’s most important astrophysics research centers. The first black hole in our galaxy was discovered by IAC telescopes in 2001.

It’s former director, Rafeal Rebolo, enthusiastically promotes SELF/ELF.

“IAC is a public research organization that exists to develop observatories,” Rebolo says. “We have nine member nations and agreements for collaborations with 12 more. We have an institute of 400 people, 200 of them scientists and 100 of them technologists. We have two prominent ground-based observatories in our network and many, many research programs and collaborations.

“But,” he smiles, “there’s only one exoplanet telescope being built in the world, and it’s right here.”

GSU’S GROWING REPUTATION IN SPACE SCIENCES RESEARCH

Jefferies and a colleague, Professor of Physics and Astronomy Fabien Baron, lead a rising star space sciences research program at GSU.

Their Remote Sensing for Space Sciences group conducts research using high-resolution imaging focused on two branches of the field of remote sensing.

One is astronomy, with an emphasis on developing new instrumentation and algorithms to extract details on planets, stars and their environments. The second is space domain awareness, basically the identification and surveillance of satellites in near-Earth orbit.

Jefferies and Baron started Georgia State’s Imaging Hub program under an initative with Next Gen, and it then became a part of the university’s Imaging for Global Solutions Initiative funded through Georgia State’s RISE Project. The Rise Project brought together a powerful consortium of the university’s faculty, post-doctoral researchers and students from the departments of Physics and Astronomy, Chemistry, Mathematics and Statistics, Psychology, Computer Science and Biology all engaged in cutting-edge research in imaging.

The Georgia State team — which includes Jefferies and Baron as well as Senior Research Assistant Dmitry Shcherbik; adjunct faculty Doug Hope; current students Lexi Azoulay, Billy O’Brien, Megan Peatt, Suyash Dhungana and Diego Portero; and assistant researchers Ty Tidrick and Josh Dulle — conducts research in several areas relevant to ELF.

They’re developing novel ways to measure and analyze distortions in a wavefront of light to assess and correct optical aberrations in telescopes and optics systems. They’re also creating new techniques to manipulate light for improving image contrast and advancing methods to push past the theoretical resolution limit for a telescope of a given size and wavelength.

And when the team’s not busy with all that, it’s developing advanced computational imaging techniques to use with telescope architecture like that of the SELF/ELF.

All this represents just one point of light in GSU’s growing constellation of research projects across the university.

“People may not know that Georgia State is such a hub of astronomical advancement, but this field is one of many where we’re proud to deliver not only collaborative science but real-world impact,” says Georgia State’s Vice President for Research and Economic Development Donald Hamelberg. “Or, in this case, impact that could extend well beyond our world."

IS THERE LIFE AFTER EXOLIFE?

What happens once exolife is found and verified?

Would we feel a shock like the one that rattled humanity in the first half of the 17th century when Galileo turned his telescope on the night sky over Italy and charted the moons of Jupiter? Or have we come to think of life outside our universe as simply a sci-fi trope that belongs on the silver screen?

Just as Galileo and his telescope measured and extended the properties of our physical world, a new kind of telescope offers a chance to extend our vision to include the biology of the nearby universe, if it’s out there. For the first time, life outside the Earth might be measurable and made understandable.

“Galileo grabbed the emerging technology of his era, new lenses and optics, to make breakthroughs,” Kuhn says. “Today, the ELF can also take hold of emerging technology — machine learning, additive manufacturing and photonics — to make the revolutionary breakthroughs of our own time.”

And what happens when the ELF makes an exceptional discovery?

“Then we begin the race to contact other life,” says Jefferies, “to learn from it and, perhaps, to teach it as well.”

AUDACIOUS, RIGHT?

The wild notion of building a telescope that’s never been imagined before, an instrument designed to find life on planets that shine in the light of stars beyond our solar system … that’s simply audacious.

Right?

That’s precisely the reason why Stuart Jefferies, Rafael Rebolo and Jeff Kuhn submitted a proposal to The Audacious Project in 2024.

Housed at TED, the entity known for its ground-breaking and revelatory TED Talks, the Audacious Project is a collaborative funding initiative that each year identifies ambitious, high-impact social projects to support and nurture.

For example, in 2024, Audacious funded a program that will create a blueprint to fight classroom hunger in Africa. It backed another initiative that will empower refugee communities by fostering entrepreneurship there. Another Audacious plan aims to protect humanity by monitoring artificial intelligence for dangerous capabilities.

The Audacious Project has given more than $6.5 billion to these and dozens of other big-idea proposals since its founding in 2018, as the organization works to shape positive change in our world.

The ELF telescope proposal shone bright enough as a big idea to make it through an initial round of 2024 Audacious assessments. As of 2025, funding decisions are made on a rolling basis, so, as they wait for good news, Jefferies, Rebolo and Kuhn have a telescope to build.

“The slogan that Harley-Davidson used on packaging for oversized motorcycle pipes back in the day,” Jefferies says, “perfectly describes our thinking with the ELF: Go big or go home.”