Astronomers at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) have discovered a planet orbiting neighboring Proxima Centauri, which is the closest star to our sun.
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But because Proxima Centauri is a dim red dwarf star radiating much less heat than the sun, it still occupies the “habitable zone” where temperatures are mild enough to permit liquid surface water.
We have been talking about new planets for, let’s see, about 21 years, ever since Swiss astronomers found one orbiting 51 Pegasus in 1995.
In a discovery that has been years in the making, researchers have confirmed the existence of a rocky planet named Proxima b orbiting Proxima Centauri, the closest star to our sun, according to a new study. An atmosphere also protects animal species in particular from damaging high-energy radiation from the Sun – ultraviolet and X-rays. If you’re going there, you’ll wanna splurge for first class, as 25 trillion miles is a long way to go while drinking $7 beers in coach. This transit method has been the most successful so far – Nasa’s Kepler spacecraft used it to find thousands of candidate planets from 2009 to 2013.
One possible obstacle to life evolving and flourishing on the planet is the way it hugs its parent star.
Dr Guillem Anglada-Escude, from Queen Mary University of London, who led an worldwide team of about 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”.
“Many exoplanets have been found and many more will be found, but searching for the closest potential Earth-analogue and succeeding has been the experience of a lifetime for all of us”, Anglada-Escudé said.
Wobble watching – This involves looking for changes in the colour spectrum emitted by a star due to the gravitational pull of one or more invisible planets.
Other factors against habitability, according to the Nature report, include Proxima Centauri’s strong magnetic field and tidal locking, the phenomenon in which, in Earth moon-like fashion, only one half of the planet faces its star. What do we know about the search for life beyond the horizon of our Solar System?
Most of these distant worlds – like our own Jupiter and Neptune – are composed of gas, an inhospitable environment for life. The intent is to launch the probes in the next few decades. The next step may take another 20 years: “building telescopes capable of directly imaging the planets and taking spectra of planets to learn about their atmospheres”.
Earlier this year, an all-star team of scientists and business leaders including Stephen Hawking announced Breakthrough Starshot, a project to send out hundreds of light-powered space probes that would weigh about a gram, travel at one-fifth the speed of light and send pictures back to Earth. An exoplanet could not get closer than that, even if it tried! In the paper, researchers estimated it to be 400 times the intensity, but recent research has caused them to create a new estimate, they said.
“The significance of the detection went sky high”, Anglada-Escudé said. But because its star is much cooler and fainter than our sun, Proxima b has a temperature that is suitable for liquid water to exist on the surface without evaporating.
There are estimates that there could be billions of Earth-like planets in our Milky Way galaxy. I’m going to need a plan b if President Trump becomes an Earthly reality.
Outside experts praised the finding as rock-solid and thrilling.
“It is inspiring to find a potentially habitable world on our cosmic doorsteps, around our next star”, said exoplanet expert Lisa Kaltenegger, director of Cornell University’s Carl Sagan Institute.
All of which is a reminder to thank our lucky star that we have such a wonderful home. 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.
Anglada-Escude said there is only a 1-in-10-million chance that what they saw was a false positive, proclaiming “no doubt” that what he found was real.
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Proxima Centauri coexists with a binary star in Alpha Centauri, a well-studied star system that serves as a neighbor to our sun. Then a close examination of years of data from a different telescope found the same thing, Butler said.
