The sixth borough
Scientists find hot new nabe: ‘Earth 2’
Houston, we’ve found Earth 2.0 — the closest planet to our solar system that could be capable of supporting life.
Scientists have pondered for centuries whether a world of aliens could be out there somewhere.
And they now believe that planets like the newly discovered Proxima b, a sphere that is warmed by a small, cool star in the constellation Centaurus, our neighbor in the cosmos, could sustain life as we know it.
But don’t expect ET to be dropping in anytime soon — the planet, about 1.3 times the size of our own, is about four light-years away, which translates to about 25 trillion miles.
And scientists say Proxima Centauri — the red dwarf star it orbits — regularly emits such intense bursts of radiation that whatever life forms that could exist would likely be far underground or deep in a body of water, if there is one.
Still, the eggheads hailed the find.
“This is the discovery of the year and possibly of the decade,” Ignas Snellen, a professor of astronomy at the Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands, told Britain’s The Guardian newspaper.
“It will be our prime laboratory for the search for extraterrestrial life for the decades ahead. We have no idea whether life could exist on this planet, but the circumstances are likely to be much more favorable than on Mars,” he said.
The new world is in what scientists call the “habitable zone,” or “Goldilocks region” of space, an area of a solar system where the temperature is not too hot or not too cold — but just right to sustain liquid water, which is necessary for life to exist
On Earth, life flourished because the planet had both an atmosphere and a magnetic field, which shielded the surface from the most damaging radiation from space.
It’s uncertain yet whether Proxima b has either.
Although Earth-like, the planet would still look pretty alien — it does not have a blue sky, but a perpetually orange one, the scientists said.