Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by martyb on Wednesday December 20 2017, @11:27AM   Printer-friendly
from the say-hi-to-Vir-Cotto-for-me dept.

NASA thinks that the technologies needed to launch an interstellar probe to Alpha Centauri at a speed of up to 0.1c could be ready by 2069:

In 2069, if all goes according to plan, NASA could launch a spacecraft bound to escape our solar system and visit our next-door neighbors in space, the three-star Alpha Centauri system, according to a mission concept presented last week at the annual conference of the American Geophysical Union and reported by New Scientist. The mission, which is pegged to the 100th anniversary of the moon landing, would also involve traveling at one-tenth the speed of light.

Last year, Representative John Culberson called for NASA to launch a 2069 mission to Alpha Centauri, but it was never included in any bill.

Meanwhile, researchers have analyzed spectrographic data for the Alpha Centauri system and found that small, rocky exoplanets are almost certainly undiscovered due to current detection limits:

The researchers set up a grid system for the Alpha Centauri system and asked, based on the spectrographic analysis, "If there was a small, rocky planet in the habitable zone, would we have been able to detect it?" Often, the answer came back: "No."

Zhao, the study's first author, determined that for Alpha Centauri A, there might still be orbiting planets that are smaller than 50 Earth masses. For Alpha Centauri B there might be orbiting planets than are smaller than 8 Earth masses; for Proxima Centauri, there might be orbiting planets that are less than one-half of Earth's mass.

In addition, the study eliminated the possibility of a number of larger planets. Zhao said this takes away the possibility of Jupiter-sized planets causing asteroids that might hit or change the orbits of smaller, Earth-like planets.

(For comparison, Saturn is ~95 Earth masses, Neptune is ~17, Uranus is ~14.5, and Mars is ~0.1.)

Also at BGR and Newsweek.

Planet Detectability in the Alpha Centauri System (DOI: 10.3847/1538-3881/aa9bea) (DX)


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 20 2017, @06:54PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 20 2017, @06:54PM (#612447)

    there's a problem:
    "conventional socio-economic" technology, like reaction-mass engines, that require to mine a earth-bound resource, or a part of the earth itself and then eject or dump it into some general direction of outerspace is not going to cut it (for the distance).

    one could re-phrase it as profit taking by (very) slowly reversing the formation of the earth, that is the accumulation of dust and debris into a planet.

    i believe there are gigantic forces to be harnessed from nature and it doesn't require a huge machine and gazillion of people working together.
    the problem is, what happens during the transition time, where this technology becomes common knowledge but with no plan (what to do with this new discovered energy) and the human mind still stuck in the old way of thinking?

    it would be like a regular sized ant that can now lift your whole house. what would the ants do?
    would they throw each other onto other planets (and solar-systems) or would they not care and just start a ant-world-war with everything else, including whatever supports ant-life to becoming collateral damage?

    Starting Score:    0  points
    Moderation   +1  
       Interesting=1, Total=1
    Extra 'Interesting' Modifier   0  

    Total Score:   1  
  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by c0lo on Wednesday December 20 2017, @07:49PM

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday December 20 2017, @07:49PM (#612482) Journal

    "conventional socio-economic" technology, like reaction-mass engines, that require to mine a earth-bound resource, or a part of the earth itself and then eject or dump it into some general direction of outerspace is not going to cut it (for the distance).

    Theoretically, a single ejected proton would be enough to move the entire Earth in another star system - if you could accelerate the proton enough.
    You know that m = m0/sqrt(1-v2/c2) guarantees that the proton will have the mass of Earth if its speed is close enough to c.

    --
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford