Getting to know the neighbours: Earth analogues in Alpha Centauri with the TOLIMAN space telescope

Le résumé fourni par la source

The TOLIMAN mission will fly a low-cost space telescope designed and led from the University of Sydney. Its primary science targets an audacious outcome in planetary astrophysics: an exhaustive search for temperateorbit rocky planets around either star in the Alpha Centauri AB binary, our nearest neighbour star system. By performing narrow-angle astrometric monitoring of the binary at extreme precision, any exoplanets betray their presence by gravitationally, engraving a tell-tale perturbation on the orbit. Recovery of this challenging signal, only of order micro-arcseconds of deflection, is normally thought to require a large (meter-class) instrument. By implementing significant innovations optical and signal encoding architecture, the TOLIMAN space telescope aims to recover such signals with a telescope aperture of only a 12.5cm. Here we describe the key features of the mission: its optics, signal encoding and the 16U CubeSat spacecraft bus in which the science payload is housed - all of which are now under construction. With science operations forecast on a timescale of a year, TOLIMAN aims to determine if the Sun’s nearest neighbour hosts a potential planetary stepping stone into the galaxy. Success would lay down a visionary challenge for futuristic high speed probe technologies capable of traversing the interstellar voids.

Ce résumé expose les affirmations des auteurs. BNTIC ne l’interprète pas comme une validation indépendante des résultats.