First Habitable Planet Confirmed.

Source

Twenty Light-years away, a veritable "Stone's throw" in an astronomical sense, lies Gliese 581, and the fourth planet, dubbed Gliese 581d (They're astronomers, not writers) is (one of several actually, but this is the interesting one) a planet that falls into the habitable zone for it's star.


Gliese 581d is believed to have a mass around 7times that of Earth, but a lower rotational velocity results in a gravity of about twice that of Earth.


Two things strike me as peculiar, first has already been said, this Planet is actually very close to us. While it would still take 300,000Years to arrive using conventional propulsion, on a cosmic scale, it might as well be down the block.

Second, Gliese581(The star) is a Red Dwarf (Tiny, with low output), Red Dwarf stars are not exactly the powerhouse of fusion our Star is, it was originally thought that the likeihood of planets forming within a Red Dwarfs theoretical habitation zone was beyond unlikely, and damn near impossible, once again showing the world, that when dealing with things on a galactic scale, there's no such thing as a statistical impossibility.

It's just a shame Obama pretty much shut down our space program.

Very interesting.

As someone who has been fascinated by the discovery of extrasolar planets since the first ones were found back in the 90s, this is very interesting.

However, I'm curious as to where you got the idea that Obama has pretty much shut down the space program. According to

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Budget

, spending was higher during the 90s/Clinton years, and got much lower during the Bush years (surprise, surprise). It actually appears to be projected to go up now, unless I'm reading the chart wrong.

thats cool! would like to look into it.. source?

im an idiot.. i retract that last line!

Haha, with double gravity can you imagine how the typical north american would look? Your nuts at 60 would be around your knees :P

Come on guys! It's only a mere 20 light years away!

It would be really bizarre living in constant sun light even if it was a red haze.

This article looks familiar. I think I've seen a similar story, but finally a new topic!

/cheer

I'm looking at it from a different angle though. Whatever administration can pump however much cash into the program itself, but at the end of the day, if we're not actually pushing the boundary of exploration, or at least a realistic plan to do it, we don't have a Space Program. This means getting back to the moon and, hopefully Mars one day. As of now, we're not even sending the Shuttles up, and the Astronauts we send to the International Space Station, have to ride along with the Cosmonauts on the Russian rockets.

Seriously, we're carpooling to space...

I believe Obama cut space funding.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/forum/2011-04-29-Obama-says-goodbye-space_n.htm

Abyssea? o.O~!?

Yeah the red sky kinda had me thinking about Aby too :D

Private industry... we needed the government for space back during the infancy of space travel... but now my bet is on private industry. If NASA even took a small percent of the money they spent on shuttle launches, which was pardon the pun, astronomical, and put it into private industry research we'd be much further along. Just my two cents but government funded space travel is not the way of the future.

Oh back to the topic... pretty interesting about the planet though. Also still amazing to sit and think about how big the universe is and that 300K years of conventional travel is considered close.

Um... We just sent a shuttle up a few days ago.

I wonder if Jesus saved this planet too???

What's the point of looking for a habitable planet when you don't have the means to travel to it?

Privatizing space is a scary road that will likely lead to the militarization of low-orbit and the eventual blocking of humans from traveling into space. Once it's economical (Even if just through scale) to exploit the wealth of the solar system.


And it was the last one.

Given time, there are very possible methods which we could develop to travel to it. In the article it explains that a ship traveling near light speed (not nearly possible with today's technology, but feasible in some distant future) would take 20 years to reach it (that's 20 years time for those NOT in the ship). Taking relativity into account, those on the ship would experience a MUCH shorter travel time.

I don't think humans would ever be able to survive that kind of travel.

Endeavor still has one launch left.

I just did a huge college paper on the possibilities of traveling to Mars and terraforming options. The only real logistical problem (ignoring cost) to long distance space travel is that any ship going farther than the moon has to be large enough to be self sufficent. That means power generation, food growing, waste recycling, ect. For a ship that large it would have to be built in orbit as it could likely never be propelled to escape velocity. It also means the ship could not land on the destination planet, a drop ship would have to be used. Despite all this, with international co-operation like we saw on the space station a manned mission to Mars could be launched within 10 years given current technology. The chinese government is actually planning a mission to the moon in the next few years and a potental moon research station.

Is that true? I thought it was 20 years for those ON the ship, as experienced after time dilation.

I.e. many thousands of years back on Earth.

Ion Drives for long-distance travel are practical, at least for automated drones.

Cold Fusion has been demonstrated as possible, though still impractical.

But, more importantly, we've managed to actually capture anti-protons, so antimatter annihilation based engines can provide many times the power of Fission or Fusion, with much less "Space" for fuel.



Conventional methods are incredibly slow, It's totally reasonable to expect that to be more like 100,000 with the theories of emerging technology. That's still a long time, if somehow we can reach near the Speed of Light though, 20 years is nothing, to colonize an entirely new world.

Oh, man, the whole concept of time being different outside of earth still blows my mind.

This is exciting though ~

I thought it was that it would take 20 years for us but they won't have aged 20 years. Instead, time slowed down from their perspective and it would only take a "short while". But still 20 years for us?