Breakthrough Watch News Today

In the decades following the 20th-century space race, it seemed space exploration and the subject as a whole had lost some of its charm. Lack of interest from governments and private investors meant dwindling funds, and the once-bright lure of the cosmos seemed to burn low in the public consciousness. However, in the last few years, the tech investor and science philanthropist Yuri Milner has fanned the flames of the space science sector, reinvigorating the field with a much-needed injection of ...

Breakthrough Listen is one of the projects of the Breakthrough Initiatives and is a leading mainstream scientific initiative for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI).

A new custom-designed space telescope mission called TOLIMAN will search for nearby habitable planets in the closest star system to Earth, Alpha Centauri.

EVAN GOUGH, UNIVERSE TODAY 13 FEBRUARY 2021 Astronomers using a new technique may have not only found a super-Earth at a neighbouring star, but they may also have directly imaged it. And it could be nice and cozy in the habitable zone around Alpha Centauri.   Its much easier to see giant planets than Earth-size planets. No matter which detection method is being used, larger planets are simply a larger needle in the cosmic haystack. But overall, astronomers are very interested in planets that...

Perhaps most intriguingly, the way that the planet was discovered is unprecedented

Planet 5-7 times size of Earth found in the nearest star system? Planet 5-7 times size of Earth found in the nearest star system? Chethan Kumar | TNN | Feb 11, 2021, 22:30 IST Representative image Astronomers from Breakthrough Watch, the global astronomical programme looking for Earth-like planets around nearby stars say there’s an “intriguing possibility” of them having observed a planet roughly five to seven times the size of Earth orbiting within the habitable zone of the nearest sun...

New technology promises authentic images of the exoplanets in our neighbouring star system Alpha Centauri. The dress rehearsal immediately delivered something that makes astronomers dream of a great discovery. We can all observe our solar system’s planets and dwarf planets with telescopes: Even the distant Pluto appears as a blurred sphere on the Hubble space telescope’s images. But can today’s instruments also take pictures of planets orbiting other stars? We now know more than 4000 such...

Scientific American Is It a Planet? Astronomers Spy Promising Potential World around Alpha Centauri The candidate could be a “warm Neptune” or a mirage. Either way, it signals the dawn of a revolution in astronomy Print Alpha Centauri, our nearest neighboring star system, rises above a unit of the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope at the Paranal Observatory in Chile. Credit: Y. Beletsky (LCO)/ESO Advertisement For the first time ever, astronomers may have glimpsed lig...

  Since 1995 when exoplanet explorers from the Geneva Observatory in Switzerland, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz –who were recently awarded half of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery of a planet orbiting a sunlike star named 51 Pegasi– thousands of extrasolar planets have been found, including potentially Earth-like worlds, along with bizarre objects that bear no resemblance to any of the planets in our solar system. Twenty-Six Years Later… Twenty-six years later, it is ...

Astronomers hopes raised by glimpse of possible new planet Ian Sample Science editor Astronomers have glimpsed what may be a previously unknown planet circling one of the closest stars to Earth. Researchers spotted the bright dot near Alpha Centauri A, one of a pair of stars that swing around each other so tightly they appear as one in the southern constellation of Centaurus. The stars form what is called a binary system 4.37 light years away, a mere stone’s throw in cosmic te...