A Telescope That Could Fit On A Coffee Table May Be the Key To Finding 'Earth-Proxima'

The hunt for exoplanets has been a popular sub-field of astronomy for decades. Experts have used several ground observatories as well as space telescopes like NASA's planet-hunting Kepler mission to search for different worlds among a variety of stars. However, the question many people want an answer to is: Among the billions of potentially habitable, Earth-like planets in the Milky Way, how fae is "Earth Proxima"?

Two scientists at NASA Ames Research Center, Ruslan Belikov and Eduardo Bendek, believe that the twin sun-like stars, Alpha Centauri A and B, which is about 4.4 light-years away are the perfect places to start exploring. They think that maybe one in two sun-like stars may be capable of accommodating a rocky planet. The star is described to have a not-too-hot, not-too-cold "habitable zone" where water is present leading experts to conclude that life could exist.

If the odds hold true not only for one, but also for both members of the binary star system, it could mean there is about 75 percent chance that the Alpha Centauri may have a potentially habitable planet.

According to scientificamerican.com, Belikov and Bendek's belief may literally be out of this world. There has not been a single person that knows the actual number of habitable planets in the Milky Way, or even what it actually means to say "habitability." Some researchers think that there isn't enough room for planets to form around binary stars which means that there are probably less chance for other worlds to form around Alpha Centauri than what was estimated.

Since Alpha Centauri is Earth's closest neighbor, it would be much easier to find signs of habitability and life compared to other across the universe.

As experts put it, a major step in the study would be "direct imaging." This could show features which are inaccessible that may be give useful information about a world's surface or atmosphere. Direct imaging another Earth would be billions of times dimmer and can only be seen using a telescope priced at billions of dollars which will require decades before it can be completely built.

But since Alpha Centauri is close to Earth, Belikov and Bendek say the feat could be accomplished using a space telescope so small as to fit on a coffee table, built for a cost so modest that it could conceivably be launched before the end of the decade. "This idea presents a paradigm shift from the conventional way of doing astrophysics missions," Belikov says.

The pair came up with a proposal to NASA in 2014 for a mission to Alpha Centauri, but the agency passed over the speculative, narrowly focused project. Now, a nonprofit organization called Mission Centaur is seeking to give those projects a more proper planetary destination, by making Belikov's and Bendek's Centauri-centric telescope a reality by funding them privately.

The organization is the star of a new short documentary co-produced and directed by Brett Marty and Joshua Izenberg of Speculative Films. The film includes interviews with Belikov, Bendek and astrobiological luminaries like Bill Borucki and Jack Lissauer of NASA's Kepler mission and Bill Diamond of the SETI Institute.

"We wanted to make Alpha Centauri a very tangible thing to the viewer, to show it in the night sky and make this quest feel real," Marty says. "If you live in the Southern Hemisphere, Alpha Centauri is one of the brightest and most recognizable stars in the sky. But if you live in the Northern Hemisphere, you never see it."

Marty and Izenberg also spent weeks in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile capturing time lapses of the star system and looming over the European Southern Observatory's most powerful planet-hunting telescopes to capture planets around Alpha Centauri.

"When we find Earth Proxima-the first truly Earth-like planet with water and an atmosphere-I think it will be like an earthquake for humanity," Marty says. "This has the potential to radically alter the way that we, as both a civilization and as individuals, view ourselves in the universe.... If the first human sets foot on a planet in a nearby star system in 200 years, that story will have started with us. I think that's pretty powerful."