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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?
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.
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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).
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.
That title reads like a real estate ad to get Millennials to move there.
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.
Please wait for the Wiki Leaks release.
Everyone wants to be at the top of the food chain
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)
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.
No...
But with NASA's excellent computer security.... https://hardware.slashdot.org/... ...., I'm sure the pictures will be out soon enough!
You'd be much better off having a slow, steady acceleration all the way there and a slow, steady acceleration all the way back.
There is no "back" and there is no slowing down or orbiting. It's a flyby approach and the only thing that returns are communications.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
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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Well, we've rarely had to optimize our missions for speed instead of efficiency. I'm not saying it'll be easy, but just because we haven't gone a lot faster yet doesn't mean we can't do it.
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
Yeah but it's a neutron star, the goldilocks zone's going to be a lot closer...
You obviously haven't seen the tree yet!
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. ...
The interstellar space probe concept mission they are referencing is this one by Philip Lubin. The scheme has the 70 gigawatt launching lasers accelerating a tiny wafer thin probe to 20% c in 10 minutes, which is about 10,000 gees. A tiny wafer thin structure can handle that. And no, there is no slowing down. These things fly through the target system at 0.20 c, and keep on going.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
There would only be 2 sunsets at most. One of the suns would not set, or even move in the sky unless you travel across the planet.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
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.
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.
What's a human lifetime, anyway? Insignificant.
Let's say we set the bar a few orders of magnitude lower. Say, 0.15% the speed of light. Leave around the time the ancient pyramids of Egypt were built, arrive today.
Now pick something in between. Say, 1% the speed of light. One-way trip ~425 years. Is it so hard to imagine that in a # of decades, we might have probes able to accelerate to that speed? Now replace 'probe' with 'city-sized starship'. Something big enough to allow generations of people to grow up & have offspring. Decades of technological progress not enough? How about a century from now? Or 2 centuries?
In other words: all we need is patience, and imagination. And (as mankind) not be stupid enough to blow ourselves up before those spaceships are on their way. As long as travel group can sit out the ride, who cares if the actual trip time is 20, 200 or 2000 years.
Oof. That makes the "atom of dust collision" problem even worse. Provided the wafer probe survives the impact, that's likely to be a big momentum change with so little mass. I suppose the relatively small cross section of the probe that can be hit helps, but doesn't the dust collision likelihood just get worse as you get closer to a celestial body?
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.
If memory serves right, 17000 m/s is not even twice the earth's escape velocity (IIRC 11km/s). That doesn't even seem to be enough to escape the Sun (IIRC about 40km/s needed to leave the solar system). I think you forgot the k in that, so that would make it 17000 km/s, with the speed of light being 300000 km/s - so somewhere in the vicinity of 5% speed of light is proven achievable.
We only need cameras, and powerful antennas for a probe, and enough fuel and heat source, to be able to arrive on the other side while the electronics are still working and can snap pictures and send them back. It would seem that at 17000 km/s a probe will make the trip between the solar/star systems in a little under 100 years. Add to that about 37 years for acceleration in the solar system (it can surely be shortened with gravity boosts) and about the same time to decelerate on the other side (I guess it would be too old of a craft to even attempt aero breaking or gravity slow down) and the time for it to radio the pictures and other measurements and we have a very feasible under 200 years if we launch tomorrow.
I'm not sure we have a transmitter though that we can blast over the distance and still be captured, so we can add a few more years to that.
"The biggest difficulty is transmitting useful data back to Earth as there's going to be very little power available."
wouldn't be possible to send many of those at regular intervals on the same path, and use the them as a line of breadcrumb repeaters of sorts?
"Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong." (Oscar Wilde)
Let's hope so, we need to make sure not to hit the planet with it - then their version of will smith will show up cause we started some.... :)
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
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'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.
Honestly, I think James Webb just found its first imaging target. ;)
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
It's a flyby approach and the only thing that returns are communications.
Although that isn't insignificant either... the communications will also take a very long time to get back, 5 years or more?
Come play Moral Decay!
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/...
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OK, who else heard "wafer thin probe" in John Cleese's fake French accent?
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.
Nah, it's just the easiest to detect. Most likely Earth is far from unique in terms of being a rocky planet about its size in the Goldilocks zone and much more alone (if at all) in the realm of "not getting hit by moon-sized objects frequently; with a moon in a stable nearly circular orbit to mix the liquid up via tides without causing widespread flooding and catch incoming mid-size asteroids; not being bombarded with x-rays due to the type of star or being too close to the center of a galaxy and getting bombarded with gamma rays; with a gas giant in a stable orbit just the right distance away to catch bigger rocks, etc.
Another alternative of course is simply that any culture advanced enough to travel the stars is also experienced enough to know multiculturalism destroys every culture involved and wants no part of it.
The worst part of that is if you took a dollar in change and laid it out in front of your average American and asked them to pick out how much of that dollar goes to NASA they wouldn't have a clue they'd have to slice a penny to get the right answer.
30+ years of 'all government bad, all taxes are theft, and government always wastes money on purpose' propaganda is hard to overcome, much to our detriment. Especially when the money actually wasted on purpose goes to corporate welfare and giveaways, courtesy of those who foist that propaganda on us.
I dub the "Nemesis".
(Issac Asimov fans know, and *daaaammmm* he was eerily bang on.)
:T:R:A:N:S:
Well, we send a bunch of them since we just spent a metric fucktonne of money building this fancy laser, we might as well use it. At least some of them will get through.
Enigma
Kinda like all the planets you find in No Man's Sky. Radioactive and barren.
I'm not sure we have a transmitter though that we can blast over the distance and still be captured, so we can add a few more years to that.
In order for us to be able to measure a signal from a probe, it would have to be not just bright enough for us to detect it, it would also have to be bright enough to discernably change the light we get from the star.
This page says that it is possible to outshine a star for brief moments (few nanoseconds) using lasers: https://www.princeton.edu/~wil...
I've done some back of the envelope calculations to verify that. And while its totally wrong that one 10 000 th of the output of a star is 4 joules per ns, it should still be possible to build a laser that outshines proxima centauri.
According to wikipedia, proxima centauri has a luminosity of 0.0017 times the luminosity of the sun, which is 382.8 * 10^24 Watts. So it has 6.5 * 10^23 Watts of luminosity.
Let's assume the laser has a beam divergence of .1 millirad.
This page has an example for a red (1064 nm) laser, but we want to shoot a blue one as proxima centauri is mostly red so doesn't have much blue luminosity: https://www.rp-photonics.com/b...
On .1 milirad, the star would emit approx 2.5*10^-10 of its total output (2.2*10^-10 = (.1/(1000*pi*2)^2). That would mean 1.6*^10^14 Watts for proxima centauri.
If you say that .1% of the star's total emitted light is blue at the specific wavelength you are sending, you have to divide by 1000.
Per nanosecond, it would be 163 joule. Theoretically possible, but question is whether you can build a sender and receiver (and get the sender into the right place).
...decline.
"If you're thinking what I'm thinking, you're right." -
On .1 milirad, the star would emit approx 2.5*10^-10 of its total output (2.2*10^-10 = (.1/(1000*pi*2)^2). That would mean 1.6*^10^14 Watts for proxima centauri.
Err sorry, this should read (.1/(1000*pi*2))^2 and 1.6*^10-14.
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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and that right there is the whole problem with humanity. I hope your grandchildren enjoy warm climates.
You're not going to be making many significant observations as you zip past at 0.2c.
Yes, 116,227,108.9743 years is less than 116,227,109 years
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?
We shall name it Pandora!
Does it orbit a gas giant though?
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.