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Space Science

There's a Tantalizing Sign of a Habitable-Zone Planet in Alpha Centauri (technologyreview.com) 116

An international team of astronomers has found signs that a habitable planet may be lurking in Alpha Centauri, a binary star system a mere 4.37 light-years away. It could be one of the closest habitable planet prospects to date, although it's probably not much like Earth if it exists. From a report: The new findings: The Alpha Centauri system's potential to host life-bearing worlds has always intrigued scientists, but no known exoplanets have ever been established there -- in part because the close proximity meant it was too bright for astronomers to really narrow in on any planetary objects in the area. But in a paper published in Nature Communications on Wednesday, an international team of astronomers using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile found a bright thermal imaging signal coming from the habitable zone of Alpha Centauri A. The signal was derived through Near Earths in the Alpha Center Region (NEAR), a $3 million project supported by the ESO and Breakthrough Watch. The latter is an initiative backed by Russian billionaire Yuri Milner to look for Earth-size rocky planets around Alpha Centauri and other star systems within 20 light-years of us. NEAR was able to push forward upgrades to the VLT that included a thermal chronograph, which can block stellar light and look for heat signatures coming from planetary objects as they reflect the light from their star. It found the signal around Alpha Centauri A after analyzing 100 hours of data.
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There's a Tantalizing Sign of a Habitable-Zone Planet in Alpha Centauri

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  • by ozduo ( 2043408 ) on Wednesday February 10, 2021 @05:21PM (#61048712)
    Do some crop circles then piss off
    • by jmccue ( 834797 )
      I do not know, you might really upset Londo Mollari and he will come here with is battle cruiser.
  • but sooo far away.

  • by aberglas ( 991072 ) on Wednesday February 10, 2021 @05:40PM (#61048772)

    The A and B stars come within 36 AU of each other every few years. That would produce massive gravitational confusion for anything trying to orbit either of them.

    Certainly would be an odd place, with a second dim sun that comes and goes, much brighter than the moon I would imagine.

    (There are known planets on Proxima Centauri, but that is far away from A and B)

    • by cusco ( 717999 )

      Ran into this yesterday about Breakthrough Listen.
      https://spectrum.ieee.org/aero... [ieee.org]

      In 2019, we published a paper in the Astronomical Journal, detailing our search across 1,327 nearby stars. While we detected tens of millions of narrowband signals, we were able to attribute all of them to satellites, aircraft, and other terrestrial sources. To date, our most promising signal is one at 982 MHz collected in April 2019 from the nearby star Proxima Centauri. The signal is too narrow for any known natural phenome

      • Or at least misleading. He missed out the most critical factor if you are looking for little green men. Namely

        L1: How long would little green men broadcast.
        L2: How long would the robots that replace them broadcast.

        I have no idea about L2. But we know that L1 is about 200 years, +/- 100 years. We are roughly half way there on Earth, after just 60 years of software development.

        Are robots alive? Can submarines swim? I don't know. But I do know that robots are essentially just software, so they can trav

  • by sbszine ( 633428 ) on Wednesday February 10, 2021 @06:00PM (#61048824) Journal
    According to TFA, it's a gas giant orbiting in the habitable zone, not something actually habitable by humans. Think Neptune but warm.
    • by starless ( 60879 ) on Wednesday February 10, 2021 @07:10PM (#61049064)

      According to TFA, it's a gas giant orbiting in the habitable zone, not something actually habitable by humans. Think Neptune but warm.

      Except if it has an Earth-sized moon...

    • by cusco ( 717999 )

      Why would the clouds not be habitable? If we can live in space we can live in clouds.

      https://phys.org/news/2016-01-... [phys.org]

      With a mean radius of 24,622 ± 19 km and a mass of 1.0243×1026 kg, Neptune is the fourth largest planet in the solar system. All told, it is 3.86 times the size of Earth and 17 times as massive. But, being a gas giant, it has a low density of 1.638 g/cm3. All of this works out to a surface gravity of 11.15 m/s2 (or 1.14 g), which again is measured at Neptune's cloud tops.
      -

      • by sbszine ( 633428 )
        Yep. I guess the argument against it would be that Venus is much closer for a cloud habitat. But you're right, it's possible.
  • by Dasher42 ( 514179 ) on Wednesday February 10, 2021 @06:02PM (#61048832)

    Quoth the technologyreview article: "The new signal would suggest it’s the size of Neptune. That means we’re not talking about an Earth-like world but a warm gas planet five to seven times larger than Earth."

    A gas giant in a habitable zone? What if it has moons? I think the reason we don't hear so much talk about exomoons is that they'd be so hard to distinguish with our current technology, not that they don't offer interesting possibilities.

    Pros: you automatically get a reprieve from tidal locking to the star, though the day/night cycle would the length of the orbit, with a huge gap for the gas giant eclipsing the sun. At a certain sweet spot, comparable to Callisto's orbit around Jupiter, the gas giant's magnetic field might shield the moon without itself irradiating it.

    Cons: The tidal forces could be rough on habitability. Plus, being close to a large gravity well might draw additional meteor bombardment.

    This is layman's speculation; I don't have the mans at hand to run the calculations. I can't wait for the scientific community to have some hard evidence to work on though!

    • There's a youtube channel called Cool Worlds (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGHZpIpAWJQ-Jy_CeCdXhMA) that is focused mostly on exoplanets and exomoons. Indeed the principal scientist is very interested in exomoons (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFMZBd04mOo)

      "The Cool Worlds Lab (http://coolworlds.astro.columbia.edu), based at the Department of Astronomy, Columbia University, is a team of astronomers seeking to discover and understand alien worlds, particularly those where temperatures are cool enough f

      • Thank you so much for that recommendation! Cool Worlds is really one of the brightest gems of transmitted science I've seen, not just because of eye candy, but because of the rigor and labor to expand our horizons. What a great channel! It made my day.

      • by jjbenz ( 581536 )
        That cool worlds channel looks pretty cool. I'll have to check it out.
    • the day/night cycle would the length of the orbit, with a huge gap for the gas giant eclipsing the sun

      Huge gap? less than five hours of a seventeen day orbit (worst case, of course) for Callisto, as an example of that sort of thing....

  • Where's my survivalist guide when I need it?

  • Danger will Robinson its a gas giant , Send Dr. Smith to he surface to check it out.
  • Confirmation (Score:4, Insightful)

    by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Wednesday February 10, 2021 @06:51PM (#61049006)

    Thanks to the idiots who cancelled Thirty Meter Telescope we wonâ(TM)t get independent confirmation for a while.

  • I'd imagine figuring out where the sun is would be quite a problem [wikipedia.org].

  • How reliable is a report by someone who does not know the difference between a chronograph and a coronagraph?

    chronograph [ kron-uh-graf, -grahf ]
    noun
    1. a timepiece fitted with a recording device, as a stylus and rotating drum, used to mark the exact instant of an occurrence, especially in astronomy.
    2. a timepiece capable of measuring extremely brief intervals of time accurately, as a stopwatch able to record fractions of a second as well as elapsed time.
    verb (used with object)
    3. to time by means of a chr

    • by cusco ( 717999 )

      Reporters rely on spell checkers much more than they should

      • by jbengt ( 874751 )
        I guess they need a dictionary-checker in their word processors, too, then.
        • by cusco ( 717999 )

          Yeah, the general purpose spell checker is pretty useless once you get outside the regular business vocabulary. Even the Firefox spell checker, which one would think should contain some technical terms, thinks that Novell is a misspelling of Nowell, Lowell, or Novel.

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