So if he were betting, he’d now say there was about a 25 percent chance that it could be a habitable world.
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“It’s so inspiring, it’s our closest star”, Lisa Kaltenegger, a Cornell astronomer who wasn’t involved in the new study, told The Washington Post. We’ve got a new home that’s only 4.25 light years away, is slightly bigger than our current place, has skies the color of a “late autumn sunset”, and has years that are only 11 days long.
He said the planet has about the same mass as earth and is only 4.3 light years away.
Its orbit is 7.5 million kilometres from Proxima Centauri, just five per cent of the distance between Earth and our own Sun.
Scientists said yesterday that they had spotted an Earth-like planet, orbiting a star so close that we could conceivably send craft to it in our lifetime and report back on any life within. But Proxima b may not be quite as hospitable as Earth. “Now that we know the planet is there, we can be more creative”.
In terms of astronomical distance, the planet known as Proxima b is right next door.
Q: Didn’t scientists suspect that the planet was there?
Astronomers say that Proxima b is orbiting in a habitable zone, meaning the planet’s surface temperature could promote the presence of liquid water. Boston said the intricate details of a planet’s surface can create a huge variety of specific habitats, and resolving the details of those environments on a planet outside Earth’s solar system is “certainly beyond the resolution of any conceivable telescope”. Also called radial velocity, this is how Proxima b was discovered.
So odds are that this planet looks different from Earth, even though it has some possibility of being habitable.
Colleague Dr Guillem Anglada-Escude, also from Queen Mary University of London – who led the team of around 30 astronomers, said: “Succeeding in the search for the nearest terrestrial planet beyond the solar system has been an experience of a lifetime, and has drawn on the dedication and passion of a number of global researchers”.
There are several methods for detecting planets.
For life as we know it, liquid water is an essential ingredient. In the end, the signal from the planet’s motion came out pretty clearly.
“At that time, I didn’t see anything highly, highly significant”, Endl said.
This newly discovered planet is much closer to its parent star, about 5 million miles apart, than Earth and the sun, which are 93 million miles apart.
“It is quite fantastic that our closest stellar neighbor would harbor a low-mass planet”, Boffin said. At just four light-years from Earth, the red dwarf is our sun’s closest neighbor, making the discovery of its exoplanet a truly breakthrough discovery.
This graphic helps put the new planet into perspective. Yet, despite that distance, scientists think technology will eventually develop to make it possible to visit the planet.
Picture producing – Snapping a picture of an exoplanet in front of its star is something like trying to photograph a microscopic speck of dust on a glowing lightbulb.
Shifts in the star’s light spectrum showed that at times the star was approaching Earth at around human walking pace – about 3mph – and at other times receding at the same speed. Now, if the planet has an atmosphere it could redistribute the heat from the day side to the night side.
How fast can we get something to this planet? Over the next few years we might be able to figure that out using Hubble or the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope.
A ROCKY planet that might have aliens on it has been found, close enough that we could travel there.
Without an atmosphere, Proxima b might not be too appealing though. The search for life on Proxima b comes next’. That means it is much cooler than our Sun, hence the closer habitable zone around it. But that doesn’t necessarily mean there’s any life there.
The discovery could lead to finding more planets in the universe that could sustain life.
According to a Nasa study published in 2000, a giant laser sail measuring 200 miles in diameter could make the trip to Proxima Centauri in just over 12 years.
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The star, which sits in the constellation of Centaurus between the two bright stars that point to the Southern Cross, is too faint to be seen with the unaided eye.
