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eso exoplanet

Alpha Centauri has been in the news a bit lately, afterwards astronomers discovered a potentially habitable planet in the Goldilocks zone around the organization'due south smallest star, Proxima Centauri. But Proxima Centauri isn't the only hotness in its neighborhood. Now a just-announced collaboration called Project Blue has been founded to launch a lightweight, depression-overhead space telescope, to look at the 2 largest stars in that system, Alpha Centauri A and B. The thought is that the Project Blue telescope would directly epitome any orbiting planets within the stars' habitable zones.

Project Blue has a cast of scientific luminaries including Jon Morse, head of the BoldlyGo institute and sometime head of astrophysics at NASA. Other universities and groups include SETI, Mission Centaur, and UMass at Lowell, with a whole panel of advisers and others doubtless before long to follow.

In contrast to other telescopes similar Hubble and Kepler, small, quick, and inexpensive are the buzzwords for this project. The telescope is supposed to have an 18-inch mirror — for reference, Hubble's over 5 times that, but Hubble is a much more "generalist" instrument. This telescope would but look at Alpha Centauri, so it doesn't need all the capability of the Great Observatory-class telescopes, which is good news for costs. Morse is shooting for a budget of $50 million to become the telescope into orbit, but hoping he can do it for half that.

The privately funded mission also aims to launch the insufficiently pint-sized telescope into orbit before the end of the decade — a glimmer of the heart, when information technology comes to space telescopes and time. While Projection Blue is in its planning stages, the consortium is revving upwardly their funding efforts. If they manage to get successfully funded, they hope to launch the fridge-sized telescope into orbit past 2022.

UMass is involved with Projection Blue considering they've been doing such groundbreaking piece of work on stellar coronography. If directly imaging an exoplanet adjacent to its star is like imaging a firefly adjacent to a lighthouse, so the Projection Blueish telescope needs to very carefully mask out the lighthouse.

Scientists don't know yet whether Alpha Centauri has any planets. But data from Kepler suggests that every star in our galaxy has at least one planet orbiting information technology. We've fifty-fifty found evidence that some binary star pairs take planets. So it stands to reason that Alpha Centauri may take a planet or planets to observe. Hopefully at that place will be 1 with liquid water and an atmosphere. It would bear witness upward as a pale blue dot simply a few pixels across, only similar our own blueish marble next to our ain quivering drib of plasma. But the color of an exoplanet tells us a lot about its limerick and atmosphere. Watching it through time reveals details about the orbital characteristics of the planets the consortium hopes to find.

The stars of the Alpha Centauri system also afford a solid chance to image Goldilocks-zone exoplanets because of their size. Proxima b is in Proxima Centauri's habitable zone, but because Proxima Centauri is a red dwarf, that zone is as well close to cleanly separate Proxima b from the light shed by its parent star. Blastoff Centauri A and B are both significantly larger, and so their habitable zones will be further out — hopefully far enough to allow Project Blue a gamble for successful direct visible-spectrum imaging of exoplanets in the system.