China has announced its first plans to search in the stars for nearby habitable planets that could one day expand humanity’s “living space” across the Milky Way.
In the project, called Closeby Habitable Exoplanet Survey (CHES), officials are proposing to launch a 3.9-foot (1.2-meter) space telescope nearly 930,000 miles (1.5 million km) to a gravitationally stable Lagrangian point between Land and the the sun, according to China’s state-run CGTN news service. Lagrange points travel around the sun at exactly the same rate as the Earth, which means that the craft at one of these points will stay the same distance from our planet indefinitely.
Once at the L2 Lagrange point (which is also home to NASA James Webb Space Telescope) The CHES telescope will spend five years searching for habitable worlds across nearly 100 Sun-like stars within 33 light-years (10 parsecs) of Earth. From this data, astronomers hope to determine the size of the Earth outer planets which move around their stars in orbits similar to ours – evidence that this potential “Earth 2.0” might harbor water, and possibly even life.
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“The discovery of nearby habitable worlds will be a great achievement for humanity, and it will also help humans visit Earth’s twins and expand our living space in the future,” said Ji Jiangyi, astronomer at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and principal investigator of the CHES mission, CGTN . saidChina Global Television Network website. Scientists say they hope to find nearly 50 Earth-like exoplanets or exoplanets in their search.
to me NASA’s Catalog of Exoplanets, 3,854 of the 5,030 known exoplanets were discovered using a technique known as the transit method, which was first used in 1999 to discover the planet HD 209458b. The transit method works by training telescope viewers toward the galactic center and observing the flickering of starlight as the planets pass in front of their host star. To date, it has been used by NASA’s Kepler space telescope, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and the European Space Agency’s Cheops Marking Exoplanet Satellite (Cheops) to identify and study exoplanets.
But the transit method can be slow and requires several passes of a planet orbiting in front of its star before scientists can confirm the discovery. In addition, this method can only detect the radius of an exoplanet (not its mass or the shape of its orbit), and requires assisted surveys from ground-based telescopes to ensure that the dimming signals are not caused by other stellar activities, the researchers say.
The newly proposed telescope could detect exoplanets faster and in more detail using a different method called astrometry. In this way, scientists will look for the wobble of stars caused by gravitational tugs from planets orbiting planets. If the star is compared to the six to eight reference stars behind it, the CHES telescope will flag it for further investigation. Then, by studying the specific way the star oscillates, the researchers say they will be able to determine the mass of the exoplanets orbiting it and map their 3D trajectories around it.
However, astrometry has been the cause of multiple controversies among exoplanet hunters. Detecting planets from the minute oscillations of stars requires very precise measurements, and so far only one exoplanet has confirmed reliance on this technique, according to the Planetary Society. One of the most famous false positives produced by this method was the 1963 claim by Swarthmore College astronomer Peter van de Kamp, who announced the discovery of a planet orbiting Barnard’s star. But further examination revealed that his measurements came from a misreading caused by modifications to the telescope’s primary mirror, not by tugging the planets. Simply put, the outer planet of Van de Kamp did not exist.
So far, only preliminary investigations into the feasibility of the proposal have been carried out by teams from various Chinese research institutions, so it is not certain that the project will continue. But we may not have to wait long to test the ability of astrometry to detect distant worlds. The European Space Agency’s GAIA spacecraft, which until now has been precisely mapping the positions of stars, is also expected to use astrometry to find distant exoplanets. Some of those astronomical readings could be in the European Space Agency’s upcoming release of data broadcast from the GAIA spacecraft, which is expected to arrive later this year.
Decisions on funding for the CHES mission are expected in June, and if selected, the team will work to build the new telescope for the 2026 launch. The proposal runs counter to another exoplanet project called Earth 2.0 in which a group of seven satellites will be launched for transit to the L2 Lagrange point. .
China takes a look at other planets during a period of increased ambition in its scientific study of space. China has landed rover vehicles on the Moon and Mars, and also plans to complete its first space station by the end of this year and have a functioning lunar base by 2029. The Chinese Space Agency has also launched a dark matter probe, an X-ray telescope to study neutron stars, black holes and a communications moon. Quantum. China is also set to break its own world record for space launches this year, having set 60 launches in 2022, five times more than it completed in 2021, Live Science previously reported.
Originally published on Live Science.