Home » Tired of living on Earth? One mission will search for habitable planets on Alpha Centauri

Tired of living on Earth? One mission will search for habitable planets on Alpha Centauri

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Tired of living on Earth?  One mission will search for habitable planets on Alpha Centauri

Are you tired of living on planet Earth? How about finding a home in the Alpha Centauri system? Seriously, a new mission designed by a team from the University of Sydney will look for habitable planets right in the “nearby” star system. Alpha Centauri is in fact located “only” 4,376 light-years away. Ready to go?

Unfortunately, despite its “proximity”, repeated astronomical surveys have failed to find concrete evidence of the existence of exoplanets capable of hosting life. A detection made particularly difficult by the fact that Alpha Centauri is a binary system, therefore consisting of two stars in orbit around each other, which makes it quite difficult to find planets.

Already in 2019 the Breakthrough Initiatives had announced a new project to find the famous “exoplanets next door”, using a special telescope for the interferometric monitoring of the orbital locus of our astronomical neighborhood, the TOLIMAN (from the ancient Arabic name of the star).

Now, the new mission of the University of Sydney team will use the method of astrometry to find (hopefully) potentially habitable exoplanets in the Alpha Centauri system. By monitoring a star’s apparent position in the sky, one will look for signs of wobble as indicators that gravitational forces (such as the planets themselves) are acting on it.

Recently, the University of Sydney also signed a contract with the EnduroSata leading provider of microsatellites and space services headquartered in Sofia, Bulgaria for the mission support at launch.

The professor. Peter Tuthill, professor of physics at the Sydney Institute for Astronomy (SIfA) and lead scientist of the mission TOLIMANhe said in a statement: Alpha Centauri is incredibly close to home. Astronomers have discovered thousands of exoplanets outside our solar system, but most of them are thousands of light-years away, beyond our reach.”.

“Modern satellite technology will allow us to explore our stellar neighborhood and perhaps lay the foundations for future space missions who will travel the interstellar voids towards the Centauri system”he added.

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This latest project is just one of many supported by the Breakthrough Initiatives, which is already playing a key role in the search for signs of extraterrestrial intelligent life with its advanced project Breakthrough Listen, the largest program ever made (SETI).

On the other hand, the project TOLIMAN also fits perfectly with another initiative of the group, the Breakthrough Starshot, an interstellar mission (still in the proposal stage) that will exploit advances in miniaturization, new cutting-edge materials and an alternative propulsion, to send a nanovehicle right to Alpha Centauri.

By the way, do you know how long it would take us to reach Alpha Centauri? On the other hand, some missions aimed at exploring Alpha Centauri and the galactic neighborhood have been planned for several years now.

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