CONFIRMATION OF A NEARBY HABITABLE PLANET
IT’S been an incredibly busy year in space exploration full of amazing discoveries, the capturing of unprecedented imagery, the emergence of bold new theories and the occasional mission failure.
For some it might seem like humanity has lost its appetite for adventurous space missions since the glory days of the Apollo missions and the Moon landing. But nothing could be further from the truth as 2016 provided some truly monumental moments from our continued push into the final frontier.
Here are some of the most exciting.
CONFIRMATION OF A NEARBY HABITABLE PLANET
Thanks to NASA’s Kepler Telescope which has been busily scanning 150,000 stars for signs of orbiting bodies in recent years, we’ve discovered that on average every star has at least one planet if not many more circling it.
In May, the US space agency revealed it had found a further 1284 new planets, more than doubling the number of known exoplanets in the universe. And the most important part: nine of them could theoretically be habitable.
“This announcement more than doubles the number of confirmed planets from Kepler,” said Ellen Stofan at the time, chief scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “This gives us hope that somewhere out there, around a star much like ours, we can eventually discover another Earth.”
Scientists said the calculations made this year suggest there could be tens of billions of habitable planets in the Milky Way.
Fast forward to August, and astronomers think they have the best candidate for a nearby Earth-like planet, or “Second Earth”.
The planet dubbed Proxima B is orbiting our closest star named Proxima Centauri, a red dwarf star that’s just four light years away.
Proxima B is orbiting in the “goldilocks zone” of Proxima Centauri, which means it’s close enough to the star that water would not freeze, but far away enough so that water wouldn’t boil.
Now scientists are trying to figure out a way of getting a robotic probe to the planet to see if it is home to alien organisms, although sadly it is not a mission many of us will live to see.
