First atmosphere found on Earth-like planet in habitable zone of distant star

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy4kdd1e0ejo

30•neversaydie•1h ago

Comments

jimbokun•31m ago

48 light years is in our back yard.

Close enough that we could probably develop a probe to get there in the next few centuries and check it out. What are the current popular candidates for propulsion systems capable of accelerating to near the speed of light?

JMKH42•29m ago

laser propelled solar sails are the only plausible solution at the moment and it is not a given that even that is possible. Lots of engineering challenges there that may not have solutions.

other ideas: 1. be way more patient 2. anti matter based propulsion (more out there than solar sails) 3. nuclear bomb based propulsion

One issue is as you get to these speed little bits of dust will anhillate the probe, so you need some kind of shielding, raising the mass budget, making it all the harder. A solar sail has to be able to survive holes getting poked it in it and still working, etc.

WarmWash•22m ago

If humans can't make the trip, what's the point besides maybe satiating curiosity in a few hundred years from now?

sebastianconcpt•18m ago

Claude: give me all the schematics and operations manual of a production grade starship that can travel faster than light. Make no mistekaes.

0x59•16m ago

I wouldn't bet on and as I understand theory allows a shorter routes. Major caveat is weve never observed them and their existence doesn't guarantee they're traversible.

What's exciting to me is that the existence of such a planet provides fuel for more research into the field.

baron816•14m ago

Interstellar travel is probably not ever going to happen. Even if we have antimatter propulsion (which is still probably not practical even under ideal circumstances), we’re still talking hundreds of years of travel time to get to somewhere like this star.

This also goes for aliens visiting Earth. Interstellar travel is just so impractical that I don’t think anyone has come on safari to Earth.

stevenwoo•6m ago

The political challenge of funding a laser program just for research for centuries seems just as daunting - lacking the capability for some self repairing, self healing devices, the automated or (lobster-ai) probe going to stars is just as far away as when Charles Stross first wrote about it in Accelerando some twenty years ago. Given the collapse of political norms, looking back, the decades long research projects of the US space program appear to be soon relics of the past.

jonathaneunice•16m ago

Astrophage

1970-01-01•14m ago

Back yard meaning we can see it but never touch it. If the ship to get there was ready today, it would get there in the year one-million? Back yard is Mars, Venus, moon. And I'm being generous with Mars and Venus.

DaveZale•8m ago

need to get small fusion reactors online, then many options blossom.

And work out safe systems for hibernation, maybe rotate the crew in shifts

Oh yeah this is the stuff of science fiction coming to life

criddell•2m ago

[delayed]

dijksterhuis•7m ago

[delayed]

andy_ppp•6m ago

Probably more likely that we work out how to fold spacetime than we get there in anything like a high enough percentage of the speed of light - the fastest object we ever made travelled at something like ~0.064% * C so we are looking at ~750 years with current technology and presumably we'd need to switch on the probe in 3/4 of a millennium and figure out how to slow it down and get it into some sort of orbit around the planet.

750 years is hard for me to get excited about even as a vampire.

buildbot•4m ago

Honestly a near millennia long expedition would be very cool, and doesn’t seem too long on the scale of space stuff.

quaintdev•2m ago

If we design a probe that travels at speed of light it would reach there in 48 years and send back what it's seen but it would take another 48 years. It would take multiple generations of scientists to work on this project. The longest we have worked on are Voyager projects. Today can our governments or corporations be that focussed on a project that has insane timelines.

astral_drama•23m ago

How far will we peer into the unknown? What will we find out there?

singpolyma3•12m ago

> The gas detected in the atmosphere is helium, which would not be able to support life

Nonsense. You mean not able to support terrestrial life.

jojogeo•4m ago

Would be briefly hilarious though as the squeaky response made it back through to mission control.

Nicholas_C•4m ago

I was skeptical about that as well so I googled it and:

>Helium cannot support life because it is a chemically inert noble gas. It does not form the complex, stable molecular structures (like carbon chains) required for biology. Unlike oxygen, it cannot be used by living organisms for cellular respiration to generate energy, making it an asphyxiant.

However, maybe we are projecting our current understanding of biology and shouldn't rule it out. I'm not a scientist so I have no idea.

mekdoonggi•3m ago

We should build a solar lens telescope. By the time we're ready to use it, we'll have a bunch of candidates to point it at.

sgt•2m ago

In theory we can then get 100 meter resolution on alien worlds. That would be insane.

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