Alpha Centauri Has A Planet! – 213 days old

[ZemaTalon]

Huge news! Astronomers have announced they have found a planet orbiting one of the stars making up the most famous star in the sky: Alpha Centauri, the closest star system to our own! At 4.3 light years distant, this is far and away the closest exoplanet known… and of course, it has to be.

eso_alphacentauriexoplanet.jpg

Alpha Centauri is a triple-star system, composed of a binary star, two stars much like the Sun – one slightly larger and hotter, called Alpha Centauri A, and the other slightly smaller and cooler, called Alpha Centauri B – orbited themselves by a red dwarf (called Proxima Centauri) much farther out.
The planet orbits close in to Alpha Cen B, and is technically called Alpha Centauri Bb – planets have lower case letters assigned to them, starting at b. Its mass is only 1.13 times the Earth’s mass, making this one of the lower mass planets yet found! But don’t get your hopes up of visiting it – its period is only 3.24 days, meaning it must be only about 6 million kilometers (less than 4 million miles) from its star. Even though Alpha Cen B is a bit cooler than the Sun, this still means the planet is baking hot, far too hot to sustain any kind of life as we know it, or even liquid water.
Still. Holy crap! A planet for Alpha Cen. Wow.

Read the rest at Discovermagazine.

If only we had hyperdrive already

[Bad Haircut]

Another cool find.

If only we had hyperdrive already

meh. they're already sat on all that exotic propulsion tech. never see the light of day till all the black stuff has gone.

[BitBender]

* BitBender doesn't think avocado's will grow there.. no Salmon, either

But it never ceases to amaze me that scientists frame the possibly of other life around the framework in which we exist...

[ZemaTalon]

* BitBender doesn't think avocado's will grow there.. no Salmon, either

But it never ceases to amaze me that scientists frame the possibly of other life around the framework in which we exist...

Guess I'll hav to bring plenty of them then

Yeah, I guess they just go by what they already know & assume it'll be the same elsewhere. Kind of like how most all the science fiction aliens look like us, but maybe with some facial ridges.

[Bad Haircut]

But it never ceases to amaze me that scientists frame the possibly of other life around the framework in which we exist...

Privately usually more than willing to think out of the box. Publicly, forget it; funding, credibility, etc, etc. Terrified sheep. The only branch that you're "allowed" to publicly breathe and utter such things is theoretical Physics. Where funnily enough, the notion of multiple dimensions is mandatory because the Mathematics tells them so. So it's no coincidence you get people like Michio Kaku turning up at large 'fringe' exopolitics events.

[BitBender]

"Michio Kaku" - The face of physics in the media... I am not fond of all his postulations. Lotta late night science channel shows where I'd drifted off to my parallel space listening to him...

[Dark Angel]

Guess I'll hav to bring plenty of them then

Yeah, I guess they just go by what they already know & assume it'll be the same elsewhere. Kind of like how most all the science fiction aliens look like us, but maybe with some facial ridges.

Now that depends on what you read.