Space | Closest Yet 'Earth-Like' Planet Found

Source

http://www.reuters.com/resources_v2/...thead-logo.gif

New planet discovered in Earth's back yard
By Chris Wickham and Irene Klotz
LONDON/CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida | Wed Oct 17, 2012 2:12pm EDT

http://s1.reutersmedia.net/resources...=CBRE89G17Y900
This artist's impression shows the planet orbiting the star Alpha Centauri B, a
member of the triple star system that is the closest to Earth in this image
released on October 17, 2012.
Credit: Reuters/ESO/L. Calcada/N. Risinger (skysurvey.org)/Handou

(Reuters) - Astronomers have found a new planet, the closest yet outside our solar system and just an astronomical stone's throw away at four light years, raising the chances of finding a habitable planet in Earth's neighborhood.

Researchers say the new planet is too close to its sun to support known forms of life, with a surface temperature estimated at 1,200 degrees Celsius (2,192 Fahrenheit). But previous studies suggest that when one planet is discovered orbiting a sun, there are usually others in the same system.

The new Earth-sized planet, announced in science journal Nature by Stephane Udry and Xavier Dumusque at the Geneva Observatory, orbits one of the suns in Alpha Centauri, roughly 25 trillion miles away.

"It's a landmark discovery because it's very low mass and it's our closest neighbor," said Udry. "Its orbit is very close to its star and it must be much too hot for life as we know it but it may well be just one planet in a system of several."

Commenting on the find, University of California astronomer Greg Laughlin said: "This is our back yard, so to find out that planet formation occurred there is just extraordinary."

Since the discovery of the first exoplanets - those outside our solar system - in the early 1990s, more than 800 have been found but this one is the closest to Earth.

Getting there is extremely unlikely in the forseeable future. Laughlin estimates it would take about 40,000 years to travel to the new planet with current propulsion technology.

It was detected using the HARPS instrument on a telescope at the European Southern Observatory's La Silla site in Chile. The device is able to pick up tiny changes in the color of the light coming from a host star as it wobbles under the gravitational influence of orbiting planets.

MINUTE SHIFTS

The gravitational effect in this case is minute, causing it to move back and forth by no more than 51 centimeters (20 inches) per second.

Alpha Centauri is a three-star system consisting of two stars similar to our sun and a faint red star called Proxima Centauri. The planet orbits Alpha Centauri B.

Astronomers have speculated about planets orbiting these suns since the 19th century but small planets like this are hard to find and instruments have only recently become sensitive enough to detect them.

"Our observations extended over more than four years using the HARPS instrument" said Dumusque.

The researchers said they will make their data available to other astronomers to test their findings but in the meantime some remain skeptical.

"Actually, I still have my doubts," astronomer Artie Hatzes at Thuringian State Observatory in Tautenburg, Germany, told Reuters.

Hatzes said the wobble detected in the star could be caused by a series of other factors, including sun spots, so the data need to be tested by other researchers.

"These activity variations have to be filtered from the data before one can extract the signal due to the possible planet," he said. "It could well be that someone else analyzing the same data may come up with a different conclusion. That is why I am not 100 percent certain."

But Dumusque is confident. "We have considered in this analysis all the known possible explanations, including instrumental noise and stellar origin. In the end, the planetary solution is the most likely one."

(Editing by Keith Weir and Mark Heinrich)

and perhaps promise someday to get there.....

Warp drive looks more promising than ever in recent NASA studies
By Brian Dodson

October 3, 2012


The first steps towards interstellar travel have been taken, but the stars are very far away. Voyager 1 is about 17 light-hours distant from Earth and is traveling with a velocity of 0.006 percent of light speed, meaning it will take about 17,000 years to travel one light-year. Fortunately, the elusive "warp drive" now appears to be evolving past difficulties with new theoretical advances and a NASA test rig under development to measure artificially generated warping of space-time.

The warp drive broke away from being a wholly fictional concept in 1994, when physicist Miguel Alcubierre suggested that faster-than-light (FTL) travel was possible if you remained still on a flat piece of spacetime inside a warp bubble that was made to move at superluminal velocity. Rather like a magic carpet. The main idea here is that, although no material objects can travel faster than light, there is no known upper speed to the ability of spacetime itself to expand and contract. The only real hint we have is that the minimum velocity of spacetime expansion during the period of cosmological inflation was about 30 million billion times the speed of light.

The warp effect uses gravitational effects to compress the spacetime in front of a spacecraft, then expand the spacetime behind it. The bit of spacetime within the warp bubble is flat, so that the spacecraft would float at zero-g along the wave of compressed and expanded spacetime. The net effect is rather like surfing, where you are nearly stationary with respect to the wave, but are traveling with the speed of the wave. Whereas many of the theoretical studies consider a warp bubble moving at ten times the speed of light, there is no known limit to the potential speed.

Such a warp bubble could in principle be used to enable subluminal travel (travel slower than light) as well as superluminal travel (travel faster than light). This may seem a silly choice – why travel slow rather than fast? However, it is likely to turn out far easier to achieve a subluminal warp drive for a number of fundamental reasons. Besides, space travel at 90 percent of the speed of light is far superior to anything we currently have on the books.

This sounds too easy, and in many ways, it is. Thus far, all superluminal warp drives require negative energy and pressure to form and maintain the warp bubble. Matter consistent with such properties does not exist in classical physics. While in quantum mechanics there are certain possibilities for negative energy phenomena, they generally do not seem well suited to generate the required warp bubble.

An additional problem is that a great deal of negative energy is required to initiate a warp bubble. For Alcubierre's original model, it would take more negative energy than the total mass of the Universe to equip a small spacecraft to travel at ten times light speed. Fortunately, refinements to the model have resulted in the energy requirements reducing to the mass equivalent of a few hundred kilograms of matter with negative energy. Mind you, we don't know how to get that quantity either, but it feels a more likely prospect.

Matter with negative energy and negative pressure is usually called exotic matter, and we don't know of any. However, another possibility is to use dark energy to expand spacetime – after all, that is how we know dark energy exists, through observing the accelerated expansion of the Universe. Although nearly three-quarters of the mass-energy of the Universe is dark energy, it is spread thinly, at the equivalent of about ten hydrogen atoms for every liter of space. Given this, harnessing dark energy for warp drives might seem an overwhelming task.

That doesn't mean it's impossible however. To put this into perspective, consider magnetism. The interstellar magnetic field is about a nanoTesla, or about one-fifty thousandth of the Earth's field. If this is all we knew of, harnessing magnetism for any practical purpose would seem unlikely. However, a tiny rare earth magnet exhibits magnetic fields 100 million times stronger than the interstellar field. It isn't wise to recklessly eliminate possibilities.

All warp bubbles have unknown difficulties concerning turning them on and off. It isn't that models for this process can't be composed – rather the models are too complex to analyze. In addition, to date warp bubbles are symmetrical, so how do they decide which direction to move? A recasting of the relativistic theory of warp bubbles suggests a solution to this dilemma, but the theoretical analysis appears to be faulty. It isn't clear if the faults can be patched without losing the result.

Other problems with superluminal warp bubble drive include the apparent need to generate the front edge of the warp field, which is moving faster than light. In some cases it becomes impossible to control a superluminal warp drive from the spacecraft within the bubble, which would be embarrassing to all concerned as the ship continued to travel forever, or at least until it hit something. Speaking of hitting something, we presently have no idea what happens if a warp bubble hits an external object.

Many models of superluminal warp bubbles also have visible event horizons which are likely to generate high levels of Hawking radiation. Some researchers believe the spacecraft would be incinerated by this radiation, some believe it would not present a problem. The jury is still out, but it seems likely that such problems can be avoided.


http://www.gizmag.com/warp-drive-bub...stellar/24392/

I laughed when I read the url. Then reminded myself that it's a 'hard G' and not a 'Soft G.'

Its not an "earth like" planet...orbits too close, and its mass is too big. Alas, it is merely the closest planet we know of.

I hope they find me a new home soon. Can't stand being on the same planet as Honey Boo Boo and her family.

When I see photos like this of the stars I think of the TRILLIONS of planets that could exist in between the 84+ Million stars. And that is just ONE patch of the Milky Way galaxy. Billions of other galaxies still out there.

http://img14.picoodle.com/i5ao/acroy..._eba_ucfr3.jpg

Amazing Photo Captures 84 Million Stars in Our Milky Way Galaxy
By SPACE.com Staff | SPACE.com – 9 hrs ago

Astronomers have catalogued 84 million stars at the heart of the Milky Way galaxy using an enormous cosmic photo snapped by a telescope in Chile, a view that is billed as the largest survey ever of the stars in our galaxy's core.

The staggering 9-gigapixel picture was created with data gathered by the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA), an instrument at the European Southern Observatory's Paranal Observatory in northern Chile. The zoomable image is so large that it would measure 30 feet long by 23 feet tall (9 by 7 meters) if printed with the resolution of a typical book, researchers said.

The catalogue derived from the new image contains 10 times more stars than previous studies have provided. It should help astronomers better understand the structure and evolution of our home galaxy, researchers said.

"By observing in detail the myriads of stars surrounding the center of the Milky Way we can learn a lot more about the formation and evolution of not only our galaxy, but also spiral galaxies in general," study lead author Roberto Saito, of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Universidad de Valparaíso and The Milky Way Millennium Nucleus, said in a statement.

The huge new picture probes the Milky Way's central bulge, a concentration of ancient stars found near the core of most spiral galaxies. Getting good looks at this region is not an easy task.

"Observations of the bulge of the Milky Way are very hard because it is obscured by dust," said co-author Dante Minniti, also of Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile. "To peer into the heart of the galaxy, we need to observe in infrared light, which is less affected by the dust."

VISTA was able to do just that, snapping thousands of infrared images that were combined to generate a monumental color mosaic measuring 108,200 by 81,500 pixels. It's one of the biggest astronomical images ever produced, researchers said.

Astronomers identified 173 million different objects in the 9-billion-pixel image, of which 84 million could be confirmed as stars. The rest were distant objects such as galaxies, or they were too faint or blended to be identified conclusively.

Saito and his team then plotted the brightness of each star against its color, creating a color-magnitude diagram with 84 million data points. These diagrams are valuable tools, helping astronomers study star properties such as temperature, mass and age.

"Each star occupies a particular spot in this diagram at any moment during its lifetime," Minniti said. "Where it falls depends on how bright it is and how hot it is. Since the new data gives us a snapshot of all the stars in one go, we can now make a census of all the stars in this part of the Milky Way."

The astronomers are making their data publicly available, so other research teams can use it to make exciting finds of their own.

The team published their results in the August issue of the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.




http://news.yahoo.com/amazing-photo-...115527272.html

Quote:

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Originally Posted by short faced bear

The staggering 9-gigapixel picture

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I'm going to need more RAM.

If any of you are bored and want to play astronomer for a day and try discovering a new planet yourself:

http://www.planethunters.org/

Basically, the way planets are discovered are one of two methods:
1.Gravity...a VERY large planet (jupiter or bigger) that orbits close to a star, actually PULLS the star as it orbits, creating a wobble which is detected by telescopes and imaging.

or 2.When a planet orbits a star, and its orbit is lined up in a way that it passes between the star and us, the star will ever so slightly "dim" as the planet passes (think eclipse, but only a small fraction of it). And this website has tons of data on stars and possible "dims" and needs actual human beings (i.e. YOU) to go through the data and see if any of the dims are due to a planet passing across said star.

The website explains what you need to do and has some practice runs to show you what to look for. But who knows...maybe you just might discover a planet out there.

It's good to hear that we're out there searching for new worlds because the way we're taking care such poor care of this one tells me that someday mankind will need to move to a new address.

So these astronomers are like some kind of inter stellar Century 21 Real Estate Agents right now looking for new properties for us before the old neighborhood goes to hell. :lol-027:

One with a pool and a tropical climate of less than 1200C would be nice. :36_1_68[1]: