Chile's Very Large Telescope. (Image courtesy of ESO.)
Whether it’s the SETI sponsored, kickstarted Project Blue, or the idea of speeding nano-vessels across our vast interstellar distance in only a generation, the desire to discover more about the worlds surrounding our nearest star has never burned brighter.
In an effort to support this interest, The European Space Organization (ESO) tapped into funding provided by the Breakthrough Initiatives to bolster the hardware on Chile’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) so that it might peer more deeply and with greater clarity into the Alpha Centauri system.
According to the ESO, “Detecting a habitable planet is an enormous challenge due to the brightness of the planetary system’s host star, which tends to overwhelm the relatively dim planets. One way to make this easier is to observe in the mid-infrared wavelength range, where the thermal glow from an orbiting planet greatly reduces the brightness gap between it and its host star.”
The ESO continues, “But even in the mid-infrared, the star remains millions of times brighter than the planets to be detected, which calls for a dedicated technique to reduce the blinding stellar light.”
With the funds provided by The Breakthrough Initiative, the ESO’s engineers will design enhanced adaptive optics systems that employ an observational technique called coronography to reduce the in-rushing waves of extraneous interstellar light.
Researchers working on the VLT upgrade expect that the telescopes new coronograph will be completed, installed and ready to make careful observations of Alpha Centauri by 2019.