Alpha Centauri Mission Searching For Life, Signals Already Found
A team of researchers out of the University of Sydney will search Alpha Centauri for signs of life in the hope of finding another habitable planet.
The search for extra-terrestrial life has always been an area of fascination for scientists and researchers. With the advancements in technology and space exploration, the search for life beyond our planet has undoubtedly become more feasible. With that said, The University of Sydney took to its official website to announce it has signed an agreement with EduroSat, a European space technology company, for the TOLIMAN mission to determine if the planets in our neighboring star system, Alpha Centauri, are capable of hosting life.
Led by Professor Peter Tuthill and backed by Breakthrough Initiatives in California, the new mission was dubbed TOLIMAN after the old star’s Arabic name. It will search for habitable planets around two Sun-like stars in the system, Alpha Centauri A and B, which are located four light-years from Earth. The ultimate goal of the mission is to determine if these planets have the potential to develop and maintain environments hospitable to life.
Although Tuthill stated the stars are incredibly close to Earth, no compelling evidence has been found for the existence of exoplanets in the Alpha Centauri system, despite repeated astronomical surveys. While astronomers have reported numerous possible signals from the star system, one turned out to be a false positive involving an RV signal attributed to a planet in 2012, and the other, a possible planetary transit in 2013, was determined to be outside the habitable zone of the star system. In 2021, a potentially life-sustaining planet named Candidate 1 (C1) was reportedly detected around Alpha Centauri using direct thermal imaging, but this remains unconfirmed.
With the help of modern satellite technology, Professor Tuthill said he hopes his team can explore the thousands of exoplanets beyond our solar system, even if most of them seem completely out of our reach. While discovering exoplanets is undoubtedly a major technological challenge, Tuthill and his team are developing a compact and customized space telescope that can capture highly precise measurements to achieve the task. Despite its diminutive size of just 12 liters, the telescope needs a satellite to accommodate it while ensuring thermal and mechanical stability through active systems with extreme accuracy.
EnduroSat will provide the necessary hardware and software for the mission to search the Alpha Centauri star system for planets capable of hosting life. The company’s MicroSat technology can downlink payload data at 125+ Mbps. The data collected will be sent back to Earth for analysis by the researchers at the University of Sydney and other institutions involved in the mission.
Professor Tuthill of The University of Sydney, EnduroSat CEO Raycho Raychev, and Dr. S. Pete Worden, Executive Director of Breakthrough Initiatives, have expressed their excitement in partnering with one another in the TOLIMAN mission. Along with understanding Alpha Centauri, the nearest stellar system to our solar system, the team hopes the effort will help pave the way for more low-cost astronomy missions in the future. More importantly, it hopes to bring us closer to determining whether life exists beyond Earth.
