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.
Let's visit the planet (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Let's see them aliens! (Score:4)
I don't think humanity on the whole needs any more incentive to think it's special. That type of self-obsessive navel gazing novelty seems to be built into our basic core.
The fact of the matter is, we just don't know and haven't developed our own capabilities to the point where we can make a definitive determination even in our own galactic neighborhood. I won't say there definitely *IS* life out there, but I'm certainly not ready to definitely say there *IS NOT* life out there either. Maybe it's spread out more than what we'd like? Maybe it's better at hiding itself than we'd prefer? Or maybe we really are alone. But until we get a little better at even getting concrete evidence of planets in what we consider the habitable zone, or start visiting even robotically other parts of the universe, we can't say for certain.
It's a lot of fun to speculate, certainly. But at this point that's all any of it is: speculation.
Re: (Score:1)
It's a bit more than speculation. We have been collection a LOT of null results for the past century.
Sooner or later, we have to amend our theories.
Re:Let's see them aliens! (Score:5, Interesting)
As I coincidentally posted this morning in a different forum:
The likelihood that another civilization is detectable is very low, but from what we can tell (from our one known example) life itself may be fairly common. It arose pretty much as soon as it was possible to exist on Earth, but then sat at the level of bacteria for 3 1/2 billion years. Once sex was invented that changed, but still for the next half a billion years sentience seems to have been absent. Finally a few mammals and birds started to develop intelligence and later tools, but still for the next several million years "high technology" consisted of rocks and pointed sticks. Only 10,000 years ago population density finally rose to the point where civilization became possible, but still for the next 9,900 years communication was limited to the distance a message could travel carried by hand (with the obvious exceptions for semaphores, smoke/fire signals and pigeons). Radio was the first communication that could leave the planet's surface, tenuous at first but evolving into powerful broadcast stations. Now, only a century after its origin, our signal is fading again as broadcast radio is abandoned for directed low power signals, and within a few decades we'll be essentially undetectable again.
So any other technological civilization may have a window of a couple of centuries or less during which it could be detected at interstellar distances. Life on another planet which has followed our path would be detectable for 0.0000000375% of its existence.
Re: (Score:2)
The big thing is that 3.5 odd billion years or however long it takes for the lower probability events that led to us to happen. Sex is one, having a nucleus in a cell is another. A lot can go wrong over billions of years and a lot has to go right, from a steady star to a steady liquid water world.
People just can't comprehend how long it has taken us to evolve to this point, the Earth has gone around the galaxy, a distance of 100's of thousands of light years, 20 odd times.
Advanced life is likely rare, with
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Around the turn of the first millennium Europe's second largest export (after furs) was slaves to the Arab and Chinese markets. Arab writers wrote that European slaves were prized because they rarely tried to escape since their new standard of living was so much better than where they originated. We might find life in their dog house something beyond our wildest dreams.
Brain/computer interfaces may give us the ability to communicate with other creatures in the foreseeable future. I already know what my d
Re: (Score:2)
At some point, we have to recognize and start acting like we are kinda special.
Like snowflakes.
Re: (Score:2)
Humans have been acting like we are kinda special since we learned how to control fire.
As for the claim that no other civilizations out there, it is simply not supported by the facts you presented. You have made a reasonable argument to be made that no one reasonable traveling distance. But the distances involved are so huge that your claim is like someone that finally got out of their room, looked around the house, then out the window and decided there is no one else on the planet.
Distance from Earth to
We barely left our planet!!! (Score:2)
The universe is BIG, REALLY BIG. At least wait till we have explored a few hundred galaxies before concluding stuff the universe. At the absolute minimum, wait until we have at least visited another solar system.
So close... (Score:2)
but sooo far away.
How could anything orbit close to Binary system? (Score:3)
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)
Re: (Score:2)
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
The Drake equation is wrong (Score:2)
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
Gas giant, not an Earthlike planet (Score:3)
Re:Gas giant, not an Earthlike planet (Score:5, Insightful)
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...
Re: (Score:3)
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.
-
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Indeed, I've always been intrigued by the idea of Venusian cloud habitats.
Neptune-sized (Score:3)
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!
Cool worlds (Score:3)
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
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3)
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....
Watch out for mind worms... (Score:2)
Where's my survivalist guide when I need it?
Re: (Score:2)
https://www.amazon.com/Hitchhi... [amazon.com]
Only $8.
The Jupiter 2 made it.Nice! (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Confirmation (Score:4, Insightful)
Thanks to the idiots who cancelled Thirty Meter Telescope we wonâ(TM)t get independent confirmation for a while.
Three body problem (Score:2)
I'd imagine figuring out where the sun is would be quite a problem [wikipedia.org].
They Used a Chronograph? (Score:2)
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
Re: (Score:2)
Reporters rely on spell checkers much more than they should
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
That's not true. It'll just take a while to get there.
No time like the present to start the trip.
Re: (Score:3)
or maybe it would be quicker to wait for a faster ship
Seems like a probe might be able to make the trip and send back signals within a human lifespan though. The current fastest manmade object is a solar probe travelling at about 10^5m/s I think and interstellar operation was not in its design
Re:lol (Score:4, Insightful)
Here's a thought. We could send a probe now, and if we develop a faster engine in the future we can send another then.
I'm cool with that.
Re: (Score:2)
Here's a thought. We could send a probe now...
If only Elon had set up Starman with autopilot and a GPS.
Re: (Score:2)
If only Elon had set up Starman with autopilot and a GPS.
Galactic Positioning System?
Re: lol (Score:2)
The concept already exists. You can use well-known pulsars to orient yourself in space.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
And? So what? We're approaching the Singularity, where humanity merges with its technology. Once that happens we become essentially immortal, and if one is immortal 200 years is no longer an obstacle.
Re: (Score:2)
You still need the energy to get up to speed and maintain your ship on the voyage and slow down when you get there. There's only so much energy in a gram of matter and not much of it is accessible through fission or fusion. Antimatter might work if you can figure out how to harvest the energy that is released as gamma rays and how to make a lot of antimatter.
Re: (Score:3)
Most of the matter and energy in the universe is in interstellar space, it's just very, very diffuse. Start from the Oort cloud, gather together two or three proto-cometary bodies, and you now have literally cubic kilometers of mass to convert into whatever energy state is useful to get you moving.
" not much of it is accessible through fission or fusion" with current technology.
FTFY. I seriously doubt that our technology is going to stagnate over the next few centuries.
Re: (Score:2)
You still need to use energy to accelerate those proto-comets. The equations of fission and fusion only allow so much energy to be extracted. Perhaps there is new physics that we're not aware off but until then, we're left with the fact that e=mc squared and it takes X energy to to accelerate a gram of matter to whatever speed. I'm not a physicist and to lazy to work out the math but my understanding is that with fusion, the best you are going to do is, by fusing a gram of matter, accelerate a gram of matt
Re: lol (Score:1)
Contrary to what you may have seen in the science fiction movies you confuse with reality, we are nowhere near the singularity.
Re: (Score:3)
I encourage people to read 'The Singularity Is Near' by Ray Kurtzweil (at least the first half, the second half is just more documentation of the first part). Even though it's over a decade old his predictions are pretty close to reality so far (nanotech has turned out to be more difficult and AI less difficult than he thought.) If you don't like reading the Singularity University videos on YouTube are pretty good and give an outlook based on a variety of viewpoints.
Re: lol (Score:1)
And I like to encourage people not to read books by nutty futurists who haven't got the faintest grasp on reality or understanding of what the things they're write about actually involve.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Where's the fun in that?
Re: (Score:1)
At 66 million miles per hour, far beyond anything we are currently capable of, it would take ~200 years to reach Alpha Centauri. At 100 times the speed of light, it is 2,000 years to the center of our galaxy and our nearest neighbor, Andromeda, is 20,000 years away.
I'm curious. With present technology, what interstellar speed are we currently capable of? So I did the research and the math.
A quick calculation shows the distance as (to 3 significant figures, as per the article) 4.13*10^13 km.
Wikipedia's article on interstellar probes lists Voyager 1 with a speed in 2017 of 16.95 km/s.
A divided by B = 2.43*10^12 seconds or 77,200 years at constant velocity, not counting for the fact that it's going the wrong way.
Proposed probes listed in the article seek cruising speed
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
It's sometimes called the "wait calculation". There are analyses and equations to describe the problem, although like other statistical anyses, reality can correct the estimates quite harshly.
https://www.researchgate.net/p... [researchgate.net]
Re:lol (Score:4, Insightful)
We should have set off for Alpha Centauri years ago but there's no money in it so we didn't.
Re: (Score:3)
Any mission to Alpha Centauri we could have launched before now
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Actually we do have the technology to send a probe. Not a large one, but a bunch of little ones.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:2)
And what do those little probes use for energy? Energy that allows them to slow down at the end of the voyage, even using a solar sail requires energy to orient it, energy to explore after getting there, and the energy to communicate their findings back.
Re: (Score:2)
There's a link to the Wikipedia article about Breakthrough Starshot in my post. They don't slow down, they flash through the system at about 1/5 the speed of light, which allows them to reach Alpha Centauri in about 20 years. If you don't like reading here are a couple of YouTube videos.
Quick summary:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Steven Hawking, Yuri Milner and others:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, I read the article after posting. I know I should have read and then posted. You still have the problem of energy to keep the probes operating, a little chunk of radioactive stuff that produces enough energy is not going to have the longest half life and it takes a lot of energy to communicate back to the Earth.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, if we ever get to the point of being able to make the journey, we should be capable of living off of asteroids, comets or such.
The way I see it, colonizing the Solar System is the first step, and at that point we don't need a planet and most systems probably have debris for resources in orbit.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Yea, the Moon is a start. Still, just learning how to keep a closed eco-system functioning for decades or centuries is going to take a lot of learning.
By the time we're ready to take the trip, who knows what type of society will exist. A space society is going to be different, likely less free as the society really can't afford for people to have the freedom to open the airlock because space is a conspiracy.
Re: (Score:2)
It's a relatively short hop from the surface of the Moon back to Earth. Make all our mistakes on the Moon, and later setting up a base/colony somewhere like Mars, or even in the asteroid belt, will require less figuring-out.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, a lot of truth in that.
Re: (Score:2)
Well.. It's tough. We could have sent a probe to orbit AC, which would be cool, but limited value verses observations we can make of it from earth. Now we are getting close to finding another planet to orbit in it's habitable zone. That's a bigger deal.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah but if it took 200 years to get there we could be getting really useful data in 50 years when it's a quarter of the way there. We could be gathering data on the interstellar medium while AC would be getting closer and clearer all the time.
We have space programs that ran for decades already. it's not too much of a stretch to consider a program that won't be realized fully for 200+ years. Even if it's not finished by the agency, nation, or organization that initiated it.
The probe would be our most advanc
Re: (Score:2)
We don't have the technology now to do anything meaningful toward that end. The most we can hope for is to send a probe in that general direction that will take hundreds of years to get maybe get there with no hope of ever hearing from it again. It's like tossing a brick overboard in the middle of the ocean in order to explore a specific square foot of the ocean floor thousands of feet below. You have no hope of actually hitting the right spot and you will never know that it did and you will never know w
Re: (Score:2)
About 20 years travel time at 20% the speed of light, check out the Breakthrough Starshot program. Unless you think that our technology is at its absolute apogee and will never get better there's absolutely no reason why we wouldn't hear back. When Viking was launched the technology didn't exist to communicate with it at its current distance, by around 1990 it did. The radar signal from Arecibo (prior to its deliberate destruction by conservative's neglect) could have been detected by a similar telescope
Re: (Score:2)
Go ahead, and don't forget to drop a postcard.
Re: (Score:2)
Even with today's technology, a trip to Alpha Centauri would "only" take 20 years. 90 years if we want to enter orbit. It would be more interesting if Sirius had a habitable zone planet - that would take only 69 years to get to orbit.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Here, if you're actually interested.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Stephen Hawking, Yuri Milner and others:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Re: (Score:1)
Technical challenges
(some fancy science fiction)
According to The Economist, at least a dozen off-the-shelf technologies will need to improve by orders of magnitude.
Not really what Id call "today's technology"
Re: (Score:2)
No, but certainly could be "this decade's technology" if resources were directed that way, and Milner has the resources.
Re: (Score:1)
even 'we could have this in 10 years, maybe, if we throw wads of cash at it now' is a very, very long shot from 'today's technology'.
Look all research is commendable and if some small portion of what they aim for materializes in the next 10 years, for this application or more likely other uses, great.
I would however not hold my breath for gigawatt scale laser arrays in orbit, or interstellar spacecraft with masses measured in grams to be flight ready in 10 years time, even with massive funding. Compared
Re: (Score:2)
We went from the Wright Flyer to international air travel in 25 years, from the IBM PC to a computer on every desk in 15 years, from sub-orbital rockets to the Moon in 10 years. You don't think that building a gigawatt laser (on Earth, not on orbit, at least get your talking points straight) to launch dirt-cheap light sails (which already exist and have been tested) is possible? I think you completely misunderstand the arc of technology. Capabilities in technology tend towards an exponential curve, and w
Re: (Score:1)
No it's you who has the 'arc of technology' wrong. As impressive as the advances you quote were, they were fast-paced evolutions of a known principle, with lots of relatively plannable engineering problems in between. You simply cannot apply these examples to any given new aspiration and expect the same kind of development. You cannot, for example, with any kind of confidence develop a concrete plan to have a space elevator in now+X years, the same way they planned the moonshot. It's a different class of pr
Re: (Score:2)
There must be a habitable planet at Alpha Centauri, else why would we send the Jupiter 2 there back in 1997?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
the spacepope has great hopes now besos has retired to focus on tek to shoot his ex into space