Sydney, Nov 17 (TIWN) Australian astronomers and space engineers are seeking to use a space telescope capable of discovering new planets in Earth's "nearest neighbour", Alpha Centauri.

"We want to concentrate our efforts on this one, very special star system - Earth's nearest neighbor - rather than playing the odds with bigger populations of distant stars where lucky breaks can reveal planets to astronomers by other techniques," Tuthill told Xinhua.  Astronomers know that Alpha Centauri consists of three stars, two of which are very much like the Sun, and these present a tantalizing possibility in the ultimate quest to find a planet capable of supporting life.  "These next-door planets are the ones where we have the best prospects for finding and analyzing atmospheres, surface chemistry and possibly even the fingerprints of a biosphere - the tentative signals of life," Tuthill said.  The Telescope for Orbit Locus Interferometric Monitoring of the Astronomical Neighbourhood (TOLIMAN) would use a new technology called a "diffractive pupil" that helps with the exquisitely precise measurements on the captured starlight needed to detect rocky Earth-like planets around the system's "Goldilocks zone".