Proxima b’ move-in ready? Closest ever Earth-like planet confirmed by scientists

Rumors of a not-too-distant potentially life-supporting planet have been rife for the last few weeks but scientists have now finally confirmed its existence. “Proxima b” is the closest planet to home that could harbor life at a mere four light years away.

https://www.rt.com/viral/357068-proxima-b-second-earth/

 

Sorry to burst your bubble but I think you'll find they haven't actually found it or seen it, they only think it's er, somewhere out there. Nice to know it has wet water though (is there any other kind? ), so Earthlings can get a drink when they get there.

 

Hate to burst your bubble, but you should learn how to read

Rumors of a not-too-distant potentially life-supporting planet have been rife for the last few weeks but scientists have now finally confirmed its existence. “Proxima b” is the closest planet to home that could harbor life at a mere four light years away.

As pointed out, this is a confirmation to that discovery.

 

This is likely the first planet we'll travel to once our future generations develop the ability to move through space faster. Hopefully we're able to maintain our Earthly presence long enough to get that far.

 

Stephen Hawking Helps Launch Project 'Starshot' for Interstellar Space Exploration

NEW YORK — Stephen Hawking wants humanity to reach the stars.

The famed cosmologist, along with a group of scientists and billionaire investor Yuri Milner, unveiled an ambitious new $100 million project today (April 12) called Breakthrough Starshot, which aims to build the prototype for a tiny, light-propelled robotic spacecraft that could visit the nearby star Alpha Centauri after a journey of just 20 years.

 

It's a pretty cool finding, but I don't think I'd pack my bags just yet - Proxima Centauri is a volatile flare star.... the surface of that planet is going to be exposed to some pretty heavy doses of radiation, plus the planet is so close to the star that it'll probably be tidally-locked - the same side of the planet will face the star all of the time so if there is an atmosphere, the temperature variations between the light side and the dark side will result in pretty intense winds... also, it's right at the outer edge of the habitable zone, so it'll probably be a fair bit colder than Earth. Think arctic temperatures at the equator. Nice place to visit, but I don't think I'd want to live there.

 

Could you at least give a decent source? One like this one http://www.space.com/33834-discovery-of-planet-proxima-b.html.

Being tidally locked and being showed with X-rays would be no show stopper if there is liquid water. Life could evolve in deep sea vents. Then migrate upwards, like it did on earth. Another plus is the time. The life of a small star would be much longer than our own sun.

 

I don't even think they know if it has liquid water. As far as I can tell, it's in the Goldilocks zone so if there actually is water, it could be liquid, but the planet may well be bone dry, like Mars.

 

Liquid water could be a good possibility - Proxima Centauri is an iron-rich star (1.6 times as much per pound as the Sun), so that should be a pretty good indicator of how much stuff is floating around there. If it has lots of iron, the odds are pretty good it has lots of water too.

I did some back of the envelope calculations using this website:

http://www.planetarybiology.com/calculating_habitable_zone.html

I worked out the habitable zone for Proxima Centauri to be between 0.039 and 0.057 AU and the planet is estimated to orbit at 0.049 AU - so it's almost smack-dab in the middle. By comparison, the Sun's habitable zone is between 0.95 and 1.37 AU and our orbit is 1.00 AU, so we're right on the inner edge. So maybe it'd be more temperate than arctic?

 

The Europeans are building a big telescope down in Chile as we speak that should be able to get a good view of the planet as it passes in front of Proxima Centauri.... it should be able to get a read on any atmosphere it may (or may not) have from those observations.

http://www.eso.org/public/teles-instr/e-elt/

Pretty neat video on there... they're expecting the imagery to be 15 times more clear than Hubble. Should be up and running in 2024.

 

Credit goes to where I see it first.

And RT is a decent source. More decent than Clinton News Network

 

Will NASA's TESS spacecraft revolutionize exoplanet hunting?

NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), planned to be launched in August 2017 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida, is designed to discover thousands of exoplanets. Led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), TESS will focus on stars 30-100 times brighter than those surveyed by the Kepler telescope, thus, the newly discovered planets should be far easier to characterize with follow-up observations. NASA assumes that approximately 500,000 stars will be studied, including the 1,000 closest red dwarfs, across an area of sky 400 times larger than that covered by Kepler. The agency estimates that TESS will discover more than 3,000 transiting exoplanet candidates, including those which are Earth sized or larger. So is it a revolution in exoplanet hunting? David Charbonneau, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, whose research focuses on exoplanets, thinks so. "I do think TESS will have a huge impact," he told astrowatch.net. "The main impact of TESS will be to find many planets similar to the ones Kepler has been finding, but around stars that are much closer and hence much easier to study."

Previous sky surveys with ground-based telescopes have mainly picked out giant exoplanets. In contrast, TESS will examine a large number of small planets around the very brightest stars in the sky. TESS will record the nearest and brightest main sequence stars hosting transiting exoplanets, which will forever be the most favorable targets for detailed investigations.

Exoplanet candidates could later be investigated by the Automated Planet Finder telescope, the HARPS spectrometer and both the future ESPRESSO spectrometer and James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The development team at MIT has suggested that the first manned interstellar space missions may be to planets discovered by TESS.

"The TESS team currently predicts that TESS should find a handful of Earth-like planets - e.g. the same size and temperature - that transit, and hence perhaps would be accessible to spectroscopic studies of their atmospheres with JWST or the next generation of Extremely Large Ground-Based Telescopes," Charbonneau said.

Laura Kreidberg, a graduate student in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Chicago, who led a team of astronomers that characterized the atmosphere of a super-Earth class planet orbiting another star for the first time, also expects much from TESS. "TESS is expected to yield a sample of dozens of Earth-size, transiting planets whose atmospheres we can study with the James Webb Space Telescope," Kreidberg said. "These systems will be well suited to follow-up observations to characterize their atmospheres, in contrast to Kepler planet detections that were mostly around fainter distant stars."

TESS is designed to carry out the first space-borne all-sky transiting exoplanet survey. It is equipped with four wide-angle telescopes and associated charge-coupled device (CCD) detectors. Science data will be transmitted to Earth every two weeks. Full-frame images with an effective exposure time of two hours will be transmitted as well, enabling scientists to search for unexpected, transient phenomena, such as the optical counterparts to gamma-ray bursts.

The Kepler project has provided ground-breaking new insights into the population of exoplanets in our galaxies; among the discoveries made using data from Kepler is the fact that the most common members of the exoplanet family are Earths and Super-Earths. However, the majority of exoplanets found by Kepler orbit faraway, faint stars. This, combined with the relatively small size of Earths and Super-Earths, means that there is currently a dearth of such planets that can be characterized with follow-up observations.

"Kepler taught us so much! TESS will find planets of nearly the size of Earth around stars all over the sky, including around bright stars. These bright stars allow us to study the nearly Earth-size planets in fine detail, a wonderful prospect!" said Geoffrey Marcy, Professor of Astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley, the world's champion planet hunter, famous for discovering more extrasolar planets than anyone else.

 

Well I won't pack my bags just yet then!

 

This is the sort of thing I've had in mind ever since news of confirmed exoplanets began to emerge. We need to get probes out to these systems. It would be unimaginably cool to see those worlds the way Voyager and other such probes showed us our own system's planets up-close for the first time.

 

Oh I know how to read alright, and I also know that what I read was a load of unsubstantiated crap which I'm not stupid enough to believe.

 

'liquid water' eh, young Mike? You obviously missed my question as to what other kind of water could there be? Or perhaps they mean not frozen water, in which case it would be ice, so why don't they say 'ice' rather than be so condescending: or is it that they're attempting to introduce some mystique into it to impress the naive? Well it sure doesn't impress me.

 

That'll make a good combination with the E-ELT.... find'em with the satellite and analyze them with the telescope. Should be exciting times in the space sciences coming up.

 

Because you don't know how to read and missed the fact that this plane is in the Goldilocks zone. Do you know what that is?

Not cold enough for water to freeze. Not hot enough for water to turn to vapor.

Just right.

I love how people who are ignorance of science try to argue against scientific discovery.

Its like watching a person who has never played basketball; a person who doesnt even know much of the rules which govern the game, trying to tell a successful NBA player that they aren't doing it right.

Its sort of funny

 

Its a CONFIRMED scientific discovery.

You minus well be calling electromagnetism or black holes "load of unsubstantiated crap"

You sound quite silly doing it

 

Probably a good idea....imagine how stupid you'd feel to spend 20 years in a tin can getting there only to find it was just a irradiated chunk of rock getting bombarded by smaller chunks of rock? *L* It'd be a bit like packing up the kids to go and drive to some tourist attraction in Nebraska and then discovering it was some tourist attraction in Nebraska.

I often wonder about the idea of packing up a bunch of people in some giant spacecraft and setting off on some multi-generational voyage to another star. That whole science fiction staple. How the heck are they going to feel when they finally get there and find out that it's been settled by humans for 80 years?? "Yeah... we invented faster-than-light technology back in 2102 and came here first thing. We would have looked for you guys, but truth be told, we kind of forgot about you. Eta Cassiopeiae III used to be a nice place, but ever since the drug dealers and hookers took it over, it's kind of a dive now." There's a movie to be made there. It'd be like the Titanic never really sunk and just drifted around for the last 104 years, only to show up in New York today.

 

Yeh. It would be stupid to send humans without actually seeing it.

I'm guessing that they will try to look at the spectrum of its atmosphere next to see if it can support life or if there is water on its surface.

 

That's the plan.... to try and get a side-on glimpse of it's atmosphere while it transits Proxima Centauri. I imagine it'll be pretty high up on the target list once the E-ELT comes on-line in 2024.

 

The Vogon planet is in that vicinity, they are soon to demolish Earth to make way for a Hyper Space causeway.

https://youtu.be/r8kN-ySWRlQ

 

First, liquid water is a perfectly legitimate form to use in this context, which is non terrestrial H2O. You can Google it if you like and see that many articles use that term. Look, I like a snarky reply as much as the next guy, but when you do one, you better be 100% correct, and you were not.

Secondly, I honestly don't see what you think was condescending about my post. There was no condescension intended. If you're this troublesome to deal with in what I thought was a fairly innocuous topic I'll just chock it up to lesson learned and try to remember to avoid you in the future.

 

It is; I will chalk it up to lesson learned, this metaphor relates to lessons learned on a chalk board, you chock the wheels on a car or vehicle to prevent it from rolling.

You are hereby fined two credits, for a violation of the verbal morality code, mangling a metaphor, a thought crime.

http://www.macmillandictionary.com/us/dictionary/american/chalk-something-up