Once it reaches the planet, it will transmit pictures back to earth, which will take five years to return. This year, the team checked every day during the 60 nights of their scans of Proxima Centauri.
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They’re calling it Proxima b – just 4.2 light years from Earth, in the Alpha Centauri system. Based on those readings, astronomers were able to determine that Promixa B is in the “habitable zone” – the sweet spot where water can exist on its surface in liquid form and theoretically support life.
Proxima b doesn’t rotate, a factor that makes life likely on the dark and cooler side of the planet. An artist’s impression shows a mountainous surface, bathed in an eerie red light. But the discovery made by a group of 31 scientists at the Queen Mary University of London is a significant one.
Dreams of intergalactic travel lit up the internet on Wednesday following the dramatic discovery by a team of astronomers who announced that Earth may have a twin.
“The significance of the detection went sky high”, Anglada-Escudé said. “We have found a planet around Proxima Centauri”.
Astronomers first noticed the suggestion of an alien world at Proxima Centauri in 2013, but the red dwarf star is so faint – and constantly outshined by the stellar duo Alpha Centauri AB – that confirming the presence of an exoplanet proved extremely hard. An exoplanet is any planet outside our Solar System.
“We hope these findings inspire future generations to keep looking beyond the stars”, Escudé said.
“The discovery of the potentially habitable planet around Proxima Cen is the culmination of 30 years of work that has improved stellar velocity measurement precision from 300 m/s (metres per second) to 1 m/s”, said one of the researchers, Paul Butler from Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington. The star pelts its planet with powerful ultraviolet rays and X-rays, which would mean that anything living there would find it much harder and so would have to become hardened against that radiation. “If you’ve got one in your backyard, it tells you that through the galaxy there are going to be many, many of these types of planets”.
That project would launch thousands of tiny spacecraft into space propelled by lasers on the ground. For these reasons, Proxima b may just be the closest planetary host for alien life.
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Without an atmosphere, Proxima b might not be too appealing though. With liquid water comes the potential for life similar to that on earth, but much more research is required to learn if that’s possible.
