Earth-like planet found 25 trillion miles away
Rocky sphere orbits nearest star to Earth, Proxima Centauri
WASHINGTON — After scanning the vast reaches of the cosmos for Earth-like planets where life might exist, astronomers have found one right next door.
A planet that’s rocky like Earth and only slightly bigger has been discovered orbiting Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to our solar system, scientists reported Wednesday. It is probably in the not-too-hot, not-too-cold Goldilocks Zone where liquid water — a key to life — is possible, if the planet has an atmosphere.
And it is a mere 4.22 lightyears from Earth, or nearly 25 trillion miles.
It is easily the closest potentially habitable planet ever detected outside our solar system — and one that could be reachable by tiny, unmanned space probes before the end of the century, in time for some people alive today to witness it.
The international team of astronomers that announced the discovery did not actually see the planet but deduced its existence indirectly, by using telescopes to spot and precisely calculate the gravitational pull on the star by a possible orbiting body — a tried-and-true method of planet-hunting.
“We hit the jackpot here,” said Guillem Anglada-Escude, an astrophysicist at the Queen Mary University of London and lead author of a study on the discovery in the journal Nature . He said the planet is “more or less what we have on Earth.”
They’re calling it Proxima b, and while it could be like Earth in the important features, it would probably still look very alien.
It is 4.6 million miles from its red dwarf star, or just one-twentieth of the distance between Earth and the sun, creating an incredible orange sky with no blue, so it looks like a perpetual sunset. And if that’s not different enough, the planet circles its star so quickly that its year is about 11 days.
The planet doesn’t rotate, so one side is always facing its star and the other side is always dark and colder. It is bombarded with X-rays and ultraviolet light, but that wouldn’t necessarily be fatal to life, since life can exist underground, scientists said.
Scientists in the past 20 years have found more than 3,000 planets outside our solar system, or “exoplanets.” And more than 40 of them seem to be in the habitable zone.
But this one “basically puts a giant flashing neon sign on the nearest star saying: See this right here,” said study co-author R. Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution for Science.
It would take more than eight years for an energy pulse or radio signal traveling at the speed of light to go there and back. NASA’s New Horizons probe, the fastest spacecraft launched, left Earth hurtling toward Pluto at about 36,000 mph. At that speed, it would take more than 78,000 years to get there.
Earlier this year, an allstar team of scientists and business leaders including Stephen Hawking announced Breakthrough Starshot, a project to send out hundreds of light-powered space probes that would weigh about a gram, travel at one-fifth the speed of light and send pictures back to Earth.
Breakthrough Starshot executive director Pete Worden said organizers are hoping to include Proxima in their plans, but it would take 20 years to get there.