Alpha Centauri Has an Earth-Sized Planet 152
The Bad Astronomer writes "Astronomers have announced that the nearest star system in the sky — Alpha Centauri — has an Earth-sized planet orbiting one of its stars. Alpha Cen is technically a three-star system: a binary composed of two stars very much like the Sun, orbited by a third, a red dwarf, much farther out. Using the Doppler technique (looking for very small changes in the velocities of the stars) astronomers detected a planet orbiting the smaller of the two stars in the binary, Alpha Centauri B. The planet has a mass only 1.13 times that of the Earth, making it one of the smallest yet detected.However, it orbits the star only 6 million kilometers out, so it's far too hot to be habitable. The signal from the planet is extremely weak but solidly detected (PDF), giving astronomers even greater hope of being able to find an Earth-like planet orbiting a star in its habitable zone."
That sounds really cool (Score:1, Funny)
Let's use that as a setting for a sci fi movie and waste it on contortionist zombies and scientists who act like complete douchebag morons. Awesome.
Re:That sounds really cool (Score:5, Funny)
Let's use that as a setting for a sci fi movie and waste it on contortionist zombies and scientists who act like complete douchebag morons. Awesome.
Seriously, dood, you gotta stop writing for SyFy Channel.
Re: (Score:2)
Let's use that as a setting for a sci fi movie and waste it on contortionist zombies and scientists who act like complete douchebag morons. Awesome.
Did you have a hand in Prometheus?!
Re:That sounds really cool (Score:5, Funny)
Let's use that as a setting for a sci fi movie and waste it on contortionist zombies and scientists who act like complete douchebag morons. Awesome.
Seriously, dood, you gotta stop writing for SyFy Channel.
I don't get it. What does his comment have to do with wrestling?
Re: (Score:1)
Re:That sounds really cool (Score:5, Funny)
Sounds good. Let's call it... Chiron. Or maybe Manifold 6?
Ooh, ooh, is it going to have telepathic worms?
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
We should send seven leaders, who can't agree on anything, on a spaceship to go visit and check the place out.
Re: (Score:2)
Of course - she was extremely effective at an early blitz campaign where her military bonuses and native anti-spy abilities let her simply crank out military units and push deep into enemy territory before most other factions could mount a reasonable defense. Miriam wasn't really any good at running an economy, or gaining technological superiority, or a numbers advantage (or most other things) on her own - she was good at taking them by force from other players, jumping out to an early lead, and using sheer
we already knew this from Star Trek (Score:1)
We already know that Zefram Cochrane is going there sometime in the next century to retire and live out his life with a cloud being... probably Apple's iCloud
Dear /S/cientists (Score:5, Interesting)
how do planets orbit binary star systems? I would think two stars would give the planets erratic orbits that would either send them into one of the suns or shoot them into space.
Re:Dear /S/cientists (Score:5, Informative)
It's rather the same way the moon orbits the earth. If you have a binary system, a planet can quite happily orbit very close to one of the two stars so long as the distance between the planet and the star it orbits is smaller than the distance between stars. The pair of stars will orbit their mutual center of mass, and the planet will orbit a single star.
Of course, the three body problem is an open question in physics, but if you make the assumption that one of the masses is much smaller than the other two it (which is the case for planets orbiting stars) it becomes quite solvable, especially if you're happy with numerical simulations of orbits.
A similar situation is possible if the planet is a long way from the pair of stars, and would then orbit their center of mass. That isn't the case here, but is certainly a feasible solution to the problem. You only really get orbits that are highly erratic when the planets orbital radius is over a quarter of the distance between the stars.
Throughout this I've assumed equal mass stars. Feel free to put a factor of M1/M2 in front of every distance I gave for non-equal mass stars.
Re: (Score:2)
As a follow up to your input, would it be possible for a planet to have a figure 8 orbit around a binary star system? i.e. the planet has such a highly elliptical orbit that it goes part way around one star but is then sent off on a trajectory which allows it to be "captured" by the second star but is again flung out on a reverse trajectory to be "captured" by the first star?
Just a thought question.
Re: (Score:3)
A figure-8 is quite hard to find, since the symmetries involved would require almost perfectly equal masses between the stars and perfectly circular orbits of the stars. (This is from memory running simulations a long while back). However it is certainly possible to have a planet be orbiting one star for a few loops and then be captured by the other, orbit it a few times and keep getting passed back and forth.
The basic condition you need for this is for the planet to have enough energy to get over the maxim
Re:Dear /S/cientists (Score:4, Informative)
Not an erratic orbit at all. Picture Jupiter. If it suddenly increased its mass by a factor of 20, it might have enough mass to become a star, but would have virtually no impact on the orbit of Mercury, and very little on Earth or Venus. Just because a body becomes a star does not require planets to orbit both stars. In actuality, all planets orbit the center of mass of the solar system. In our solar system's case that resides inside the sphere of our sun.
Re:Dear /S/cientists (Score:5, Informative)
For those who care
Jupiter is about 0.0009 solar masses. Current models of nuclear fusion predict that if an object has mass of about 0.07 solar masses it will begin a fusion reaction. So Jupiter would need to swell to 80 times its current mass.
Re: (Score:3)
More reading indicates that the center of mass of our solar system can be inside or outside of our solar system depending on the position of Jupiter relative to Saturn. I didn't know this before.... interesting stuff.
Re: (Score:1)
I take it you meant inside or outside our sun. I didn't know that either.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes... I was clearly posting too late at night.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
All bodies in all solar systems orbit a common centre of gravity - which is not necessarily even within the central star. As planetary systems go, those in binary systems orbit the barycentre of the stellar system, unless they orbit too close to either of the stars in which case it becomes a Lorentzian body, which then orbits both stars in a semi-chaotic orbit describing a figure-8 of varying distance from both stars, with both stars becoming orbital axes.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
the Earth/Moon system shares a common barycentre which lies somewhat off the centre of Earth's core - in effect, both bodies orbit a point in space rather than the Moon orbiting Earth.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Any system of bodies is going to have a center of gravity. My guess (not having read TFA) is that this planet is many times further away from the binary stars than they are to each other.
From the PDF, it seems to be the opposite:
With a separation to its parent star of only 0.04 AU, the planet is orbiting very close to Alpha Centauri B compared to the location of the habitable zone.
Re:Dear /S/cientists (Score:5, Informative)
The stars are actually very wide spaced compared to the planet-star system itself. As a result, the planet is well within the gravity well of B. At a minimum AB separation is 11AU - well over 200 times the B-planet separation.
Orbit centred on A: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ee/Orbit_Alpha_Centauri_AB_arcsec.png
Simulation plus table of info: http://www.solstation.com/orbits/ac-absys.htm
Re:Dear /S/cientists (Score:5, Informative)
Having RTFA (I know), this planet is very close in to one of the stars, in this case Alpha Centauri B. There are two possibilities for planets in a binary system, either orbiting close in to one of the stars, or far away from both. I think I remember reading once that Alpha Centauri A and B are far enough apart from each other that there is a good chance that planets in either star's habitable zone would have stable orbits.
Re:Dear /S/cientists (Score:5, Interesting)
What are the prospects for a single orbiting planet (let's exclude other objects) orbiting both stars in a figure 8 configuration, crossing the barycenter of the star's combined rotations?
(Eg, both stars orbit clockwise as seen from plane of rotation north, and orbit each other in an elipse. A planet orbits first one star, then the other, crossing the barycenter at the period of maximal approach of the two stars, moving from one star to the other like a dance partner in a ballroom routine.)
Assuming that the objects are free from outside gravitational purturbations, are exactly the right distance apart, and that the periodicity of the planet's orbits between the stars is exactly synchronized, would such a system be stable?
Re:Dear /S/cientists (Score:5, Informative)
It'll get ejected - that configuration isn't stable.
For Alpha Centauri A and B, the 'stable zone' is out to roughly Jupiter's orbit from each star - plenty of room for both to have habitable worlds.
Re: (Score:3)
Oh, I understand it would be absurdly touchy, pretty much garanteed to not exist, and almost certainly not stable long term.
We could juice it up a little, and say that there is a very massive object that orbits both stars at a very large radius out, around the combined center of rotation. Say, a class M star, or a brown dwarf. This object will perturb the orbit of the hypothetical figure-8 planet. (We will assume that the planet is very far frrom the parent stars, say jupiter orbit equiv, and that the compa
Re: (Score:3)
And that's just it - all stars involved are shedding mass in different directions, at varying rates. You might have instances where a single figure-eight of sorts gets performed, but that means there's been a capture and likely a subsequent ejection. But unless you actually want to engineer this somehow, and have a means of keeping it stable (planetary thrusters go!) - it won't be seen. If we ever find something like that the first assumption is going to be aliens having fun, and that's what Occom's razor i
Re: (Score:3)
What are the prospects for a single orbiting planet (let's exclude other objects) orbiting both stars in a figure 8 configuration, crossing the barycenter of the star's combined rotations?
I asked this very question not long ago:
http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/31201/might-a-planet-perform-figure-8-orbits-around-two-stars [stackexchange.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Having RTFA (I know), this planet is very close in to one of the stars, in this case Alpha Centauri B.
I wonder if there is another planet around A cen B slightly closer to it than Earth is from the sun? We may find life on our nearest neighbor star system. If such a planet exists, but is yet undiscovered, can we name it Tattooine?
Re: (Score:2)
(I'm not sure what the actual naming rules for "popular" names for extra-solar planets are ; the formal names are the likes of "Alpha Cen Bb". It may be that there are no rules for "popular"
Re: (Score:2)
I can't name it anything, but can hope that whoever discovers it was a Star Wars (not Star Trek) fan.
Re: (Score:2)
Paul Wiegert (http://www.astro.uwo.ca/~wiegert/) did some of the work 15-odd years ago. Some of the earlier work is online at http://www.astro.uwo.ca/~wiegert/papers/1997AJ.113.1445.pdf [astro.uwo.ca].
Re: (Score:3)
The planet is 6 million km from B, or roughly 10x closer than Mercury-sun.
A and B are roughly 3.5 billion km from each other, or roughly the Sun-Uranus distance.
So, no.
Re: (Score:2)
Any system of bodies is going to have a center of gravity. My guess (not having read TFA) is that this planet is many times further away from the binary stars than they are to each other.
No, that's not what TFA says. It says it is many times closer to one of the stars than it is to either of the others. The other two stars have only minor effects on its orbit.
Re: (Score:2)
I'd leave well enough alone! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I'd leave well enough alone! (Score:4, Insightful)
Why is this modded down? Stephen Hawking [neatorama.com] would agree.
Re: (Score:2)
While you have a very intelligent post, I think you have missed the point of my post. What I am disagreeing with is the modding down of the post. A downmod isn't a way of saying "I don't agree with your point".
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
If somehow we "made contact" with some "ET" type, and they had the means to get here "quickly", you think they would come
in friendship? LOL, probably blow us up like the Klingons, Borg or some other crap. Just leave things alone will ya?
That's what the television and movies tell you, don't they? Do you ever wonder why most of them tell that ETs are here to attack us ?
To keep us in Fear and to believe that if someone would come here, this would be automatically justify a reason for us to attack them.
Think about how the US & Hollywood portrays terrorists in movies, TV -series and mainstream news. Same thing with Extraterrestrial Life.
Oh, and btw. Imagine, that if there are civilizations out there who are _exponentially_ more evolved, hav
Re: (Score:3)
Our society has suppressed this information for so long to keep us blinded from the truth. The communication happens telepathically and during meditative states of mind, or during dreams.
WTF, slashdot? That's insightful??? Prove telepathy exists, prove that the "telepathic" subject actually had contact, prove it wasn't a stupid dream, do it with the scientific method and you could have a point. But you see, you can no more prove that than you can prove that sentience exists.
This was NOT the least bit insigh
Quite a discovery... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Exactly. What is the temperature on the side away from the sun? I'm guessing the atmosphere has been blown away by stellar wind. If not the convection could make it a furnace anyway.
Re: (Score:2)
Apparently there's a message there... (Score:3, Funny)
Temperature = 1500K (Score:4, Informative)
That sounds really cool. Or hot since, unfortunately, the close proximity to its star means that it probably has a surface temperature of 1500 K.
I guess I'd be more interested in a different-sized planet a bit further away from its star.
Re:Temperature = 1500K (Score:5, Interesting)
What makes this a big deal, is that prior to this it was an open question whether the Alpha Centauri system could support planets orbiting the individual stars or not. Now that it has been shown that planets can orbit the individual stars in this system, as opposed to orbiting outside both stars around the common center of gravity as is the case for most planets in binary systems, the probability of their being more planets including possible ones in the habitable zones of the stars just got a whole lot bigger.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Heil Sid Meier (Score:2)
When can we start travelling over there?
We have to establish colonies with factions fighting each other! [gog.com]
Re:Heil Sid Meier (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3)
Err what? The game *starts* in 2100 (the Unity launches in 2060 and spends 40 years in transit). You may be thinking of one of the earlier Civ games. Alpha Centauri, depending on difficulty level, ends (you reach "mandatory retirement age") on 2300, 2400, or 2500. Each turn is one year, unlike typical Civ games.
Re: (Score:2)
Sorry, travel has been indefinitely postponed due to a copyright dispute.
Unfortunately (Score:1)
Re:Unfortunately (Score:5, Informative)
Not unfortunate, just a recognition of reality. At this moment in time, the science return for sending unmanned probes / orbiters / rovers vastly exceeds the return on sending humans. We'll continue to develop space capability and at some point it may make sense to send humans to Mars ... or maybe not.
And please do NOT invoke the whole "omg we have to get off this rock" argument. If an asteroid impact blew most of Earth's atmosphere and water into space and annihilated 99.999% of the species, Earth would STILL be easier to live on than Mars.
Re: (Score:2)
One of the "arguments" for going to Mars is to survive AFTER an asteroid hits Earth. Not too many supply ships going to arrive on Mars in that case.
Re: (Score:2)
We aren't going to figure out how to set up a self-sustaining system on Mars. It's not like we can fly there and find the Martian plants that produce oxygen in the secret underground caverns (although I have to admit, that would be very cool). The technology and systems to do a self-sustaining environment would be built & tested on Earth.
Re: (Score:2)
I would hate to see us disappear too. But I'd like to see a clear link between spending massive amounts of money on a self-sustaining Mars colony and the survival of the human race. For example, enumerating the top threats to humanity (nuclear war, nearby supernova explosion, asteroid impact, bio-warfare, civilization collapse due to resource exhaustion, etc) and some explanation as to how a Mars colony is the most practical solution to these problems. Right now, I'm not seeing it.
Don't get me wrong, I l
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Unfortunately the United States can't even get off the planet anymore...
Sure we can. [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:2)
I really think the reason we have such stalled space progress is because of NASA. I don't mean to go all libertarian, but I do think that NASA suffers from a lot of the worst problems of any large governmental body, and that has suffocated space research.
Re: (Score:2)
He failed to predict the danger of Nazi WMD though, and allowed a "missile gap" to develop
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vannevar_Bush [wikipedia.org]
The German V-1 flying bomb demonstrated a serious omission in OSRD's portfolio: guided missiles. While the OSRD had some success developing unguided rockets, it had nothing comparable to the V-1, the V-2 or the Henschel Hs 293 air-to-ship gliding guided bomb. Although the United States trailed the Germans and Japanese in several areas, this represented an entire field that had been left to the enemy. Bush did not seek the advice of Dr. Robert H. Goddard. Goddard would come to be regarded as America's pioneer of rocketry, but many contemporaries regarded him as a crank. Before the war, Bush had gone on the record as saying, "I don't understand how a serious scientist or engineer can play around with rockets", but in May 1944, he was forced to travel to London to warn General Dwight Eisenhower of the danger posed by the V-1 and V-2. Bush could only recommend that the launch sites be bombed, which was done.
Not a mistake his rather unjustly maligned namesake would have made.
Who knows better? (Score:2)
I understand how the Doppler effect actually works, I don't understand how it works on a scale of this magnitude, with one or two sources of reference and data that has been determined "scrubbable" (as in, "static noise", or data that doesn't belong in the analysis). How exactly is the speculation even tied to something worth a story?
Re: (Score:2)
> How exactly is the speculation even tied to something worth a story?
It is tied to something worth a story by a scientific paper linked in the fucking article.
Sure (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
But the techniques are getting better. And the "transit" method (OGLE, Kepler projects) has different constraints.
Understatement of the Year (Score:5, Interesting)
"it's far too hot to be habitable."
That's an understatement. From the ArsTechnica article on the alpha Centauri planet [arstechnica.com]:
"But don't start building the colony ship just yet. With a 3.3 day orbit, the planet is only 0.04 Astronomical Units (1 AU is the typical distance from the Earth to the Sun). That makes this planet blazingly hot, at about 1,500 Kelvin."
Re: (Score:1)
If calling 1,500 kelvins "far too hot to be habitable" is the understatement of the year, then I'll call it merely "too hot to be habitable" and win the award!
Re: (Score:2)
And us space bloggers feel like chumps (Score:5, Interesting)
Space bloggers (like me) who are signed up with the ESO news feed got word of this overnight. But the story was under embargo. You do not break the story until the embargo lifts or the ESO and Nature magazine gets very angry at you.
But some loud-mouth in Croatia violated the embargo. We were patiently waiting for the embargo to lift, biting our collective tongues, when mouthy jumped the gun.
We got an email from the ESO about an hour ago that said:
"I just spoke to the Head of Press at Nature, Ruth Francis, and we have agreed to LIFT THE EMBARGO on the Alpha Cen story IMMEDIATELY due to an unfortunate leak. You may run your stories."
Nature and ESO lift exoplanet embargo early following coverage by Croatian news outlet [wordpress.com]
Footfall time (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
There Could Be Habitable Planets Also (Score:3)
It is entirely possible that there are undiscovered planets in the habitable zone. It is the planets closest to the star with the shortest orbital periods that are the easiest to discover, either because generate frequent perturbations that can be detected in the data set, or are the most likely to cross the stellar disk (when using the brightness fluctuation method).
Re: (Score:2)
It is entirely possible that there are undiscovered planets in the habitable zone. It is the planets closest to the star with the shortest orbital periods that are the easiest to discover, either because generate frequent perturbations that can be detected in the data set, or are the most likely to cross the stellar disk (when using the brightness fluctuation method).
Then sign me up! If there's a star in the habitable zone, we'll colonize it when we get there. If there's not, we should have advanced enough technology by that time to move the planet we've already discovered anywhere we want it.
Re: (Score:2)
If there's not, we should have advanced enough technology by that time to move the planet we've already discovered anywhere we want it.
Yeah, but they've been saying planet-moving technology is five years away since the 60s.
Re: (Score:2)
To: Centauri Prime. Attn: Londo Mollari (Score:1)
Problem with discovering further-out planets... (Score:1)
- the orbital period is way longer (let's say 1 year) ... so I guess you'd need at least 1 year and then some of observation data (albeit with a lower sample rate) to make sure you really found something and it's not a fluke.
- this is even worse if you go for observing passes of the planet in front of it's host star (as the possibility of the pass from our perspective decreases with distance, and also the time between passes increases).
Ah! Home sweet home (Score:2)
Ah! Home sweet home, I do miss it sometimes but the journey back is a pain in the ass.
What's the use (Score:3)
We're stuck here for good, destined to just keep looking at extra solar planets via telescope and speculating about whether they could support life as we know it. The nearest star, Proxima Centauri, is 4.3 light years away. The farthest man made object is just roughly 17 light hours [twitter.com] from home after 35 years of travel; so forget about sending spaceships physically to the stars unless someone invents warp drive. It's laughable to talk of Alpha Centauri when no one in power is showing interest in returning to the moon, let alone Mars.
And leaving aside that, we're stuck with the reality of NASA facing budget cuts despite its overall budget being a drop in the ocean compared to what's been spent on war in the last 10 years.
Space exploration should've been incremental, start with a lunar refuelling base at the pole where there's water ice that can be broken down into hydrogen and oxygen for rocket fuel, and use that as a staging area for further exploration. Build a spacecraft for travelling to Mars in LEO stage by stage, and send a bunch of robots to assemble a modular base well before the first humans are sent (Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars series describes this approach).
While Curiosity, Opportunity & Spirit are testimony to NASA's engineering prowess, it still can't beat an actual geologist (areologist?) on Mars with a field laboratory who's able to directly analyse rocks and figure out what it was like in the past.
Want some perspective? Just the annual airconditioning budget for the US Army in Iraq/Afghanistan far exceeds [npr.org] that of NASA's.
Re: (Score:2)
Let's be honest - Voyager was never intended to be a transport to get to Alpha Centuri. It's designed to be a low-power "poodle-along" slowcoach to get to the outer planets, not to get much further, and to take it slow because it takes DAYS to send back an image that it's captured and anything faster moving wouldn't provide enough useful data.
The problems of scaling up and speeding up aren't insurmountable but are HUGE, I grant you. But considering that 51 years ago no man had ever gone into space whatsoe
Next, we find the earthlike planets there (Score:2)
Especially Rann. Now, *where* did I put my red flight suit and rocket packs?
mark "Alanna's waiting for me...."
We must colonize it! (Score:2)
Quick, gather seven intelligent, ruthless leaders with widely disparate ideologies and barely restrained hostility toward each other, then put them on course for the planet.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
lol, anonymous thinks the universe is twice as big as the solar system.
Man will never fly, and only a fool would think it possible to walk on the moon.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
That's the thing with all your "man will never fly" quotes. Someone BUILT a machine, using real materials,
Re: (Score:3)
Since the moon shots, the space loon brigade has had DECADES to show us something, ANYTHING, that manned space makes a shred of sense.
And every time we come up with something, the JOEs shoot it down by saying 'We can't do that now, therefore we'll never be able to do it so don't even bother getting out of bed'. And Congress seems to listen to the JOEs, especially when they can game the system to pump and dump 'development money' into their districts as purest pork without having to come up with anything tangible with the money, rinse and repeat.
Re: (Score:2)
With the currently plausible technology, it'd have to be a generation ship. We'd need them for exploring and fully utilising the Solar System, so by the time that we're in a position to seriously consider expanding to Alpha Centauri, we'll have generations of experience with them.
An unnecessary constraint. you only need to persuade the
Power source [Re:Uh oh...] (Score:2)
to traverse four light years of space
It simply needs to be long-lasting, and repairable en-route.
with absolutely no resources available from Earth once it's on its way
Make it big, contains adequate resources to support itself indefinately. An ecosystem.
The hard resource is energy. What's the power supply for a very very long voyage?
We really need fusion for this.
Technology development needed [Re: Power source] (Score:2)
We send an unmanned ship carrying all of human knowledge, a few robots, a bunch of DNA samples and the equipment needed to grow clones.
Well, that has been proposed-- for that matter, by me http://web.archive.org/web/20100409080615/http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/generalscience/star_voyage_020319-1.html [archive.org]
(although I'm by no means the first)
We might not be able to do it now, but it's likely that we could in time.
Yes, quite a bit of technology development needed.
Re: (Score:3)
Why? A generational ship is not a new concept.
It sucks, though, as it will invariably be overtaken by some dudes in a faster-than-light space yacht who make fun of the ancient crew. At least that's what my sci-fi reading experience tells me. :-)
Re: (Score:2)
Idiom crits your language skill for 9999 damage. You have lost all knowledge of English and are reduced to grunting and pointing.
Re: (Score:2)
Then, there is this:
http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/09/17/2229257/warp-drive-might-be-less-impossible-than-previously-thought [slashdot.org]
Re: (Score:3)
This IS Beta Centauri Five!!! Beta Centauri Six exploded, six months after we were left here. The orbit of the planet shifted. ADMIRAL Kirk never came back to check on our progress...
Amusing, but, no, Alpha Centauri B is not Beta Centauri. Beta Centauri is a completely different star, about 300 light years away.
http://www.astro.wisc.edu/~dolan/constellations/hr/5267.html [wisc.edu]
Re: (Score:2)
Of course many thought we as a species would have established permanent bases on the Moon [wikipedia.org] and even a manned spaceflight mission to.... Saturn. (or was that Jupiter?)
I'd personally put the likelihood of anybody from the Earth ever getting to the Alpha Centauri system or for that matter any star within about 15 light years of the Earth no earlier than the year 2500 A.D., if even that early. That even is assuming we find an Earth-sized planet in a habitable zone of a star with liquid water oceans anywhere wit
Re: (Score:1)
"The Narwhal bacons at midnight?"
Don't worry everybody. I'm just testing to see if it's a feral redditor. If it is I'll have to cut its head off and then burn the body to prevent an infestation.
I'd keep you kids locked up inside [gawker.com] until I give the all clear if I were you.
Re: (Score:2)
There is a moderate possibility that Proxima Cent is not actually in orbit around Alpha Centauri A and B, but with around 10 other stars in the same area of the sky having similar proper motions, then they probably constitute a "moving group" of common origin.