Showing posts with label Proxima Centauri. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Proxima Centauri. Show all posts

Friday, April 28, 2017

Astronomers have discovered a new planet named LHS 1140b with the greatest chances of sustaining life. '' It's the most exciting planet ''

This artist's impression shows the exoplanet LHS 1140b, which orbits a red dwarf star 40 light-years from Earth and may be the new holder of the title 'best place to look for signs of life beyond the Solar System'. Using ESO's HARPS instrument at La Silla, and other telescopes around the world, an international team of astronomers discovered this super-Earth orbiting in the habitable zone around the faint star LHS 1140. This world is a little larger and much more massive than the Earth and has likely retained most of its atmosphere. Credit: ESO/spaceengine.org
An exoplanet orbiting a red dwarf star 40 light-years from Earth may be the new holder of the title 'best place to look for signs of life beyond the solar system.' Using ESO's HARPS instrument, and other telescopes, astronomers discovered a 'super-Earth' orbiting in the habitable zone around the star LHS 1140. This world is larger and more massive than the Earth and has likely retained most of its atmosphere. This makes it one of the most exciting targets for atmospheric studies.

The newly discovered super-Earth LHS 1140b orbits in the habitable zone around a faint red dwarf star named LHS 1140, in the constellation of Cetus (The Sea Monster). Red dwarfs are much smaller and cooler than the Sun and, although LHS 1140b is ten times closer to its star than the Earth is to the Sun, it only receives about half as much sunlight from its star as the Earth and lies in the middle of the habitable zone. The orbit is seen almost edge-on from Earth and as the exoplanet passes in front of the star once per orbit it blocks a little of its light every 25 days.

"This is the most exciting exoplanet I've seen in the past decade," said lead author Jason Dittmann of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (Cambridge, USA). "We could hardly hope for a better target to perform one of the biggest quests in science -- searching for evidence of life beyond Earth."

"The present conditions of the red dwarf are particularly favourable -- LHS 1140 spins more slowly and emits less high-energy radiation than other similar low-mass stars," explains team member Nicola Astudillo-Defru from Geneva Observatory, Switzerland.

For life as we know it to exist, a planet must have liquid surface water and retain an atmosphere. When red dwarf stars are young, they are known to emit radiation that can be damaging for the atmospheres of the planets that orbit them. In this case, the planet's large size means that a magma ocean could have existed on its surface for millions of years. This seething ocean of lava could feed steam into the atmosphere long after the star has calmed to its current, steady glow, replenishing the planet with water.

The discovery was initially made with the MEarth facility, which detected the first telltale, characteristic dips in light as the exoplanet passed in front of the star. ESO's HARPS instrument, the High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher, then made crucial follow-up observations which confirmed the presence of the super-Earth. HARPS also helped pin down the orbital period and allowed the exoplanet's mass and density to be deduced .

The astronomers estimate the age of the planet to be at least five billion years. They also deduced that it has a diameter 1.4 times larger than the Earth -- almost 18,000 kilometres. But with a mass around seven times greater than the Earth, and hence a much higher density, it implies that the exoplanet is probably made of rock with a dense iron core.

This super-Earth may be the best candidate yet for future observations to study and characterise its atmosphere, if one exists. Two of the European members of the team, Xavier Delfosse and Xavier Bonfils both at the CNRS and IPAG in Grenoble, France, conclude: "The LHS 1140 system might prove to be an even more important target for the future characterisation of planets in the habitable zone than Proxima b or TRAPPIST-1. This has been a remarkable year for exoplanet discoveries!" [4,5].

In particular, observations coming up soon with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope will be able to assess exactly how much high-energy radiation is showered upon LHS 1140b, so that its capacity to support life can be further constrained.

Further into the future -- when new telescopes like ESO's Extremely Large Telescope are operating -- it is likely that we will be able to make detailed observations of the atmospheres of exoplanets, and LHS 1140b is an exceptional candidate for such studies.

Notes

[1] The habitable zone is defined by the range of orbits around a star, for which a planet possesses the appropriate temperature needed for liquid water to exist on the planet's surface.

[2] Although the planet is located in the zone in which life as we know it could potentially exist, it probably did not enter this region until approximately forty million years after the formation of the red dwarf star. During this phase, the exoplanet would have been subjected to the active and volatile past of its host star. A young red dwarf can easily strip away the water from the atmosphere of a planet forming within its vicinity, leading to a runaway similar to that on Venus.

[3] This effort enabled other transit events to be detected by MEarth so that the astronomers could nail down the detection of the exoplanet once and for all.

[4] The planet around Proxima Centauri is much closer to Earth, but it probably does not transit its star, making it very difficult to determine whether it holds an atmosphere.

[5] Unlike the TRAPPIST-1 system, no other exoplanets around LHS 1140 have been found. Multi-planet systems are thought to be common around red dwarfs, so it is possible that additional exoplanets have gone undetected so far because they are too small.


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Wednesday, December 14, 2016

Australian Radio Telescope Parkes Joins $100 Million Search for Alien Life

The Parkes radio telescope in Australia is the third telescope to begin searching for signs of intelligent alien life as part of the $100 million Breakthrough Listen project. Credit: CSIRO


Updated today 20/05/2020

$100 million search for intelligent alien life just added a big arrow to its quiver.

Breakthrough Listen has begun using the Parkes radio telescope in Australia to scan the heavens, representatives of the ambitious, decade-long project announced Monday (Nov.7).

Parkes, Narrabri radio telescopes to be upgraded to improve Space Connect


The Parkes dish becomes the third telescope to be employed by Breakthrough Listen, joining the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia and the Automated Planet Finder at Lick Observatory in Northern California


"The addition of Parkes is an important milestone," billionaire entrepreneur Yuri Milner, founder of the Breakthrough Initiatives, which include Breakthrough Listen, said in a statement. "These major instruments are the ears of planet Earth, and now they are listening for signs of other civilizations."


The Parkes radio telescope can tilt 60° from vertical and would take 15 minutes to perform a 360° rotation. photo: wikipedia.org

The first Breakthrough Listen observations for the Parkes dish came Monday, when scientists turned the telescope toward the Proxima Centauri star system to look for possible signals from alien civilizations.


Proxima Centauri is the closest star to the sun, lying just 4.2 light-years away from Earth's star. This past August, astronomers announced the discovery of an Earth-size planet orbiting in Proxima Centauri's "habitable zone," the just-right range of distances where liquid water could exist on a world's surface.

It's therefore possible that the planet, known as Proxima b, may be capable of supporting life as we know it, scientists have said.



"The chances of any particular planet hosting intelligent life-forms are probably minuscule," Andrew Siemion, director of the University of California, Berkeley's SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Research Center, said in the same statement.

"But once we knew there was a planet right next door, we had to ask the question, and it was a fitting first observation for Parkes," Siemion added. "To find a civilization just 4.2 light-years away would change everything."

Proxima Centauri is also the target of Breakthrough Starshot, a Breakthrough Initiatives effort that aims to blast tiny, sail-equipped "nanoprobes" toward the system at 20 percent the speed of light using powerful lasers. Milner and a group of researchers, including famed cosmologist Stephen Hawking, announced Breakthrough Listen in July 2015. Over the next 10 years, the $100 million endeavor aims to search the 1 million stars closest to the sun, as well as the 100 nearest galaxies to the Milky Way, for possible SETI signals.



The 210-foot-wide (64 meters) Parkes dish, which is operated by Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), lies near the town of Parkes, in the state of New South Wales. The radio telescope famously helped relay live video of the Apollo 11 moon landing back to Earth in July 1969, a role featured in the 2000 film "The Dish."

Breakthrough Listen representatives also announced last month that the project would be teaming up with China's new Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) — the world's largest radio telescope — to coordinate SETI observations.


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Monday, October 31, 2016

Another '' Habitable Planet Proxima B'' this exoplanet has important water reserves

Significant water reserves were discovered exoplanet Proxima b, Swiss scientists say. Proxima b could be the closest planet outside the Solar System, a telluric exoplanet, which is in the habitable zone of the star Proxima Centauri.

Proxima b has the same specific features Earth, it can be considered akin to Earth and has significant reserves of water, having dimensions substantially similar to Earth.


Habitable Proxima-b Planet Found Next Door to Milky Way  photo: youtube

All this comes in support of the theory of a life on distant Proxima b exoplanet, say researchers at the University of Berne Swiss. They conducted measurements and necessary research and assume exoplanet Proxima b is slightly larger than Earth, then it reached conclusions that about 90% of the mass of the exoplanet is hard rock specific mountain area and 10% is water, specific oceans. Proxima b is a duplicate of Earth.

According to researchers who study planetary science, small planets are among the best candidates for the role of "second Earth", where life can exist. As a result, studies on such objects will be continued and expanded, according to researchers, reports RIA Novosti news agency.



Recently scientists announced that the star next to the star Proxima Centauri was also invented the closest exoplanet to Earth, which closely resembles the Sun, which was noted potentiometers training cycle dark points.

Remember that Proxima b exoplanet was discovered by researchers this year using spectral analysis method. Spectral analysis is a method of physical research composition of substances by examining its spectrum of radiation.

According to the study published, these variations indicate the presence of a planet, performing a complete orbit around the star in 11.2 days Proxima Centauri. Proxima b exoplanet it is almost 7.5 million kilometers or 0.05 AU of the star (about 5% of the distance from Earth to the Sun).



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