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A new custom-designed space telescope mission called TOLIMAN will search for nearby habitable planets in the closest star system to Earth, Alpha Centauri. ....
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 light from a world in a life-friendly orbit around another star. The planet candidate remains unverified and formally unnamed, little more than a small clump of pixels on a computer screen, a potential signal surfacing from a sea of background noise. If proved genuine, the newly reported find would in most respects not be particularly remarkable: a “warm Neptune” estimated to be five to seven times larger than Earth, the sort of world that galactic census-takers ....
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 terms. So tentative is the sighting that scientists are referring to it only as a “planet candidate”, aware that the bright speck in the darkness of space may be evidence of alien asteroids, streaks of dust, or more prosaically, an unforeseen glitch in their equipment. ....