A ROCKY planet that might have aliens on it has been found, close enough that we could travel there. This means scientists don’t now know if the planet has an atmosphere, possesses a magnetosphere or has liquid water.
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And it is a mere 4.22 light-years from Earth, or almost 25 trillion miles.
Edward Guinan, an astronomer at Villanova University, says when he first learned of this new planet a couple of months ago, he seriously doubted that it would have any chance of being habitable. Much study was put into Proxima Centauri because Red Dwarf stars have processes that can mimic the presence of a planet. It lies a little over four light-years from our Solar System and is near a much brighter pair of stars called Alpha Centauri AB.
Though Proxima b orbits in just 11 days, its temperature is relatively moderate thanks to the modest size of its host star.
The next star over has a planet that’s kinda like ours. Two of the biggest problems are ultraviolet rays and x-rays that are bursting out of the star, thereby endangering the possible chemicals for life to exist on that planet.
NASAs Kepler space telescope has discovered more than 2,300 exoplanets to date by studying how a stars light dims when a planet passes in front of it as viewed by the spacecraft. And more than 40 of them seem to be in the habitable zone.
Let’s face it: Our sun is going to die in five billion years, so assuming we don’t self-destruct as a species we’re going to have to get off this rock at some point. NASA’s New Horizons probe, the fastest spacecraft launched, left Earth hurtling toward Pluto at about 36,000 miles per hour.
The £75m Breakthrough Starshot project – which is backed by Professor Stephen Hawking – aims to accelerate the tiny one gram “nanocraft” to 20% of the speed of light using “sails” pushed by a powerful laser. “They are everywhere”, McDowell said. “The search for life on Proxima b comes next…”
As it stands, the planet could be even more massive than Jupiter – and correspondingly be a planet very different to Earth – we simply don’t know yet.
Outside experts praised the finding as rock-solid and thrilling. Nonetheless, it is tantalizing to imagine a habitable world so close to home. We do live in a “Star Trek” universe. That claim was met with suspicion by other astronomers, who later showed that it was unlikely to be real but a ghost signal from the past. The team of astronomers was led by Guillem Anglada-Escudé, which first noticed the exoplanet by the slight wobble of Proxima Centauri.
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Astronomers hope to one day take images of the planet itself to find out if does have an atmosphere.
