A Planet Similar To Earth, I’ll Pack My Bags And Meet You There….
There was a recent article which I will show a brief snippet from:
Earth may have a twin orbiting one of our nearest stellar neighbors, a new study suggests.
University of California, Santa Cruz graduate student Javiera Guedes used computer simulations of planet formation to show that terrestrial planets are likely to have formed around one of the stars in the Alpha Centauri star system, our closest stellar neighbors.
Now.. that information is interesting, and as I finished reading the article, I see the first comment:
Wow. Not only should we be able to observe such planets (earth-like or otherwise), but if we detected any we could realistically send a probe or two to study them. If it pans out it might be the most exciting extra-solar planet discovery in history.
There are several other comments along these same lines.. now what i want to know is.. do people not realize how far away this is? Alpha Centauri A & B are roughly 4.35 light years away from us. Proxima Centauri is slightly closer at 4.22 light years.
The Voyager spacecraft is on an interstellar mission. It is traveling away from the Sun at a rate of 17.3 km/s. If Voyager were to travel to Proxima Centauri, at this rate, it would take over 73,000 years to arrive. If we could travel at the speed of light, an impossibility due to Special Relativity, it would still take 4.22 years to arrive!
So yeah.. lets send some probes there… come on people.. get real. We could send new probes there every 50 years, and in 1,000 years we could try to send another probe, and we could probably beat all the other probes there. (If humans still exist on Earth by then).
