Something around Alpha Centauri, the closest star in our Solar System, has caught the eyes of astronomers. They think that it could be a planet similar to Neptune but warmer, which is not “particularly remarkable”; what’s remarkable is the planet’s distance from its star.
… Even though it would be shrouded in gas and essentially bereft of any surface to stand on, its distance from its star would place it in the so-called “habitable zone” where liquid water could exist. No other planet has been directly seen in this starlight-drenched region around any other star, because of the associated glare.
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The new findings were reported Wednesday in the journal Nature Communications. They come from an international consortium of planet hunters called Breakthrough Watch, via the inaugural science run of a one-of-a-kind “direct imaging” instrument called NEAR (New Earths in the AlphaCen Region), which operates on the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile. The effort is named for its chief funding organization, Breakthrough Initiatives—the brainchild of the Silicon Valley billionaire Yuri Milner, who also sponsors related projects to search the heavens for signs of alien civilizations and to send pint-sized interstellar probes to the Alpha Centauri system.
Learn more about this potential discovery over at Scientific American.
Cool!
(Image Credit: Skatebiker/ Wikimedia Commons)
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