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A low-mass planet candidate orbiting Proxima Centauri
- unlit_spark 7y agoI get excited every time I hear about a possible habitable planet, but after 10 seconds I remember that this means nothing and will mean nothing for a few centuries as we won't be able to reach any other planet that's billions of kilometers away.
- robin_reala 7y agoNot in person, but it would be an interesting target for Breakthrough Starshot.
- iamgopal 7y agosome novel much have been written about two civilisations multiple light years apart, communicating using messages that have latency of years...any examples ?
- lmm 7y agoVernor Vinge predicted a future galactic usenet - unreliable messages that might take a while to arrive, or need to go via multiple possible paths, are what usenet was built for.
- m4rtink 7y agoMany collonial empires worked with such latency before trains, steam ships, telegraph and wireless comunication became available.
- semi-extrinsic 7y agoI'm currently reading the Engines of Light trilogy by Ken MacLeod. In that universe, there is no FTL travel nor communication, but starships can travel literally at the speed of light. There are "spheres of influence" spanning some tens of lightyears, and the information delay between worlds is indeed a plot element.
- sten 7y agoThe communication delay is one of the key plot elements in The Three Body Problem books.
- sfifs 7y agoIt's a major plot element in Forever War.
- unlit_spark 7y agoDidn't know about about this project but I read more in the past hour and it seems reachable. Too bad it already has a destination. Hope I live to see the message it comes back from this.
- consumer451 7y agoWe can't visit, but new imaging systems like LUVOIR may give us information on what is happening there with a decent amount of detail. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Ultraviolet_Optical_Infrared_Surveyor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Ultraviolet_Optical_Infr...
- dvdkhlng 7y agoAlso the ELT (claimed to be operational starting in 2025) [1] will already allow study of the atmospheric composition of extrasolar planets (I guess that means spectroscopy). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremely_Large_Telescope https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremely_Large_Telescope
- brudgers 7y agoLUVOIR can provide up to about 25 km imaging resolution in visible light at Jupiter The planet is ~10,000 times further away. Back of envelope puts the resolution at 250,000km. The earth is 12,000km in diameter. At 5.8x Earth mass and assuming similar density it would be a bit more than twice as wide and 25,000km diameter is easy to work with giving the planet a width of 1/10th of a "pixel". That's not nothing. In fact it's quite a lot relative to nothing. But it's still a long way from a well resolved image.
- brudgers 7y agoEdit Oops. Forgot to apply the inverse square law. 10,000x further means resolving features of 10^10 greater area.
- lazyjones 7y agoSome sort of cryogenic hibernation for space travel is not unrealistic within the next few decades. https://www.airspacemag.com/space/hibernation-for-space-voyages-180962394/ https://www.airspacemag.com/space/hibernation-for-space-voya...
- melling 7y agoAnd the Singularity is Near: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singularity_Is_Near https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singularity_Is_Near
- Cthulhu_ 7y agoEven with that I hope we get to see missions where they send unmanned craft in that direction in my lifetime. I mean it's still only Voyager and New Horizons (afaik) that have been sent on a trajectory out of our own solar system on purpose. (faux edit: looking up the wiki page, it's the 5th to escape the solar system). An unmanned mission would probably have to go even faster, and probably has to be a bigger craft with better on-board power supply (with backups) and a big communications array. Maybe it would even need similar craft following it after a while to form a chain of communications relays on their way out.
- s_kilk 7y agoIt is extremely unrealistic within the next few decades.
- Jaruzel 7y ago
- iso947 7y agoWe’ve reached Neptune - over 4 billion km away, and Pluto is over 5bn, so billions is a relative walk in the park. Sadly Proxima Centauri is 40,000 billion km away, so a bit further to go. At 500m km/year our fastest probes would take 80,000 years to get there.
- lolive 7y agoFortunately we can send emails at the speed of light!!! (of course, the alien race living on Proxima will have to be fluent in english, ASCII, TCP/IP, SMTP and a few other prerequisites in order to receive our messages in proper conditions).
- bryanrasmussen 7y agoEmail certainly isn't delivered at the speed of light.
- mrec 7y agoCongratulations! You're one of today's lucky 10,000. http://web.mit.edu/jemorris/humor/500-miles http://web.mit.edu/jemorris/humor/500-miles
- bryanrasmussen 7y agohttps://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5321#section-4.5.3.2 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5321#section-4.5.3.2 anyway given that their network was 100% switched, and "time to connect to a lightly-loaded remote host on a nearby network would actually largely be governed by the speed of light distance to the destination rather than by incidental router delays." I'm thinking it doesn't apply to email delivery to Proxima Centauri or basically most places. on edit: though with a long enough distance to the destination it would be pretty close to speed of light as the various times to respond etc. would be negligible.
- bmgxyz 7y agoI didn't know about this and enjoyed reading it. What a pleasing little story. Thanks.
- moonbug 7y agoBut the Square Kilometer Array will probably be operational in your lifetime. That instrument will be powerful enough to tell us a lot about such near objects.
- p1mrx 7y ago> billions of kilometers Luxury. Proxima Centauri is 40 trillion kilometers from here.
- skrause 7y agoYeah, we've already reached planets that are billions of kilometers away. Pluto is never closer than around 4.3 billion km.
- JimboOmega 7y ago1.5 AU from Proxima (so 50% farther than earth is from the sun), which is itself much less luminous than the sun? I'd imagine it's a very, very cold planet and receives many times less light than earth does. Neat to find a planet, but it doesn't sound like one humans would want to have much to do with.
- m4rtink 7y agoHey, more mass for habitats and other stuff once we get there. :-) Planets are mass inefficient anyway. ;-)
- eloff 7y agoYeah, people keep focusing on Mars as a habitat, but it makes so much more sense to build in orbit around earth. So much closer when you need something and your internet latency would be great. But Bezos has the right idea, keep people on the planet and put the things you don't want on the planet in space rather, like industry. Even that makes little sense until you're sourcing the resources from outside earth.
- LatteLazy 7y agoInterestingly it's also a "flare star", so it occasionally gets 10 times brighter for a few minutes (over the whole spectrum, including xrays and gamma). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flare_star https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flare_star
- ourlordcaffeine 7y agoI wonder if this combined with a greenhouse atmosphere could keep it warm enough between flares. If it has life, I wonder if the flare cycle would be just as important as the seasonal cycle on earth.
- Rusky 7y agoReminds me of this Vernor Vinge novel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Deepness_in_the_Sky https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Deepness_in_the_Sky Set around a star that alternates between bright and dim, with a species that hibernates during the dim periods.
- sylens 7y agoTrisolaris?
- danielmain 7y agoThe Trisolarian are comming !!
- Apocryphon 7y agoSid Meier's Proxima Centauri
- deepaksurti 7y agoRelated HN discussion I guess [1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21901268 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21901268
- nafey 7y agoThe Trisolaran home world