Hunt For Exoplanets: Breakthrough Initiatives Signs Agreement To Boost ESO Telescope's Planet-Hunting Capability

Breakthrough Starshot — the $100 million Stephen Hawking-backed initiative that aims to send a cluster of microchip-sized spacecraft to the Alpha Centauri — announced Monday that it had struck a deal with the European Southern Observatory. Under the agreement, Breakthrough Initiatives, which was founded in 2015 by Russian entrepreneur Yuri Milner, will fund the development of an instrument that would allow the ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) to become much better at hunting for planets around Earth's nearest star system.

In exchange, the ESO will provide the required capabilities and time needed to look for planets in the stellar system.

"The 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," the ESO and Breakthrough Initiatives said in a joint statement. "The agreement also provides for telescope time to allow a careful search programme to be conducted in 2019."

The Alpha Centauri system, located roughly 4.3 light-years from Earth, consists of three stars — Alpha Centauri A, B, and Proxima Centauri. Of these, the third one — a red dwarf — is of special interest, as it's believed to have an Earth-like planet, named Proxima b, locked in orbit around it.

For the Breakthrough Iniative's Starshot program, which has an audacious aim of sending tiny robotic probes to not only visit, but also to return from a trip to the Alpha Centauri system within a generation, knowing the location of any potential exoplanets in the system is crucial.

"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. ... 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," ESO and Breakthrough Initiatives said in the statement. "The existing mid-infrared instrument VISIR on the VLT will provide such performance if it were enhanced to greatly improve the image quality using adaptive optics, and adapted to employ a technique called coronagraphy to reduce the stellar light and thereby reveal the possible signal of potential terrestrial planets."