Super-Earths Discovered Orbiting Nearby, Sun-Like Star

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."

Comments

Yes, nearby

[elrous0]

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?!?!?

Re:Yes, nearby

[The Archon V2.0]

Not so much a problem for the folks on the spacecraft, relativity can make the journey very manageable for them. They better not think about returning home to see Grandma though...

So space will be colonized by people with dysfunctional families?

Re:Yes, nearby

[beefnog]

What'd probably happen is about five years (as the travelers perceive it) after launch we'll develop faster-than-light travel and interrupt their journey. Or maybe just let them ride it out as a curious time capsule to cruise by and show buttcheek to.

Re:Yes, nearby

[jamesh]

Not so much a problem for the folks on the spacecraft, relativity can make the journey very manageable for them.

I think we're a long way off building a spaceship that can achieve the speeds where that effect would make any difference.

Re:Yes, nearby

[Anonymous Coward]

At .0002c, it would take about 14000 years to get there, but the lucky astronauts would only experience 13999.99972 years. Sign me up!

Re:Yes, nearby

[Penguinshit]

That's no moon...

Re:Yes, nearby

[Gospodin]

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.

Re:Yes, nearby

[CrimsonAvenger]

The problem here is that 1G sustained means your ship will be liveable by humans for those 7 years with no problem. 0.01G is not liveable at all; humans can't survive long-term in microgravity.

And of course it would be impossible to spin the ship, right?

Any ship big enough for a 100 year trip will be more than big enough to spin so that the rim of the ship experiences enough gravity to keep the crew healthy.

Not only that, 100 years is too long; no one will live that long (assuming you launch them when they're 20-25).

I take it you've never heard of the "generation ship" concept?

Humans can't live their entire lives (including their all-important formative years) in a small spacecraft with little social interaction.

And who ever suggested a small spacecraft? If I were designing it, it'd be 20 km long and 5-6 Km in diameter. With a crew of about 100,000.

A generation ship, however, could solve this problem (kids could very conceivably be raised on a giant ship with lakes and forests and a whole functioning mini-society), but as you said, this would require some incredible engineering. Lifting that much material into orbit really needs a space elevator, for starters.

So you DO know about generation ships! Great!

Hint: you don't build a generation ship from Earth. You start with an asteroid, and stock pretty much everything except the lifeforms aboard from other sources than Earth.

Note also that "incredible engineering" really means "expensive". It doesn't necessarily mean "difficult".

And this still doesn't address the gravity problem; those lakes and forests aren't going to work without artificial gravity.

Spin it. If it's six km in diameter, you have to spin it at 0.55 rpm to get 1G on the rim. And note that you have 360 km^2 worth of rim on the ship I described above. With a deck every 100 meters, we're talking a couple hundred thousand hectares at > 0.9G.

Alas, the likelihood of humanity building a generation ship is miniscule.

What passes for government here on Earth can't look far enough ahead. If we KNEW there was an alien species living there, and that they would be willing to give us the secret of FTL if only we sent someone there to collect, we'd still never get one built...

But the only real difficulty with doing so is the drive - the lifesystem, the physical structure, that sort of thing is almost trivial in comparison.

dissapointing

[jocabergs]

High gravity + Close to its star = big fat, sweaty alien women.

  I'll get excited when we find a planet about 93 million miles away from its star, the proper solar light properties for blue skin and near earth gravity. I've always had a thing for blue skinned alien girls.

Re:mmmm

[Daimanta]

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.

Wow, a confirmation

[MillionthMonkey]

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.

Super War

[Anonymous Coward]

I say it is high time we develop a warp ship capable of carrying the combined military might of the entire planet to this system.

We'll move quickly, from one "Super" Earth to the next, conquering indigenous peoples and enslaving them to toil in our mines until the planet is naught but a smoldering husk, a shadow of what used to be.

Then we'll see who is "Super".

Who's with me!?!

Re:mmmm

[TheEmpyrean]

61 Virgins? Can I trade them for 8 slutty broads that know what they're doing?

Re:mmmm

[Kugrian]

/me puts on his robe and wizard hat.

Re:mmmm

[Red Flayer]

Else you could teach the virgins what you like and help them develop their own tastes

FWIW, the two major inputs to their tastes are diet and sanitary practices. I heard vegans taste better.

(Just trying to think outside the box)