Is there life at Alpha Centauri? New space telescope to seek out habitable planets around sun's neighboring star

[Admin]

A new space mission announced today (Nov. 16) will look for habitable planets in the Alpha Centauri system, our closest stellar neighbors.

Is there life at Alpha Centauri? New space telescope to seek out habitable planets around sun's neighboring star : Read more

 

[rod]

Telescopes that resolve to 1" angular resolution and given Alpha Centauri distance of 1.34 pc, can see a diameter 1.34 au in size at the star's distance from earth. 0.5" angular resolution is 0.67 au size at the star. I am surprised we do not already see a number of exoplanets via direct imaging. Consider examples like 51 Eri b. This site shows 155 imaged exoplanets confirmed now, The Extrasolar Planet Encyclopaedia — Catalog Listing (exoplanet.eu) If our telescope can see 4" angular resolution at Alpha Centauri, we could see a Jupiter type planet moving around the star at some 5.36 au distance from Alpha Centauri.

Consider Alpha Centauri star mass, reported as 1.11 solar masses, using the MMSN we could postulate an early, protoplanetary disk mass of about 3700 earth masses, more than our Sun using the MMSN model. I would think we should already see a number of exoplanets moving around the star then, even if not habitable exoplanets. Finding life at the star postulates abiogenesis as the explanation for the origin of life.

3.695850E+03​

 

[Phillip Huggan]

I'm in too. I'm looking for scientific phenomena in the system, ethane fuel, metal ores, and electricity sources.
A space telescope generates heat. At a point along the spectrum, radar is reached and less waste heat is radiated. The observation wavelength will be when waste heat dips. It will be a convential enough radar telescope but made out of sapphire ceramics most likely. In front of it will be a 10 meter thick wall of metamaterials for 10x better magnification, or 50m thick for 100x better. The SW-Radar or whatever wavelength will be lensed. I'm also needing precision tracking. I will attempt a lesser mission hitting Triton 1st.