Astronomers and scientists have made a shortcut in the search for alien life. A giant new space-based telescope was just recently unveiled that is more powerful compared to the modern observatories. The High Definition Space Telescope (HDST) is essentially a supervised Hubble Space Telescope which is 100 times better in detecting faint starlight.

The multibillion-dollar Hubble Space Telescope is set to launch in 2018. According to Hubblesite, the Hubble Space Telescope is set to spend hundreds of hours over the next year running to identify those we should scour for life. The invention of the telescope aims to take advantage of Hubble's successor, the James Webb Space Telescope.

The James Webb Space Telescope can detect the atmospheres of faraway planets for biosignature gasses which suggest that they can host living and breathing organisms. The new Hubble Space Telescope will give way to a discovery every time it detects sodium in the atmosphere of exoplanet HD 209458 b.

According to New Scientists, with the Hubble's ability, astronomers and scientists will not only learn whether a planet's light-years away have an atmosphere but also they would learn what that atmosphere contains.

The $8 billion telescope is expected to last at least five years. If something breaks, it can't be fixed. Hence, it must be kept in a secured place. The telescope's observation of carbon, water, oxygen, carbon dioxide and methane is the atmospheres prove that scientists can hunt down some of the ingredients and byproducts of life in a potentially habitable planet.

Future telescopes like this will employ today's atmosphere with probing techniques to pick up some chemical beacon on a far-off world. These chemicals could only be produced by living organisms which could provide compelling evidence that we are not alone.

Scientists will do some observations to test what the new telescope can do and what is not.

"A training set is probably a good way of looking at it," says Kevin Stevenson at the University of Chicago. Stevenson's team hopes to find the perfect planet for to practice on.