ESO Joins Hands with Breakthrough Initiatives to Upgrade Telescope in Chile to Look for Planets around Alpha Centauri

The European Southern Observatory (ESO) has partnered with Breakthrough Initiative to upgrade its Very Large Telescope (VLT) in northern Chile to better search for planets around the stars of Alpha Centuri, the closest star system to Earth.

The triple-star Alpha Centauri system is located about nearly 4 light-years away from Earth, and scientists think it could be harboring some habitable planets not yet seen from Earth. If such planets exist, then VLT – after getting hardware upgrade – would be able to images them directly.

The Breakthrough Initiatives program was started by Russian venture capitalist Yuri Milner in 2015 to search for life throughout the Universe. The program hopes to send, within a generation, a tiny spacecraft to Alpha Centauri using a giant laser from Earth.

“We came to the conclusion it can be done: interstellar travel,” Milner told The New York Times.

For Breakthrough Initiatives, Alpha Centauri is an interesting star system for finding planets. So far, astronomers have been able to find only planet at Alpha Centauri. This Earth-sized planet—named Proxima b—was discovered last year and was found orbiting around Proxima Centuari—the smallest star within the system.

The VLT’s upgrade will involve tuning up the telescope’s VISIR (VLT Imager and Spectrometer for mid-Infrared) instrument—an imaging tool used to observe celestial objects in the mid-infrared. It is usually difficult to look for planets in the visible light spectrum as the bright light from a star can overpower the dim light of nearby planets. Looking these planets in mid-infrared would help reduce the big gap in brightness between a planet and its host star. Upgrading the VISIR instrument would make it sensitive enough to pick up planets around the two remaining Sun-like stars in the system — Alpha Centauri A and B. A new sensor will be installed in VISIR, along with employing coronagraphy technique, to enable it block out most of the light from a star and better observe any orbiting planet. Coronagraphy technique has been traditionally applied to the sun to observe its outer atmosphere—the corona. The astronomers have only recently started using the technique to try to take pictures of exoplanets. A new coronograph will be developed jointly by the University of Liège (Belgium) and Uppsala University (Sweden).

A new “detector calibration device” will also be installed in the telescope to enable the telescope make more precise observations. According to ESO, the upgradaton of VISIR could take a couple years to complete, and then Breakthrough Initiatives would be allowed to use VLT for observing Alpha Centauri.

“The probability that we’ll find a planet we can see is less than 50 percent. So there’s more of a chance we won’t see anything,” Markus Kasper, an ESO scientist, told The Verge.

“Normally this is something funding agencies don’t [fund], but Breakthrough Initiatives have created the excitement and resources to do these kinds of things.”