I co-wrote this spotlight with my boyfriend, Victor Lucas. He graduated in December 2015 from American University with a BA in International Studies. He had a regional focus on Asia and a specialty in Environmental Sustainability and Global Health. He also studied abroad at National Chengchi University in Taiwan. I just completed my degree requirements at American University in July with a BA in International Studies. I had a regional focus on Latin America and a specialty in Global Inequality and Development. I studied abroad at University of Auckland in New Zealand and at Universidad Adolfo Ibanez in Chile.

We source all of our images from public domain image resources, such as those in this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Public_domain_image_resources

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An Interplanetary News Spotlight On Proxima B : The Discovery and Possibilities for the Future

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Imagine you are from a small island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Lets say Vanuatu. Somehow, through the crazy forces that decide how life works, you end up finding yourself in a small town in Alaska. You're thousands of miles away from home, and you never expect to see somebody from Vanuatu again. For your first day in this new town you decide to bake yourself some Welcome to Alaska cookies, but you realize you didn't take any sugar with you from back home (I mean you just moved thousands of miles, its understandable you didn't want to carry sugar all that way). So you decide to go meet the neighbor and ask to borrow some. You go next door, knock, your neighbor opens the door.....and it turns out that he is from Vanuatu as well! While there are thousands of Vanuatuans on Earth, the likelihood of there being one right next door to you seemed slim to none. That is how it has been with the discovery of the exoplanet circling Proxima Centauri, Proxima B.

Proxima Centauri - Image Source

The Discovery of Proxima B

Over the previous decades, scientists have discovered thousands of exoplanets (planets from outside our solar system), as well thousands of those which could possibly be in the "habitable zone" of a star (ie. not too close and not too far, allowing for the possibility of organic life). As the leader of the team who made the discovery, Guillem Anglada-Escudé, wrote in the journal Nature:

"We know there are terrestrial planets around many stars, and we kind of expected the nearby stars would contain terrestrial planets. This is not exciting because of this. The excitement is because it is the nearest one." Source

How We Found It

The team that found Proxima B was working on a project called Pale Red Dot, who's aim was to "show to the public how scientists are working to address a major question that could affect us all, namely are there Earth-like planets around the nearest stars?" Source

As a fun little aside, the project name is an homage to Carl Sagan. As the project leaders put it:

In 1990, Voyager 1, on its trek towards interstellar space, sent back a picture of the Inner Solar System on which the Earth occupied less than a pixel. This image of Earth was called Pale Blue Dot, and inspired the late Carl Sagan’s essay ‘Pale Blue Dot : A vision of the human future in Space’, which in turn has been the source of inspiration for a generation of exoplanet hunters. Given that Proxima Centauri — or just Proxima — is a red dwarf star, such a planet would show reddish tints. Even if successful, we will only obtain information about its orbital period and mass — even less than Voyager 1’s pale blue pixel… at least for now! Source

La Silla, the observatory in Chile that discovered Proxima B - Image Source

For some decades now, scientists have been searching for new exoplanets through a method known as Doppler spectroscopy, colloquially known as The Wobble Method. Instead of looking for individual exoplanets, scientists study the light that they are capturing from the stars themselves (in this case Proxima Centauri) and analyze it to see if there are any shifts in which part of the spectrum that the light falls on. If the light shifts towards the blue end of the spectrum, it means that the star is moving away. If it the light shifts towards the red end of the spectrum, it means it is moving closer. As individual planets can be quite massive, their orbit around a star can cause the star to move in relation to the Earth, thus causing those shifts in the light spectrum we perceive. If those shifts happen repeatedly and in a steady pattern, scientists can assume that there is an exoplanet causing those shifts.

Here is a wonderful video that does an amazing job explaining it:

What We Know

1. Proxima B is at least 1.3 times the mass of Earth
   a) Because of this, scientists believe that it is earth-like (as in it is made up of rocks or metals and has a hard surface, unlike gaseous planets like Jupiter or Saturn. They also tend to have a molten heavy metal core and topological features similar to those of Earth). Source
2. A year on Proxima B is 11.2 days long (ie. it takes 11.2 days to orbit around Proxima Centauri) Source
3. Proxima Centuari is a red dwarf star, meaning it is only about 12% of the mass of the sun and 1/600th the luminosity
   a) That means that it cannot be seen with the naked eye from earth
   b) Despite the fact that Proxima B is only 5 million miles from Proxima Centauri, Proxima B is likely far colder than Earth because it's star is so much smaller (in comparison, Earth is 93 million miles from the Sun, and even Mercury is 36 million miles away) Source

Possibilities for the Future!

This is all very exciting for those interested in astrology (and probably even for those who aren't)! While we already knew about thousands of exoplanets, and even thousands of exoplanets that could potentially hold life, this exoplanet is the first such one that humanity could conceivably reach in the next century. Current methods of space travel, such as the ships that humans have sent to the moon and other planets, have travelled between 20,000 and 33,000 miles per hour. At that rate, it would take at least 20,000 years for a human spaceship to reach Proxima Centauri....far too long! However, even now there are projects in development for addressing those issues.

For example, Stephen Hawking, Russian Billionaire Yuri Milner, and Mark Zuckerberg are currently working on a project known as Breakthrough Starshot that is attempting to develop miniature spacecraft the size of post stamps that could travel potentially 100 million miles per hour....shortening those 20,000 years to something more like 20 years.

A short clip showing how Breakthrough Starshot might function

To read more about that project, check out this link:
http://www.vox.com/2016/4/12/11415516/stephen-hawking-alpha-centari-breakthough-starshot-yuri-milner

While Proxima B might be out of reach at the moment, remembering that we weren't even able to fly 120 years ago, and now we are able to send space ships to Pluto(!) tells you how quickly we are advancing. Who knows what we might accomplish a century from now?

Sources

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/25/science/earth-planet-proxima-centauri.html?
http://www.space.com/33827-proxima-b-closest-earthlike-exoplanet-strange-facts.html
http://www.space.com/17028-terrestrial-planets.html
https://palereddot.org/
http://www.vox.com/2016/4/12/11415516/stephen-hawking-alpha-centari-breakthough-starshot-yuri-milner
http://www.vox.com/2016/8/24/12628030/proxima-b-eso-new-planet-astronomers