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Earth-Like Planet, With Ambitious Life Possibility, Found Orbiting the Star Next Door (nature.com)
There's another Earth out there. For real, this time. Astronomers announced on Wednesday that they had detected a planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, the closest neighbor to our solar system. Intriguingly, the planet is in the star's "Goldilocks zone," they said, a place that hints that it may not be too hot nor too cold. Which in turn means that liquid water could exist at the surface, and by extension, it raises the possibility of life. Nature reports:"The search for life starts now," says Guillem Anglada-Escude, an astronomer at Queen Mary University of London and leader of the team that made the discovery. Humanity's first chance to explore this nearby world may come from the recently announced Breakthrough Starshot initiative, which plans to build fleets of tiny laser-propelled interstellar probes in the coming decades. Travelling at 20% of the speed of light, they would take about 20 years to cover the 1.3 parsecs from Earth to Proxima Centauri. Proxima's planet is at least 1.3 times the mass of Earth. The planet orbits its red-dwarf star -- much smaller and dimmer than the Sun -- every 11.2 days. "If you tried to pick the type of planet you'd most want around the type of star you'd most want, it would be this," says David Kipping, an astronomer at Columbia University in New York City. "It's thrilling."Much about the planet is still unknown. Astronomers have some ideas about its size and distance from its parent star. Scientists say they are working off computer models that offer mere hints of what's possible. Also, there's no picture available for this planet as of yet.
Ooh. I've seen this one. They send a probe, and it turns out that it's just a giant, curved mirror with a red filter.
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Why use parsecs if you can call it 4.2 light years, making the calculation of the travel time a lot simpler?
What a coincidence that would be... the closest star to ours. I think we just found the home of the Greys. Retribution will follow swiftly.
Population: All children
*** WARNING: Grups (Adults) are not advised to visit this planet
Life Expectancy: Depends on how old you are upon arrival.
Travelling at 20% of the speed of light, they would take about 20 years to cover the 1.3 parsecs from Earth to Proxima Centauri. Proxima's planet is at least 1.3 times the mass of Earth.
1.3 and 1.3 There are '3's - a Trinity! It's obvious that God wants us to go there!
Now, we just need a spaceship that can fly to Proxima Centauri in less than 1.3 parsecs! It's be our Kessel Run!
And we can have a whole generation that confuses distance with velocity just like mine did!
Like the velocity of Gravity here on Earth is 9.8 meters per second per second because we stutter when we type that.
"That's no planet.... it's a huge Christmas ornament!"
Astronomers announced on Wednesday
Wednesday is today. ???
I don't think this is acceptable as slashdot news, please pull it and post again in a couple of days. Twice.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
Reading the articles, I get the impression that the scientists really want to find a planet there (and perhaps too eager to see their names in print). It makes me think that they might be a little too eager to discern signals in all of the noise in their data. This has happened before in other similar circumstances, and so maybe there isn't any real planet there. I'm waiting for more definitive confirmation of it's existence (not that it will make much difference in my life).
which is over 400 times the speed the fastest human made object has ever traveled.
http://www.foxnews.com/science/2013/10/09/nasa-juno-spacecraft-to-become-fastest-man-made-object-as-it-slingshots-around.html
I'm glad there's a possibility that the life on Proxima B is ambitious. It's so sad when interstellar aliens have no drive or purpose.
Ugh.. the WORST kind.
That title reads like a real estate ad to get Millennials to move there.
pics or it didn't happen.
A planet this close to the star will be tidally locked, resulting in blast furnace heat on one side and near absolute zero cold on the other. There also will be gargantuan amounts of UV and radiation from flares, rendering this planet a barren wasteland and unfit to support any type of life.
I love the whole "it's only 20 years if you travel at 20% of the speed of light!" part. It makes it sound so close. But you're not going to snap your fingers and jump right to 20% of the speed of light from one second to the next. That's 6,114,064.6 standard Earth g-forces! You'd be much better off having a slow, steady acceleration all the way there and a slow, steady acceleration all the way back. Unless I did the math wrong, you'd need to maintain about 0.38 m/s^2 (yeah, I rounded - I'm not the one sending the craft) the entire trip. Half the time pointing your vector towards your eventual destination, half the time pointing away to decelerate. Doesn't sound like much, but you need to maintain that for 20 years on a ship with enough mass to support whatever you're sending for that long trip. And considering the fastest any spacecraft has ever attained when leaving the solar system is about 17000 m/s according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/..., that would be quite a feat!
Next door would be only 4.2 light years away (or 24 trillion miles from Earth - give or take a few dozen billion miles)
Of the Jupiter 3?
Right next to Alpha Centauri A and Alpha Centauri B [astronomically speaking]
Right Next Door. Run over and borrow a cup of sugar, will ya. Else you won't be gettin' no starship cookies tonight.
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
Those relativistic postage stamp sized probes are a dream at present. Long before we could develop the technology for this, or get funding, we will study this planet with the advanced space-based instruments with capabilities far beyond anything now existing. No probe will be sent until we reach the limit of what we can do within our own solar system - nothing is faster than analyzing the light that already gets here, and even the most extravagant telescopic system will be cheaper than the probe project and all its supporting infrastructure.
That leads us to consider the HABEX Mission a pretty cool project under development using the huge and really cool looking Starshade vehicle to provide a coronagraph for a telescope in a separate vehicle thousands of kilometers away. Having a nearby target like this gives leverage with Congress to appropriate the funds.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
Reading the articles, I get the impression that the scientists really want to find a planet there (and perhaps too eager to see their names in print). It makes me think that they might be a little too eager to discern signals in all of the noise in their data. This has happened before in other similar circumstances, and so maybe there isn't any real planet there. I'm waiting for more definitive confirmation of it's existence (not that it will make much difference in my life).
There have been dozens/hundreds of "The search for extraterrestrial life starts now!" headlines. It's also not the first time I remember reading about "Earth-like planet found!". Until they've made contact with Marvin the Martian or an alien race descends upon us to destroy our planet for broadcasting "Jersey Shore" into space. I'm calling shenanigans.
Even alien scientists need a control
If they're getting a free pass, why are there so many of them winding up killed by cops, or in prison?
Idiot.
When we first started exo planet hunting the possibilities of red dwarf stars and their potential to harbor life was a topic due to so many of their qualities that I don't think I need to cover in this community. Over time astrophysicists, including Dr. Tyson, shed considerable doubt on this possibility saying that a planet orbiting a red dwarf star close enough to have liquid water would by default also be so close that the levels of radiation would prohibit the formation of complex organic molecules.
Did I miss a revision to that over the last decade or something?
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It is impossible for the planet have a tidally locked cooked-side!
Cuz its in the Goldilocks Zone!!
The article says so!
In other news, I bet know the length of a day on that planet!!!
(Nevermind that Venus and Mars are in the Goldilocks zone in our own solar system)
It MIGHT be habitable. It MIGHT have an atmosphere. It MIGHT have water.
Chances are, it's actually tidally locked. One side gets daylight all the time and the other... well... it doesn't. It probably has had it's atmosphere stripped away. If it has water then it will all be frozen on the dark side (water evaporates on the hot side and gets locked as ice in the dark side).
Theoretically it could be a hot, but livable (except for being arid) 30C average on the light side and cold (but livable) -30C average on the dark side. Theoretically there is a comfortable zone half way in the transitional area. Don't get me wrong, this is by far our best chance at extra-solar life so far- but odds are you couldn't board a spaceship with a tent and some potatoes and start living there tomorrow as a farmer.
Definitely a great place to send a probe if we ever get the technology.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
quickly call Luo Ji
It can't be a Christmas ornament. It's to big to be a Christmas ornament.
You obviously haven't seen the tree yet!
The main problem with Breakthrough Starshot as currently envisioned, besides the difficulty of having a small probe return data at interstellar distances, is it has no way of decelerating as it approaches a target. Even if we can get past the dust abrasion problem and if we can deploy the huge space lasers, Starshot's minimal probe is going to rip through the Proxima Centauri system at 20% of c. At that speed, there will not be much of an opportunity to see anything as the local Oort cloud shreds it to death.
Instead, let's design the biggest optical interferometry arrays we can manage, terrestrial or otherwise. This will yield photons we can use.
But what about the transitional zone? Some where between the hell and the freezer surely there be would be a narrow temperate zone.
With Ambitious Life Possibility
Has the submitter recently left a job crafting endearingly mis-translated fortune cookie texts?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
If it's ambitious enough it might come here and stomp us....
We can't get to it anytime soon.
Unless the EM-drive can scale up we have no propulsion system that will get us there within a reasonable timeframe (1 lifetime), we're currently talking about a 1000-year trip, which is impossible, we can't build anything that will last that long.
Unless there's some kind of breakthrough (Warp drive, 4th dimensional slips, tesseract), in our ability to to deal with vast distances, we haven't got a prayer.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Are there any pokestops there?
Did they find unobtainium there?
This they know about Proxima Cemtauri.
"Proxima is a flare star that undergoes random dramatic increases in brightness because of magnetic activity.[19] The star's magnetic field is created by convection throughout the stellar body, and the resulting flare activity generates a total X-ray emission similar to that produced by the Sun."
Now, the planet is .05 AU from their sun. Yet the flares are equal to that of our Sun, and we are 20 times further away. I imagine that would make any visiting there a short term adventure, with careful monitoring of the next possible flare.
quote from Wikipedia on Proximan Centauri.
Wait a minute! Wasn't that the star system that the Robinsons were headed to before getting "lost in space"?
It's seems more likely that life spread TO earth than it originated from Earth, but we do currently see ourselves as an early galaxy and that could present some unique problems to humans. Most likely things are just as we've assumed and life is common enough, but it most often gets destroyed before it becomes sentient. That doesn't mean there are not millions of intelligent lifeforms in the universe, the universe is just easily that big. Europeans had no idea North and South America existed and those places are infinitely closer and smaller than just our galaxy, not less the universe. If you really appreciate the scale of the universe it becomes hard to see how long distance space travel is possible. Sad, but true. Even with huge gains we'd have to make a machine that could run for thousands of years to get to Alpha Century, longer that human civilization has been around... and that's with exponential jumps in speed. You have the mechanical and behavioral issues there. As well as funding something that takes thousands of years to get results from. I don't see the whole warp speed dream coming true. Humans are trapped on this solar system. The only way out with today's tech is to seed another planet with human DNA and ideally knowledge.The universe is big, you may as well seed many places. The best method is to have autonomous robots do those jobs. You send various robots to target planets or even program roaming colony ships and they go to the planet and setup a human clone station. You can clone to the age you want. You should be able to transfer intelligence from digital storage to a human brain. That is how we will travel the universe and preserve human knowledge and DNA. For now we could shoot life building blocks at planets with human knowledge capsules and hope for the best. We don't have any of the other technology yet, but those are all ENTIRELY practical ideas. Cloning is not that hard, we could be cloning humans now and likely be starting to get pretty good at it. We are close to having pretty smart robots. We lack machines that can last tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years to travel to these target planets as well as any confidence that we can even get there. The upside is that Alpha Century is moving toward us, the downside is galactic collisions probably destroy more life than they cause and our goal is preservation. Chances are we can just secure humanity here on Earth deep underground and save money while working on technologies we need most. The resources, gravity and water content make Earth more ideal than anything else even if you burn the atmosphere off it. Even if you mutilate the crust of the planet, your still at the right distance to the sun, you have the ideal gravity, you have tons of resources in the surface and mantle. You would not flee Earth to another world if Earth was threatened by anything other than an impact so massive that it would liquify most of the crust. How large or powerful of an impact would that take.. who knows, but way larger than anything we have record on since perhaps the early formation of Earth, billions of years ago. The point is we should do what our ancestors did and look to subterranean life as the protector of our species. In our case we don't have to adapt to such life. Something like the UN should have a network of deep underground sustainable dwellings, seedbanks, mining equipment, human knowledge. That, not a Mars colony is the best way to preserve humanity. A Mars colony would just die on Mars most likely. A purposely built human fallout NETWORK could live underground for hundreds of maybe thousands of years and build humanity back when conditions allowed. More likely than not modern human society would survive the known disasters just the way it is (with vastly lower numbers of course), but the nations who rebound the fastest will dominate that new landscape. Humanity is already living underground all over the world, but having a place made for disaster recovery would be far more ideal. It might also clam some people. We can burrow and we can spread the building blocks of life. We cannot get to another solar system, not even with a probe and that will not change for at least hundreds of years. A trip to another solar system is science fiction for now.
There's another Earth out there. For real, this time.
Uh-huh. For real.
FTFS:
-it may not be too hot nor too cold
-maybe liquid water could exist at the surface
-much about the planet is still unknown
-astronomers have some ideas about its size and distance from its parent star
-scientists are working off computer models
-there's no picture available for this planet as of yet.
Sounds like a dead certainty that we've found another Earth.
Vogon Constructor Fleet got this one marked already.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
We need to send out probes to the 10 nearest star systems for pure science.
If we get a return on what's out there within 50 years, maybe we'll learn something.
We would get data on 26 stars by sending out such a mission set.
We're presently approaching the Proxima Centauri system at 22.4 km/s, which is significantly faster than any spacecraft we've launched (New Horizons was about 15 km/s). Unfortunately we won't be headed that way forever, closest approach will be 3.11 light years in 26,700 years. Perhaps we can take maximal advantage by launching an interstellar mission in the year 28,716. Assuming no new administration comes along to alter NASA's priorities, we should be ready in time if we start preparing now.
This space intentionally left blank
Proxima Centauri is a flare star, and being randomly zapped with x-rays is not usually conducive to life.
A neutron star is a very massive dead star that is shy of being a black hole.
This planet is around a dwarf star --- a small and relatively cool star.
But if it is tidally locked, the "always facing the sun side" side is likely to be rather hot. Dwarf stars have a lot of solar flare activity according to what we know.
Not sure why there are so many open questions about this find - I just finished reading "Proxima" by Stephen Baxter, and he described it pretty thoroughly... it's a red dwarf star which means the Goldilocks planet is tidally locked. But there's enough atmosphere to keep heat circulating, thus there is liquid water in the warm areas. A relatively simple but well-developed ecosystem exists including a reasonably intelligent species dubbed the Builders who live in harmony with the other plants and animals - possibly devolved from earlier, more technological stages. And there's a weird hatch, deep under Mercury - but I've said too much already...
http://www.goodreads.com/book/...
Perfectly Normal Industries
Trump's fan club is out in force.
I dub the "Nemesis".
(Issac Asimov fans know, and *daaaammmm* he was eerily bang on.)
:T:R:A:N:S:
Kinda like all the planets you find in No Man's Sky. Radioactive and barren.
...decline.
"If you're thinking what I'm thinking, you're right." -
According to Star Trek lore, Isn't Zefram Cochrane supposed to found a colony around that very star sometime this century, only to be captured by an alien along the way? Another Star Trek prediction coming true?
I've read elsewhere that Proxima b that it has been calculated that the average temperature there is -40C. (which wikipedia seems to confirm) And yet the same article I'd read said that liquid water was possible, and hence, life was possible as well. By comparison; I think the average surface temperature of Earth is 16C. So, if there is liquid water on Proxima b, then it must be in a pretty slender equatorial zone.
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People are VERY bad at grasping huge scales of time and distance. There's also the Star Trek problem: a 1960s TV show which was essentially a Western drama redressed with spaceships and rayguns and aliens taught people to dream of quick and easy travel between solar systems populated by aliens. There was no sense of the distances, nor of the relatitivistic effects or energy requirements of trying to go really fast between stars.
The fastest manmade object ever is an unmanned space probe, and it would take over 10K years to get there. Pioneer 10 got up to 82K mph and needed 37 years to go 100AU (1/2710th the distance to the nearest star) - New Horizons which recently flew by Pluto will get reach the 100AU distance in 2038. Voyager 1 will not even make it out of the oort cloud of our solar system for 30K years. Voyager 2 is going about 35K mph.
Tax money would be far better spent on Lunar and/or Mars efforts which taxpayers wouldeventually see some return on.
There is simply no reason to spend any more money on deep space opservation before we have fully explored and colonized this solar system. I am not being a luddite here: we have excellent instruments and data already for the stuff we will not be able to reach for over a hundred generations. We lack sufficient data for stuff like the Moon's polar regions that we can get to with a three day trip or regions of Mars that require a few months to reach.
Someone moving faster would experience LESS time passing, not more.
doesn't matter, Dr Smith will just sabotage any attempts to get there... boom tissss
Maybe it is suffering from climate change and soon will be a goner just like earth.
Funny, but as I recall from the 2008 elections, Hillary is pretty anti black as well, so perhaps it is a Hillary supporter instead of a Trump supporter.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Scientist have only observed Rastifarian holidays at these distances.
on proxima centauri, everyone gets to live for thousands of years.
in P-C years, I'm nearly 1600 years old.
yeah, bring a sweater...math sez 28 days,not 11..mebbe they found one of the other worlds? anyways...how about we come to you? you play nice AND just say 'hello' once more? can we start with that?
yeah, how to get the data back....you cant flip it around can you? :P proxima is weaker than sol/bootes...