Lola Gayle, STEAM Register
The European Southern Observatory (ESO) has signed an agreement with Breakthrough Initiatives to help in the search for planets in the nearby star system Alpha Centauri. These planets could eventually be targets for future miniature space probes to be launched by the Breakthrough Starshot initiative.
Billionaire Yuri Milner and famed theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking — who recently celebrated his 75th birthday — announced the $100 million initiative in April 2016. The ultimate goal is to send tiny spacecraft, which could be as small as a computer chip, to the Alpha Centauri system located 25 trillion miles from Earth.
According to an official statement, ESO’s Director General, Tim de Zeeuw, signed the agreement with the Breakthrough Initiatives, represented by Pete Worden, Chairman of the Breakthrough Prize Foundation and Executive Director of the Breakthrough Initiatives.
“This agreement provides funds for the VISIR (VLT Imager and Spectrometer for mid-Infrared) instrument, mounted at ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) to be modified in order to greatly enhance its ability to search for potentially habitable planets around Alpha Centauri, the closest stellar system to the Earth. The agreement also provides for telescope time to allow a careful search program to be conducted in 2019.”
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Adding even further impetus to this search is the discovery of a planet orbiting in the habitable zone around the red dwarf star Proxima Centauri, which is located about four light-years from the Solar System. The planet, dubbed Proxima b for short, could be one of the first planets outside our solar system where humans could go searching for life.
“It’s the closest star, it has a potentially habitable world — I just think it’s amazing,” said Cornell astrophysicist Lisa Kaltenegger, director of Carl Sagan Institute, who was not involved in the study. “This is just such a great exciting time to live in, because we’ll figure out how we fit into all of this — and hopefully, also, if we’re alone in the universe.”
This artist’s impression shows a view of the surface of the planet Proxima b orbiting the red dwarf star Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the Solar System. Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser.
In October 2016, an international team of researchers announced that Proxima b could very well be an “ocean planet.” Specifically, they found that the planet is rocky and similar in mass to Earth — about 1.3 times that of our home planet. What’s more, its orbit — at a distance of 0.05 astronomical units (one tenth of the sun-Mercury distance) — could potentially allow it to have liquid water on its surface, thus raising the question of its habitability.
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Starshot is only one of the main goals of the Breakthrough Initiatives program. Breakthrough Listen, which was announced by Hawking and Milner in 2015, will involve a survey of the 1,000,000 closest stars to Earth. It will also involve scanning the center of our galaxy and the entire galactic plane. And beyond the Milky Way, it will listen for messages from the 100 closest galaxies.
According to a statement on the Initiative’s website: “The program will generate vast amounts of data. All data will be open to the public. This will likely constitute the largest amount of scientific data ever made available to the public. The Breakthrough Listen team will use and develop the most powerful software for sifting and searching this flood of data. All software will be open source. Both the software and the hardware used in the Breakthrough Listen project will be compatible with other telescopes around the world, so that they could join the search for intelligent life. As well as using the Breakthrough Listen software, scientists and members of the public will be able to add to it, developing their own applications to analyze the data.”
Breakthrough Message has also been set up to “encourage debate about how and what to communicate with possible intelligent beings beyond earth.” This part of the program will take the form of an international competition to create messages that could be read by an advanced civilization. The pool of prizes for the best messages totals $1,000,000 and the competition is open to everyone.
While this initiative is not a commitment to send messages, organizers say it is a good way to “learn about the potential languages of interstellar communication and to spur global discussion on the ethical and philosophical issues surrounding communication with intelligent life beyond Earth.”
To learn more about modifications and methods to be used by VLT scientists, visit the ESO website.
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