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A new telescope costing up to £40 million will be built to photograph planets similar to Earth in another solar system to see if they have alien life, it has been reported.
Scientists are reportedly hoping to take the first photo of a planet in the ‘habitable zone’ – the area around a star where life is able to exist.
The plan, run by a former NASA director, is said to focus on the nearby solar system, Alpha Centauri,which is 4.22 light years away from Earth.
It would take a century to get to the system if traveling at 13,411 kilometers per second but the telescope would photograph the planet despite being only the size of a small washing machine and including a mirror 50cm wide, RT reports.
The telescope, costing between $20m (£16.5m) and $50m (£41m), would use a coronagraph to block out light from more distant stars and capture clear photographs of planets, the website said.
The Project Blue private initiative is being led by the non-profit scientific organization BoldlyGo Institute run by a former NASA director of astrophysics.
BoldlyGo Institute chief executive John Morse told the website the telescope was the “holy grail of exoplanet” research.
He added that Alpha Centauri would be the focus because it was close to the Earth and there was a better chance of photographing a habitable planet.
“The fact that you do have two stars (at Alpha Centauri), it’s like two coin flips,” Morse reportedly told Popular Science.
“There’s four possible outcomes and only one of them is nothing, so we’re hoping that at least one of the stars will have terrestrial planets around it, and possibly both, which would be an amazing discovery.”
The telescope would be built by 2020.
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