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Super-Earths Discovered Orbiting Nearby, Sun-Like Star

Posted by Soulskill on from the i-for-one dept.

likuidkewl writes "Two super-earths, 5 and 7.5 times the size of our home, were found to be orbiting 61 Virginis a mere 28 light years away. 'These detections indicate that low-mass planets are quite common around nearby stars. The discovery of potentially habitable nearby worlds may be just a few years away,' said Steven Vogt, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UCSC. Among hundreds of our nearest stellar neighbors, 61 Vir stands out as being the most nearly similar to the Sun in terms of age, mass, and other essential properties."

4 of 242 comments (clear)

  1. Yes, nearby by elrous0 · · Score: 4, Informative

    Yes, a mere 28 light years away. So all we need to do is get in the fastest spacecraft we've ever built and we can be there in just about 150,000 years.

    Who's coming with me?!?!?

    --
    SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
    1. Re:Yes, nearby by Gospodin · · Score: 4, Informative

      That is an ion engine. My back-of-envelope calculations say that accelerating to .0002c and back to rest requires an Isp of about 5300 if you assume a mass ratio of 10:1. (Which is about as high as you can expect with current technology.) You can do a little better with staging, but not orders-of-magnitude better.

      If you can improve your Isp to, say, 50,000, which is well beyond current technology, then you could accelerate to almost 0.002c. Relativistic effects won't be really evident until well over 0.2c (at that speed it's only a 2% time dilation). We're not close to rockets that can attain such speeds.

      Improving the mass ratio is even less helpful, btw, since that's a logarithmic factor. An Isp of 50,000 with a mass ratio of 100 still only gets you to 0.004c. I suppose it's conceivable that an interstellar ship that needed almost no structure could have an extremely high mass ratio, but you can see how ridiculously high it has to be to matter.

      The only way we're going to send starships at relativistic speeds is to use (i) some form of non-rocket propulsion, like solar sails or those reactionless Casimir-effect thrusters or some other exotic method, (ii) something with a truly enormous Isp. Current ion engine tech tops out at about 30,000 s, and even nuclear pulse tops out at 100,000 s.

      --
      ...following the principles of Heisenburger's Uncertain Cat...
  2. Re:mmmm by Daimanta · · Score: 5, Informative

    How's that? I'm sure that it's possible to find at least 61 virgins on /. In fact, I think you are the right place if you're looking for virgins.

    --
    Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
  3. Wow, a confirmation by MillionthMonkey · · Score: 4, Informative

    Why is everyone surprised that super-earths are orbiting other stars? I've always wondered that.

    Anyway in case anyone hasn't RTFA (or noticed the light-gray on white links at the top of the oklo.com page) you yourself can help them search for nearby earths by downloading the tool at http://oklo.org/downloadable-console/ while you're still unemployed.