和訳お願いします Possible is the best [教養と学問、サイエンス|言葉、語学|英語]和訳お願いします Possible is the best anyone can say for now. A clearer answer will have to wait for more powerful telescopes to be built. If the answer turns out to be yes, the question of whether 85512 b actually is home to life will depend on many factors. Does 85512 b have any water to start with? Does it have a solid, rocky surface on which life can live? Does it have a cooling cloud layer to avoid overheating from its sun? Nobody knows. It would be an unlikely bit of luck if the newly discovered world did have all the right stuff for life. After all, so many conditions must fall in line. The new world is still a big deal, though. It proves that astronomers now have the technology to find these kinds of planets. Most of the big planet announcements over the past two years have come from the Kepler space mission. The high-powered, orbiting telescope is searching a section of the Milky Way galaxy for earthlike planets by studying regular dips in the brightness of stars. These tiny dips in brightness are created by planets passing in front of their stars as they orbit. The 50 new planets announced in Wyoming were discovered from the ground with a device called the High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher, or HARPS. HARPS uses a telescope at the European Southern Observatory in Chile to look for a star's slight wobble. The wobbles occur when the gravity of an orbiting planet tugs the star one way, then the other. The very first exoplanets were found this way. An exoplanet is a planet that orbits a distant star other than our sun. With so many unanswered questions, it’s still a long shot that 85512 b will turn out to be the first known exoplanet to support life. Even so, its discovery shows how far planet hunting has come. With all of the searches going on worldwide, and with increasingly powerful technologies, it's just the beginning in what could be a series of extraordinary finds.
Scientists & Astronomers are front running the ESA & IAU and letting people know that an Earth 2.0 has been found in Proxima Centauri which is ONLY 4.25 light years away. That is more interesting that all the 100 light year away twin Earth's that Kepler has found.
The hunt for exoplanets has been heating up in recent years. Since it began its mission in 2009, over four thousand exoplanet candidates have been discovered by the Kepler mission, several hundred of which have been confirmed to be “Earth-like” (i.e. terrestrial). And of these, some 216 planets have been shown to be both terrestrial and located within their parent star’s habitable zone (aka. “Goldilocks zone”).
But in what may prove to be the most exciting find to date, the German weekly Der Spiegel announced recently that astronomers have discovered an Earth-like planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, just 4.25 light-years away. Yes, in what is an apparent trifecta, this newly-discovered exoplanet is Earth-like, orbits within it’s sun’s habitable zone , and is within our reach. But is this too good to be true?
For over a century, astronomers have known about Proxima Centauri and believed that it is likely to be part of a trinary star system (along with Alpha Centauri A and B). Located just 0.237 ± 0.011 light years from the binary pair, this low-mass red dwarf star is also 0.12 light years (~7590 AUs) closer to Earth, making it the closest star system to our own.
In the past, the Kepler mission has revealed several Earth-like exoplanets that were deemed to be likely habitable. And recently, an international team of researchers narrowed the number of potentially-habitable exoplanets in the Kepler catalog down to the 20 that are most likely to support life. However, in just about all cases, these planets are hundreds (if not thousands) of light years away from Earth.
Knowing that there is a habitable planet that a mission from Earth could reach within our own lifetimes is nothing shor t of amazing! But of course, there is reason to be cautiously optimistic. Citing anonymous sources, the magazine stated:
“The still nameless planet is believed to be Earth-like and orbits at a distance to Proxima Centauri that could allow it to have liquid water on its surface ? an important requirement for the emergence of life. Never before have scientists discovered a second Earth that is so close by.” In addition, they claim that the discovery was made by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) using the La Silla Observatory‘s reflecting telescope. Coincidentally, it was this same observatory that announced the discovery of Alpha Centauri Bb back in 2012, which was also declared to be “the closest exoplanet to Earth”. Unfortunately, subsequent analysis cast doubt on its existence, claiming it was a spurious artifact of the data analysis.
However, according to Der Spiegel’s unnamed source ? whom they cla im was involved with the La Silla team that made the find ? this latest discovery is the real deal, and was the result of intensive work. “Finding small celestial bodies is a lot of hard work,” the source was quoted as saying. “We were moving at the technically feasible limit of measurement.”
The article goes on to state that the European Southern Observatory (ESO) will be announcing the finding at the end of August. But according to numerous sources, in response to a request for comment by AFP, ESO spokesman Richard Hook refused to confirm or deny the discovery of an exoplanet around Proxima Centauri. “We are not making any comment,” he is reported as saying.
What’s more, the folks at Project Starshot are certainly excited by the news. As part of Breakthrough Initiatives ? a program founded by Russian billionaire Yuri Milner to search for intelligent life (with backing from Stephen Hawking and Mark Zucke rberg) ? Starshot intends to send a laser-sail driven-nanocraft to Alpha Centauri in the coming years.
This craft, they claim, will be able to reach speeds of up to 20% the speed of light. At this speed, it will able to traverse the 4.37 light years that lie between Earth and Alpha Centauri in just 20 years. But with the possible discovery of an Earth-like planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, which lies even closer, they may want to rethink that objective.
As Professor Phillip Lubin ? a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, the brains behind Project Starshot, and a key advisor to NASA’s DEEP-IN program ? told Universe Today via email:
“The discovery of possible planet around Proxima Centauri is very exciting. It makes the case of visiting nearby stellar systems even more compelling, though we know there are many exoplanets around other nearby stars and it is very likely that the Alpha Centauri system will also h ave planets.”・・・続きはこちら⇒Twin Earth discovered Near our Solar System!
