“It would be very strange that there would be no life on other planets. I would be very surprised” – Sputnik World

Space

05:00 31.10.2016updated at 05:09 31.10.2016) shortened URL

Next b, located in the orbit of proxima Centauri —the closest star to the sun, ” was recently discovered by a team of researchers led by Anglada-Escudé. The importance of this discovery is due to the fact that the Next b has features similar to those of the Earth, which makes it an extrasolar planet in a firm candidate to host some form of life.

“we started from a set of 200 or 300 stars, one of which was precisely that of proxima Centauri. It is a star that had already been studied previously without positive results, but we still appeared very interesting for their size. We know that if we want to find planets like the Earth, which is our goal, it will be easier to detect in stars of this type. So we started to analyze and process mathematically previous data. Separate did not say anything, but when you put them together there was an extraneous signal. Was the planet,” explained Anglada-Escudé.

despite the fact that the instruments of observation that are available today do not allow us to see the new planet, the astrophysicist has explained that “When a planet is in orbit around a star causes a small periodic oscillation, gravitational influence, in its movement around the center of the system. And that movement we can detect. That happens also in our system. The existence of the Earth, for example, moves 10 centimeters per second the movement of the Sun”.

According to the researcher, the key to determine if Next b home life will be to know if the extrasolar planet has an atmosphere or not, and to do this we will have to wait about ten years to build new telescopes “with a mirror of 42 meters in diameter.”

The idea of sending a probe to the new planet seems to still have to wait, because with the current technology, a spacecraft could take “tens of thousands of years.” In addition, the ongoing movement to which they are subjected the bodies of stars would make it quite likely that “when you would have reached [the ship] was not there [Forthcoming b]“.

“I am confident that in 20 or 30 years, things change. Maybe with micronaves, as some propose,” added Anglada-Escudé.

Asked about the possibility of life in the Universe beyond the Earth, the astrophysicist said that “it would be very strange that there would be no life on other planets. I would be very surprised. I think that may be a universal process. A lot of the chemistry that made possible the life on Earth exists in the interstellar medium. I hope that we can soon answer that question.”

however, he has shown little optimistic as to the possibility of intelligent life “That is a very different question. We shall have to see if that life has prospered, has become a technological society, and has not been extinguished. If there were many civilizations like we have found”, he said.