Rather than taking very high-resolution images of the stars, the 12-centimeter-wide telescope will spread the light from the stars into thousands of pixels, creating an elaborate patterned image within which a sort of photonic fingerprint of each star’s spatial position on the sky can be seen. The telescope will use a technology known as a diffractive pupil to study the stars, a transformative approach that employs “a bit of an optical trick,” Tuthill says. The telescope’s major trait is to make use of the binary nature of Alpha Centauri A and B, which are separated by slightly more than the Uranus–sun distance, to probe the existence of planets in either star’s habitable zone. “The components of this are fairly mature,” says Guyon, who is also chairman of the Breakthrough Watch project within Milner’s Breakthrough Initiatives, which has a goal of finding planets around Alpha Centauri and other nearby stars. Although some aspects of the mission are yet to be ironed out, such as its rocket ride to space and its station in Earth orbit, the technology itself is largely ready to go. Lab testing and simulation work has been underway at the University of Sydney on the technologies for Toliman, Tuthill says, with the team now working on a full-scale prototype. Parts of the telescope are “already under contract” for construction, Tuthill says, while a precursor to the mission to test the technology, called Toliboy, was launched earlier this year on the CUAVA-1 satellite to the International Space Station. Toliman, an ancient Arabic name given to Alpha Centauri but which also stands for the Telescope for Orbital Locus Interferometric Monitoring of our Astronomical Neighborhood, is designed to hunt for planets around Alpha Centauri A and B. Earlier this year, meanwhile, a possible Neptune-sized world may have been found orbiting Alpha Centauri A. Investigations of Proxima Centauri have proved more fruitful, revealing a possibly Earth-sized world dubbed Proxima b, while another planet-Proxima c-has also been hinted at. In 2012 scientists thought they had found a planet orbiting Alpha Centauri B, dubbed Alpha Centauri Bb, but in 2015 other researchers seemingly ruled out the planet’s existence. Many efforts have been made to find Alpha Centauri’s planets, with varying levels of success. “It’s just fantastic to see private foundations accelerating our search to find another Earth.” “This announcement is fantastic,” says Sara Seager from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a planet-hunter unaffiliated with the project. The aim is to finish and launch the telescope into Earth’s orbit by 2023, ready to begin its search from space.
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It will do so in a way no other telescope can yet match. The small shoebox-sized telescope is being designed with a specific goal in mind: look for planets in the Alpha Centauri system, specifically any in its habitable zone, the starlight-warmed region in which liquid water could persist on a rocky world’s surface. Led by Peter Tuthill from the University of Sydney, who with his colleagues first devised the Toliman concept several years ago, the telescope has previously received backing from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, space engineering firm Saber Astronautics in Australia, and the California-based Breakthrough Initiatives, funded by tech billionaire Yuri Milner. This relatively low-cost telescope, called Toliman, has secured funding of more than $500,000 from the Australian government to continue development, the team announced on November 16. “This is something that has never been done before.” “We have this unique opportunity to reveal if there is a ‘habitable zone’ planet in the system,” says Olivier Guyon from the University of Arizona, part of the telescope’s team. Now a group of scientists plans to conduct a search for such worlds like never before, using a privately funded telescope to revolutionize our knowledge of Alpha Centauri.
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Any planets there would be prime targets for further study, but Earth-like worlds potentially harboring life would be the grandest of all.
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At little more than four light-years away, a fraction of a stone’s throw in cosmic distances, these stars are tantalizingly close-right on our celestial doorstep. The scientific payoff for unveiling Alpha Centauri’s planetary retinue could be tremendous. Do any habitable worlds exist in the closest stellar system to our own, Alpha Centauri? For years scientists have struggled to answer this question, unsuccessfully seeking to pierce the overpowering glare of the two sunlike stars, Alpha Centauri A and B, to see signs of orbiting planets (a third member of the system, the red dwarf star Proxima Centauri, is already known to possess at least one companion).