CHINA – China has just announced their plans to search for nearby habitable planets in the Milky Way galaxy. In a project called Closeby Habitable Exoplanet Survey (CHES) China is preparing to launch a space telescope with an aperture of 1.2 meters and towards the Lagrange point as far as 1.5 million kilometers.
Lagrange Point is the gravitationally stable position between the Earth and the sun. This was revealed by the Chinese state-run CGTN news site. The Lagrange points revolve around the sun at exactly the same speed as the Earth, which means the plane at any of those points will remain the same distance from planet Earth.
Once at Lagrange L2 (which is also home to NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope), the CHES telescope will spend five years searching for habitable worlds around 100 sun-like stars within 33 light-years (10 parsecs) of Earth.
From this data, astronomers hope to see Earth-sized exoplanets moving around their stars in orbits similar to Earth’s. The hope is that they can find a new earth that can contain water, and maybe even life.
“The discovery of a nearby habitable planet would be a major breakthrough for mankind. Also, it will help humans visit Earth’s twin and expand our living space in the future,” said Ji Jianghui, an astronomer at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Chinese scientists say they hope to find about 50 Earth-like or super-Earth exoplanets in their search.
NASA itself has created an exoplanet catalog containing 5,030 planets. About 3,854 planets from the catalog were discovered by a technique known as the “transit method”. The technique was first used in 1999 to find the planet HD 209458b.
The transit method works by training the telescope’s vision towards the center of the galaxy and observing signs of starlight flickering as the planets pass in front of their parent star.
So far, the technique is being used by NASA’s Kepler space telescope, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Characterizing Exoplanet Satellite (Cheops) to find and study exoplanets.
However, this transit method has its drawbacks. Namely, it takes a long time or slow. Because it has to see many paths of planets orbiting in front of its star before scientists can recognize it.
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