The European Southern Observatory and the billionaire-backed Breakthrough Watch program say they have achieved first light with a new observing instrument designed to spot super-Earths in Alpha Centauri, the nearest star system to our own.
The NEAR instrument, which takes its name from the acronym for “Near Earths in the AlphaCen Region,” has been installed on an 8-meter (26.2-foot) telescope that’s part of ESO’s Very Large Telescope facility in Chile’s Atacama Desert.
NEAR takes advantage of a thermal-infrared coronagraph to block out most of the light coming from the stars in the Alpha Centauri system, a little more than 4 light-years away – including the sunlike stars Alpha Centauri A and B, plus a red dwarf called Proxima Centauri.
Cutting down on that glare makes it easier for an infrared imaging spectrometer known as VISIR to pick up the warm glow of planets orbiting the stars. The upgraded instrumentation, which took three years to develop, should be capable of detecting worlds down to twice the size of Earth.
