Seeking Alpha Centauri Planets, Researchers Welcome Multiple Efforts

[gwillybj]

Space.com > Science & Astronomy

Seeking Alpha Centauri Planets, Researchers Welcome Multiple Efforts
By Project Blue Team | January 30, 2017 05:56am ET



Alpha Centauri A and B orbit one another 4.3 light-years from Earth. To directly image planets orbiting either of the stars, researchers must cancel out the overwhelming light from both of the stars.
Credit: ESA/NASA

It's always an exciting time to be involved in space exploration, and 2017 has already proved to be no exception. At Project Blue, we're on a mission to find and photograph an Earth-like planet around Alpha Centauri — and as you probably saw in the news recently, we're not the only ones with that ambitious goal. Breakthrough Initiative, a private organization aimed at looking for other life, announced it also wants to search for planets in Earth's neighboring star system, and that group will tap the best telescopic technology in Chile in hopes of doing so.

You might wonder how this affects plans at Project Blue, or why Breakthrough Starshot is using infrared instead of visible-light imaging. The answer is that we have so much to learn about the Alpha Centauri system, which is Earth's closest neighbor in space, and different imaging techniques can reveal different things.

Breakthrough Starshot plans to use ground-based telescopes imaging in thermal infrared (detecting wavelengths of 10 microns). The group will work in collaboration with the European Space Observatory to retrofit and upgrade the Very Large Telescope in Chile. Our own plan at Project Blue is to launch a small telescope the size of a washing machine into low Earth orbit and capture a direct image of Alpha Centauri using visible light. Together, these methods can help paint a more complete picture of a planet that might exist around the star. [New Telescope Aims to Image Planets Around Alpha Centauri (Video)]