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Astronomers To Announce Discovery of a Nearby 'Earth-Like' Planet (seeker.com)
astroengine quotes a report from Seeker:
Scientists are preparing to unveil a new planet in our galactic neighborhood which is "believed to be Earth-like" and orbits its star at a distance that could favor life, German weekly Der Spiegel reported Friday. The exoplanet orbits a well-investigated star called Proxima Centauri, part of the Alpha Centauri star system, the magazine said, quoting anonymous sources.
"The still nameless planet is believed to be Earth-like and orbits at a distance to Proxima Centauri that could allow it to have liquid water on its surface -- an important requirement for the emergence of life," said the magazine.
It's orbiting our sun's nearest neighboring star -- just 4.25 light years away -- meaning it could someday be considered for the world's first interstellar mission.
"The still nameless planet is believed to be Earth-like and orbits at a distance to Proxima Centauri that could allow it to have liquid water on its surface -- an important requirement for the emergence of life," said the magazine.
It's orbiting our sun's nearest neighboring star -- just 4.25 light years away -- meaning it could someday be considered for the world's first interstellar mission.
Also it's insane to think that humans could ever fly like birds in the sky, that the horseless buggy could ever outpace a solid 8-steed-wagon, or that the demons causing polio will ever be driven out by the power of Christ.
You fucking moron.
Minimally we need to start seriously looking at a robotic probe.What is the time line for something that does a flyby? Can we get a probe up to 10%c or are we looking at even 1%c as too hard? 50 years is pretty cool. 500 or more years would be taking the risk that two things happen, one civilization falls enough that we forget we sent it. Or that in the next 500 years we easily build way faster probes.
Also with 50 years and we find something worth visiting, and now can think about sending people. 500 and we are back to science fiction.
Minimally, this justifies building one huge honking telescope to get a good look at this planet.
Physics disagrees.
http://www.space.com/32546-interstellar-spaceflight-stephen-hawking-project-starshot.html
Minimally, this justifies building one huge honking telescope to get a good look at this planet.
Didn't you read the article? They were able to take a pretty detailed picture already.
#DeleteChrome
Making an anti-matter powered rocket is doable with current technology
Uhm, no. That would require:
- an antimatter rocket engine
- antimatter containment
- antimatter
None of those is "current technology". We can create beams of antimatter (particles, not even atoms), but with terrible efficiency.
Of these, we can only trap a few dozens at a time, and not for very long. Once they escape containment, they disappear in a "puff" of gamma rays.
If we could contain more antimatter, it would probably be used to build more powerful bombs first, so I'm kinda hoping it won't be in the near future.
Making an antimatter rocket is "do-able" for some value of do-able, but making the antimatter is whole 'nother issue. According to Wikipedia, estimates put the cost of a gram of antimatter somewhere between $25 billion (2006) and $62 trillion (1999). Given the 2014 gross world product was about $78 trillion, the puts the price somewhere between "a lot" and "all of the money".
If we started now, I guess we could build a two-copy redundant probe set in 20-50 years that would take 400-4000 years to get to Proxima using either ion propulsion or nuclear pulse propulsion (Orion type) (assume max roughly 1% light speed). The probe set would cost $10-1,000 billion depending on how you amortize costs, R&D and NRE, launch facilities, and fuel. The US, EU, and China have GDPs of roughly $17, $17, and $11 trillion, respectively, so that's the scale you'd be working against.
Take a tidally locked planet around a flare star. Let the sunny side be too hot for life, so that the dark side is just the right temperature for life. The dark side is also well-protected from radiation by the mass of the planet, isn't it? As long as the atmosphere isn't blown off, which it wouldn't be according to theory, what would be the difficulty for life? Obviously photosynthesis wouldn't develop, but we have plenty of life on Earth that doesn't require that, and the abundance of photosynthesis on Earth may simply be an adaptation to the abundance of sunlight we have rather than a necessary path for life.
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I like the "to announce" part. Like, if they haven't announced it, why are you reporting on it? Maybe there's a reason they haven't actually announced it yet! Perhaps the data is tentative and admits of another explanation, which, on further review, will prove to be true. Perhaps it's simply one guy's wild-ass guess based on incomplete data.
Maybe, just maybe, there's a reason he's not making any comment? Like, they want to avoid making false statements in public and embarrassing themselves? Quite unlike certain (most?) Internet "news" sites which are perfectly happy both to make false statements and to embarrass themselves? "Who cares? Just give us those clicks!"
Anyway, this is pretty cool if confirmed, but at this point, I'm treating it with all the seriousness it deserves, which is approximately zero.
Nope, anti-matter is not just a theory. It has been confirmed to exist in the first half of the last century: https://home.cern/topics/antim...
Antimatter can be used as very efficient rocket fuel, so you would have to carry less weight.
The problem however is how to do efficient production of antimatter.
Also, you would still have to carry some kind of propellant with you.
I am so relieved that all those colonization spaceships I've sent to Alpha Centauri, over many years of playing Civilization, will have somewhere to land!
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
Seems to me I once read that early last century someone said words to the effect of "what's the point of airplanes? Not like they'll ever be able to fly nonstop across the Pacific or anything".
Oddly, your comment reminded me of that....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
No, what AC was pointing out was that a mere 100 years ago, people made sweeping statements like "no one in our lifetime will ever fly". We were flying in commercial jet airliners less than 30 years later, and landing on the moon another 20 after that. The pace of advancement in the last 100 years has been enormous, and shows no real signs of slowing down. The idea that there's 0 chance that any of us will see an interplanetary or interstellar mission is crazy.
"With an evironment like that, we can rule out higher life forms."
Centaurians called.
They wanted to know how can we sustain higher life forms on Earth - since we have neither the cyclic megahurricans that are essential to recharge cyclic biotanks, nor we have a proper dark side of the planet where we can comfortably hatch our silicon eggs.
To be frank, they sounded rather narrow minded about any real possibility of life without those things.
"Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong." (Oscar Wilde)
"No, what AC was pointing out was that a mere 100 years ago, people made sweeping statements like "no one in our lifetime will ever fly". We were flying in commercial jet airliners less than 30 years later, and landing on the moon another 20 after that."
What?
100 years ago was 1916. Man first flew in a ballon in 1783.
Gliders? Otto Lilienthal was well know in the 1890s
Airplanes The Wright Brothers first flew was Dec 17, 1903. By 1916 hundreds of different aircraft had already flown including some pretty large aircraft.
"We were flying in commercial jet airliners less than 30 years later,"
The first jet commercial airliner the Comet did not enter service until 1952 which is well over 30 years later.
"The idea that there's 0 chance that any of us will see an interplanetary or interstellar mission is crazy."
I think you are right about interplanetary flight. I hope that we will see that in a life time. Manned Interstellar fight is where you are very much off. The difference in scale between going to Mars vs going to a star system is HUGE. Maybe we will see some supper shocking tech like an unexpected breakthrough in FTL flight.
But the odds are massively in favor of none of us today living to see a manned interstellar mission. Un manned we may live to see one launched but I doubt that we will see it arrive.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
That would require Intrepid-class starships for the really useful and good holodecks, so that's quite some time into the future.
Actually, holodecks in Intrepid-class starships are notoriously unreliable and liable to tricky failure modes like "the safeguards have somehow been shut off" and "everyone in the simulation is now alive and they all want to kill me".
Enigma
If only the solar sail spacecraft had some means of propulsion that could help it slow down at it's destination.
That's a pretty intense rate of deflation. At that rate we'll all be walking around with antimatter keychains next year.
In fact, their armored trading fleet is being readied right now...to back up negotiations for that bit of prime real estate closest to Sol.
Perhaps we could trade Mercury for one of their worthless water worlds. As the Centaurians like to say, "If you like mucking about in the slime, we will view you, but we will not see you". (It loses something in the translation)
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
In cosmic terms, I think "nearby" is fair. However, I always snicker a bit when planets get described as "earthlike" just because of their mass and distance from their star. We have counterexamples right in our own system. A distant astronomer using the same logic, upon discovering Venus would have declared its surface "Earthlike" and start going on about how it probably has oceans perfect for discovering life.
A body being "earthlike" requires a lot more than a similar mass and proper solar distance. Heck, do we even know that it's rocky? Proxima Centauri is a red dwarf - would it actually have blown away most of the volatiles during its formation like our sun did? Or by contrast maybe it's volatile-devoid. Earth was whalloped with volatile-containing rock during the Late Heavy Bombardment thanks to Jupiter. Does Proxima Centauri contain a Jupiter? Probably not. Also: my understanding of the habitable zone of red dwarfs is that they leave their surfaces too irradiated for LAWKI. Now, one could say, "well, it'd be in subsurface water". But you can make that argument for half a dozen bodies in our own solar system without requiring a 4+ light year journey.
No, she's fine. My associate is vomiting for a totally unrelated reason.
For the velocities in question (say > 10% of light speed) the sail would need to be accelerated using lasers -- sunlight isn't bright enough for a large enough proportion of the journey to be useful.
For the same reason it would not get enough thrust from Proxima's light to brake to a stop (or slow down much as all) especially as Proxima is a dim red dwarf.
It might be possible to do better with a magsail, but probably better to focus on recording as much data as possible during a fly-through and then transmitting it back to Earth over the succeeding years, much along the lines of New Horizons at Pluto. With a little cunning the sail can probably serve as the main antenna.