Alpha Centauri, the hunt for planets.

Twice the size of Earth or bigger would suggest that any planets found might be mini-Neptunes rather than terrestrial planets. (At least, I'd guess mini-Neptune until proven otherwise...)

I look forward to the first results of the ESPRESSO instrument. If one or more Earth-sized planets exist in this system, it should be able to detect them ...

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2016AGUFM.P13C..06M

A very similar project, American side :

The TIKI instrument is a next generation 10-micron cryogenic extreme adaptive optics (ExAO) imager being designed for the Gemini South telescope. Its goal is to detect the thermal emission of Earth-like planets in orbit around Alpha Centauri A or B.

Article from Scientific American :

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-hunt-is-on-for-alpha-centauris-planets/

The Hunt Is On for Alpha Centauri’s Planets
Astronomers could soon learn whether or not the nearest neighboring star system harbors habitable worlds

Led_Zep wrote:

Led_Zep wrote:

http://eso.org/public/blog/shooting-for-the-stars/

ESO recently joined the search for habitable worlds around other stars in collaboration with the Breakthrough Initiatives, a large-scale science programme to search for extraterrestrial intelligence. We chatted to Markus Kasper, ESO exoplanet expert, to learn more.

 

https://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1911/

Newly-built planet-finding instrument installed on Very Large Telescope, Chile, begins 100-hour observation of nearby stars Alpha Centauri A and B, aiming to be first to directly image a habitable exoplanet

Breakthrough Watch, the global astronomical program looking for Earth-like planets around nearby stars, and the European Southern Observatory (ESO), Europe’s foremost intergovernmental astronomical organisation, today 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 neighbouring star system, Alpha Centauri, within the “habitable zones” of its two Sun-like stars, where water could potentially exist in liquid form.
(...)
Since 23 May ESO’s astronomers at ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) have been conducting  a ten-day observing run to establish the presence or absence of one or more planets in the star system. Observations will conclude tomorrow, 11 June. Planets in the system (twice the size of Earth or bigger), would be detectable with the upgraded instrumentation. The near- to thermal-infrared range is significant as it corresponds to the heat emitted by a candidate planet, and so enables astronomers to determine whether the planet’s temperature allows liquid water.

Results (page 5)

https://www.eso.org/public/archives/messengers/pdfsm/messenger_0178.pdf

No planets like Neptune or greater... good news for rocky planets in HZ ?

A possible planet has been imaged, though it may also be an exozodiacal disk.

Imaging low-mass planets within the habitable zone of α Centauri
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-21176-6

The paper is open-access.

Update on the possible directly imaged planet candidate at Alpha Cen A. Not confirmation, but an independent analysis of the data also detects it.

Efficiently combining Alpha CenA multi-epoch high-contrast imaging data. Application of K-Stacker to the 80 hrs NEAR campaign
https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.02137

There's a program with JWST+MIRI coming soon, may be a planet will be confirmed ?

https://www.stsci.edu/jwst/phase2-public/1618.pdf