Today's awesome Science!(tm) news.

[theweaselking]

Quoth Phil Plait:

A new paper just published by a team of planet-hunters shows that theoretically speaking, not only can Alpha Centauri have planets, it should have them.

A bit of background: Alpha Cen is actually a binary star, with one star much like the Sun (called Alpha Cen A) and the other a bit cooler (Alpha Cen B). A third star, Proxima Centauri, orbits very far out from the central binary.

Alpha Cen is the closest star system to the Sun that we know of, at a distance of 4.3 light years, or roughly 40 trillion km (24 trillion miles). Since it’s close, it’s one of the most common stars used in science fiction.

Planet formation around one star in a binary can be tricky; the disk from which the planets form can be disrupted by the presence of another star. However, a team of astronomers including Javiera Guedes and Greg Laughlin used computer simulations to see how planets could form in the Alpha Cen system specifically. They did what’s called a Monte Carlo test, running the simulation over and over again with slightly different input parameters every time (like, disk density, composition, and so on).

Remarkably, what they found is that they got a terrestrial (rocky) planet about the size of Earth orbiting Alpha Cen B every single time, and in many cases was at the right distance from the star to have liquid water.

Comments

[kjn]

Beware the mind worms!

[dracodraconis.livejournal.com]

Two more interesting points on the article: all three stars in the system are approximately the same age as our sun so if there are planets they should be about the same age as ours. Second, being our nearest stellar neighbour, they should be easily found with currently-available technologies (like COROT).

[wise-man.livejournal.com]

I love hearing neat stuff like this. Stupid not-very-well-funded NASA and it's only giving us tidbits of cool stuff every once in a while.