Alpha Centauri Planet Search

Breakthrough Watch and the European Southern Observatory (ESO), announced “first light” on a newly-built planet-finding instrument at ESO’s Very Large Telescope in the Atacama desert, Chile. The instrument, called NEAR (Near Earths in the AlphaCen Region), is designed to hunt for exoplanets in our neighboring star system, Alpha Centauri, within the “habitable zones” of its two sun-like stars, where water could potentially exist in liquid form.

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