Earth-Like Planet, With Ambitious Life Possibility, Found Orbiting the Star Next Door (nature.com) 218
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. (Score:4, Funny)
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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"That's no planet.... it's a huge Christmas ornament!"
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You obviously haven't seen the tree yet!
No you have not. (was:Ooh. I've seen this one) (Score:3)
Vogon Constructor Fleet got this one marked already.
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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.
Good lots are still available (Score:2, Offtopic)
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They are already planning to build a new Apple Store there.
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Re:Good lots are still available (Score:5, Funny)
I hear it gets a 3-star rating!
Re:Good lots are still available (Score:4, Insightful)
I see what you did there.
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Better than this damn one star planet...
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Micro-who?
Oh, don't they make doors?
Re: Good lots are still available (Score:4, Funny)
Your joke is very transparent.
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Like a glass... window?
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Until you throw a chair at it.
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I thought they got rid of him?!
*ducks
Light years (Score:5, Insightful)
Why use parsecs if you can call it 4.2 light years, making the calculation of the travel time a lot simpler?
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It's because we want starships to go there. They don't measure the kessel run in light years do they? Why measure this?
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I personally would have rather seen the measurement in Olympic swimming pools or football fields...
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Which one?
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Astronomers use parsecs because they have a clear definition based on a physical, measurable distance. When you say light year you have to specify what a year is (there are several kinds, some change over time). In many cases it does not matter and light years are sufficiently accurate given the distance uncertainty and they are more intuitive.
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The parsec has only had a clear definition since august 2015 [wikipedia.org]. Turns out there are several different ways of measuring the distance of the earth to the sun (aphelion, perihelion, averaged over time, averaged over some other variable,...), and more or less practical ways of defining parallax.
The exact definition of a light year, meanwhile, was fixed in 1984 [wikipedia.org]. It's simply the distance covered by light in vacuum in 365.25 days (a julian year), a day being defined as 86400 seconds and a second being defined in fu
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This raises a question: Why do astronomers use irregular units like "light years" and "parsecs" instead of the SI units and prefixes used in every other scientific discipline? Is it just a matter of custom, like the use of English(-ish) units in the U.S.? The SI units would not be any more awkward to work with, and would avoid the need for complex conversions:
distance from Earth to the Sun (1.00 AU) = 150 Gm (gigameters, G=10^9)
distance to Proxima Centauri (1.3 parsecs) = 40. Pm (petameters, P=10^15)
estim
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I can't remember the last time I read an astronomy paper (NB : paper, not regurgitated shit in the popular press) which didn't use parsecs and/or AU as the primary description of astronomical distance (with , M-Earth and M-Sol in the mix). For parsecs, the reason is simple : what you measure when establishing distances is parallax, in seconds of arc. Hence PAR-SEC. No?
If converting to metres, then you need to factor in your estimate for
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Because it ties in nicely with other common units, such as the attoparsec.
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Re:Light years (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, but in his frame of reference it would only take 116,227,108.9743 years.
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On the other hand, to be fair, a light year is also based an an arbitrary amount of time.
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Of an arbitrary particle's speed, in an arbitrary substance.
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(1) and (2) are probably related, but that's way above my pay grade.
It's also quite a hard substance to get access to without space flight.
"Another Earth" (Score:5, Funny)
Population: All children
*** WARNING: Grups (Adults) are not advised to visit this planet
Life Expectancy: Depends on how old you are upon arrival.
1.3 (Score:4, Funny)
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.
I don't get it. (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:I don't get it. (Score:4, Funny)
This is the second post. The first story was published last Wednesday. It's quite common for Slashdot to publish stories BEFORE they happen.
The majority of Slash users only see the second post, and falsely accuse the site for lagging behind. Nothing could be further from the truth.
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Calm down, I remember reading about this story 2 weeks ago in MSM, so while it is early for Slashdot, it is not so early as to cause panic.
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In Soviet Russia it is already Thursday, so tomorrow is Friday!
Ambitious Life (Score:3, Funny)
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.
Re:Ambitious Life (Score:4, Funny)
These aliens are just going to steal your jobs and rape your chickens. They're not going to contribute to society on Earth. We need to build a space wall and get them to pay for it.
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They are probably sitting there and thinking they are the only ones because no one has come and visited them.
Next rocket flight... (Score:3)
Sterilized long ago (Score:4, Informative)
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No. We might as well not even look. Obviously the astronomers that are working on this don't know as much as our AC here and have neglected to ask the most basic questions of the planet.
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No. We might as well not even look. Obviously the astronomers that are working on this don't know as much as our AC here and have neglected to ask the most basic questions of the planet.
Maybe the planet was built to give us The Question.
Temperate zone. (Score:2)
But what about the transitional zone? Some where between the hell and the freezer surely there be would be a narrow temperate zone.
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gargantuan amounts of UV and radiation from flares, rendering this planet a barren wasteland and unfit to support any type of life
Kinda sounds like New Jersey, and that's full of... oh, wait. I see what you mean. Never mind.
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You are not one person who has conclusively answered all these questions which scientists are debating. It may or may not be tidally locked. The magnetic field may or may not be too weak to protect the atmosphere. Tidal locking with a strong atmosphere does not result in absolute zero temperatures any more than months without light in the winter in polar regions of Earth does. The radiation from flares may or may not be an issue for life which will presumably evolve in the ocean (which offers substantial ra
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Then who would be left to post?
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Is that a right or a left at Mercury?
Crap! Is this a one way street? The next turn off is.... oh... should have ordered the extra large Coke at the Seven-Eleven on Venus!
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Mercury comes pretty close with its 3:2 spin-orbit resonance. It spins 3 times for every 2 orbits. That's close enough to being tidally locked that the difference is mostly moot from a "cooked on one side" perspective.
"Next door" (Score:2)
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I like a little space between me and my neighbors.
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Yeah, isn't space neat? What a great and underutilized tool for giving humans perspective on all their general bullshit!
Good neighbors (Score:3)
Right Next Door. Run over and borrow a cup of sugar, will ya. Else you won't be gettin' no starship cookies tonight.
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Like a Good Neighbor, State Farm will [soon] be there!
Perhaps This Will Get Habex Funded (Score:5, Informative)
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 [nasa.gov] a pretty cool project under development using the huge and really cool looking Starshade vehicle [northropgrumman.com] 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.
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Well ain't that neat (Score:4, Insightful)
Did I miss a revision to that over the last decade or something?
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Don't get your Hopes Up (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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odds are you couldn't board a spaceship with a tent and some potatoes and start living there tomorrow as a farmer.
Also, it's very far away.
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If you looked at planet Earth, and new how planet earth worked, you knew that 'on the dark side' the temperature drops between -60 to -90 degrees celsius.
There is no way that a tidal locked planet has -30 degrees on the dark side.
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It's a Mighty Planet, so you should expect a lot of mights!!!
Starshot is incredibly premature (Score:2)
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 deat
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At that speed, there will not be much of an opportunity to see anything as the local Oort cloud shreds it to death.
1% of c, 10%, 20%... isn't it toast if it hits anything at pretty much any speed? It's less dense (ours is, anyway) than the asteroid belt and we just send probes right through that without many cares.
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Yes, you are 100% correct, and there is no reason to even debate it. This whole "Breakthrough Starshot" baloney is a waste of time. Even typing the words "Breakthrough Starshot" uses energy and time that I could have used more productively nearly any other way possible.
Ambitious life possibility (Score:2)
With Ambitious Life Possibility
Has the submitter recently left a job crafting endearingly mis-translated fortune cookie texts?
Even if it were made of gold and oil... (Score:2)
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.
Another Earth -- for real, this time. (Score:2)
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.
Good news, we're headed there already! (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Fat chance. (Score:2)
Stephen Baxter (Score:2)
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 -
Proxima B... (Score:2)
I dub the "Nemesis".
(Issac Asimov fans know, and *daaaammmm* he was eerily bang on.)
Like all the No Man's Sky Planets (Score:2)
If the inhabitants offer you a manicure... (Score:2)
but pretty cold from what I've read (Score:2)
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Please wait for the Wiki Leaks release.
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No...
But with NASA's excellent computer security.... https://hardware.slashdot.org/... [slashdot.org] ...., I'm sure the pictures will be out soon enough!
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Honestly, I think James Webb just found its first imaging target. ;)
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Everyone wants to be at the top of the food chain
Re:I'm Skeptical (Score:2)
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.
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Sure, but being skeptical is what makes this fun.
Is it for real? Or is this another Cold Fusion announcement? It's time for a good old fashioned scientific rugby scrum.
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There might be life there, but this is an early result and subject to change. I'd estimate the chance of life on Mars to be higher, and Mars is a lot more accessible.
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I know that was the case with the supposed planet around Alpha Centauri B. Though, in that case the followup was just better statistical analysis, and not more refined observations. So even though the signal that was declared to be Alpha Centauri Bb turned out to be false, they didn't actually disprove the existence of planets around the Alpha Centauri stars, just that any planets that may exist are undetectable below the noise level of the current data.
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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.
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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?
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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.
Re:Travelling at 20% of the speed of light (Score:4, Informative)
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 [ucsb.edu]. 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.
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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.
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We only need cameras, and powerful antennas for a probe, and enough fuel and heat source, to be able to arrive on the other
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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... [princeton.edu]
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
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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.
Re: Travelling at 20% of the speed of light (Score:3)
"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?
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and that right there is the whole problem with humanity. I hope your grandchildren enjoy warm climates.
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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.
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We shall name it Pandora!
Does it orbit a gas giant though?