Alpha Centauri, Nearest Star, Has Earth-Sized Planet

By Ned Potter
@NedPotterABC
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Oct 16, 2012 7:54pm

Alpha Centauri, Nearest Star, Has Earth-Sized Planet

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Artist's conception of planet orbiting Alpha Centauri B. Image: ESO/L. Calcada

How many science fiction stories have been written about Alpha Centauri, the closest star system to our own?  How many serious scientists, in their quest to determine just how lonely we are in the universe, have wondered whether there are planets there, only four light-years away?
The first results are in — and yes, there is at least one planet orbiting Alpha Centauri B, one of the three stars clustered together there.  European astronomers, using a 3.6 meter telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile, report it is remarkably small — about as massive as Earth.  Worlds that small have been beyond earthlings’ capacity to detect them until just very recently.
Let’s get some details out of the way quickly.  The newly found planet is probably hellish, only about 4 million miles from its host star (we’re 93 million miles from ours). It’s also fast, completing one orbit — one “year” — in only 3.2 of our days.
For now, the most remarkable thing about the planet, say the astronomers, is that they found it at all.  It is much too distant to be seen directly.  Instead, they watched the planet make its star wobble slightly, pulled around by the planet’s gravity as it circled from one side to the other.
Their measurements showed the star moved from side to side at a top speed of 1.8 km (about 1.1 miles) per hour — “about the speed of a baby crawling,” they said.
“It’s an extraordinary discovery and it has pushed our technique to the limit,” said Xavier Dumusque of the Geneva Observatory in Switzerland, who is lead author of the paper reporting the find in this week’s edition of the journal Nature.
So the astronomers were able to detect the little world over a distance of 25 trillion miles, but just barely.  They kept watching for four years until they were sure.
It’s hardly a twin of Earth, but it is a neighbor of sorts, one more sign that the Milky Way galaxy is thick with planets.

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Alpha Centauri, Nearest Star, Has Earth-Sized Planet

Starting about 1958 when I was 10 years old I started reading first Robert Heinlein's books and then Isaac Asimov's books and others. Since both Heinlein and Asimov had engineering and scientific backgrounds what they mostly wrote about was a projection of actual technological possibilities rather than fantasy. In fact Asimov also wrote many scientific and historical works in addition to science fiction. 

So, finally reading about actual planets being found around Alpha Centauri our nearest sun and star to our own solar system is very comforting to that 10 year old reading those books who still lives inside of me even today with thoughts of future human space adventures and colonization of other worlds (like the human race has always done).

My experience as an intuitive of the human race is that we genetically engineer ourselves to successive planets so that we can better survive in those environments and have always done this for likely millions and possibly billions of years already. Imagine Earth sort of like Hawaii and we are like the Tahitian Sailors of old looking for new islands in the Pacific (Space) to live on. So, earth was like a new Hawaii for us to find a way to live on. And so we did. (At least so far). 

So, if we can manage overpopulation, degrading soil for growing food, global warming etc. then we can continue here. Otherwise, we have to go find another planet or two to continue to survive as a species.