Welcome! These forums will be deactivated by the end of this year. The conversation continues in a new morph over on Discord! Please join us there for a more active conversation and the occasional opportunity to ask developers questions directly! Go to the PS+ Discord Server.

Alpha Centauri has a planet

12 posts / 0 new
Last post
Tue, 2012-10-16 17:07
#1
Extrasolar Angel Extrasolar Angel's picture
Alpha Centauri has a planet
http://www.eso.org/public/announcements/ann12072/ Rumors are flying very high with this one. We will see. Edited, it has been now confirmed, our neighbor has a planet. http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=25109
—
[I]Raise your hands to the sky and break the chains. With transhumanism we can smash the matriarchy together.[/i]
Top
Tue, 2012-10-16 18:35
Extrasolar Angel Extrasolar Angel's picture
http://www.space.com/18089
http://www.space.com/18089-earth-size-alien-planet-alpha-centauri.html "The star system closest to our own sun hosts a planet with roughly Earth's mass and may harbor other alien worlds as well, a new study reports. Astronomers detected the alien planet around the sunlike star Alpha Centauri B, which is part of a three-star system just 4.3 light-years away from us. The newfound world is about as massive as Earth, but it's no Earth twin; its heat-blasted surface may be covered with molten rock, researchers said."
—
[I]Raise your hands to the sky and break the chains. With transhumanism we can smash the matriarchy together.[/i]
Top
Mon, 2012-11-05 04:34
rfmcdonald rfmcdonald's picture
On the incredible coolness of Alpha Centauri Bb
Karl Schroeder made the point at his blog http://www.kschroeder.com/weblog/colonizing-alpha-centauri-the-least-and... that if worse came to worse and Bb was the only planet anywhere in the Alpha Centauri system, it could still serve as a material base for a space-dwelling human civilization there. It's not likely that it is, though. It'll be some time before astronomers are able to determine if there are other planets, but the tendency is apparently for systems with one rocky planet to have multiple rocky planets. Odd that the Titanians have launched a mission to Barnard's Star, and are about to launch for Proxima, but no mention is made of Alpha Centauri proper.
Top
Tue, 2012-11-06 10:06
Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture
rfmcdonald wrote:Odd that the
rfmcdonald wrote:
Odd that the Titanians have launched a mission to Barnard's Star, and are about to launch for Proxima, but no mention is made of Alpha Centauri proper.
Maybe they have found a nicer planet at Barnard? Sure, M-class stars are dim, but you can have tidally locked planets in the life zone. Or there could be a warm gas giant with several potentially habitable moons. Or maybe... they suspect there is something "off" about AC.
—
Extropian
Top
Tue, 2012-11-06 14:16
Extrasolar Angel Extrasolar Angel's picture
rfmcdonald wrote:Karl
rfmcdonald wrote:
Karl Schroeder made the point at his blog http://www.kschroeder.com/weblog/colonizing-alpha-centauri-the-least-and... that if worse came to worse and Bb was the only planet anywhere in the Alpha Centauri system, it could still serve as a material base for a space-dwelling human civilization there. It's not likely that it is, though. It'll be some time before astronomers are able to determine if there are other planets, but the tendency is apparently for systems with one rocky planet to have multiple rocky planets. Odd that the Titanians have launched a mission to Barnard's Star, and are about to launch for Proxima, but no mention is made of Alpha Centauri proper.
Thank you for this interesting link. Indeed any planet-no matter the type, represents some kind of resource or stop over for potential interstellar voyages. This one isn't as bad as it could be, although not the best either. Doesn't matter-if there are asteroids and comets then its all potential explorers need(hopefully there is more) Bernard's Star was for long time considered to have planets, and was target of proposal design of Deadalus probe. As to authors-exoplanet research is very dynamic-they probably don't want to give information that will be inconsistent with reality in 2-3 years.
Arenamontanus wrote:
Sure, M-class stars are dim, but you can have tidally locked planets in the life zone. Or there could be a warm gas giant with several potentially habitable moons.
Here's a nice idea for settled tidally locked planet after centuries of lost contact with Earth http://iainfluff.deviantart.com/#/d4ii6ib
Quote:
Or maybe... they suspect there is something "off" about AC.
Some have proposed that AC planetary system is very lacking in water. Bernard's Star as far as I remember was thought to be composed of two gas giants(at least), which should provide suitable source of hydrogen and probably H20 too either through natural or artificial means.
—
[I]Raise your hands to the sky and break the chains. With transhumanism we can smash the matriarchy together.[/i]
Top
Wed, 2012-11-07 04:24
Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture
Barnard is also likely a halo
Barnard is also likely a halo star: it is moving through our neighbourhood very fast, and will soon (mere millions of years) leave the galactic disc. So if you wanted to get out of the disc, it might be a good colony location.
—
Extropian
Top
Wed, 2012-11-07 19:37
rfmcdonald rfmcdonald's picture
My understanding, via Sol
My understanding, via Sol Station and whatnot, is that the radial velocity measurements are setting the bar relatively low for massive planets at Barnard's Star. Gas giants, or even ice giants, in the habitable zone are out. Tide-locked rocky planets are still viable. I suspect that the writers haven't indicated anything about Alpha Centauri because, as said elsewhere, it's presumably going to be fairly easy to determine what of any size is orbiting A and B within the actively-supported lifespan of the game. (In-game? Maybe the Titanians are prepping for a really big mission to the Centauri Cluster.) Myself, I know what I want at Alpha Centauri: I want Tirane. And I want Limbes, too, not the baked-dry greenhouse but a wet greenhouse like Toul'h Prime. If you can fit in SMAC's Planet I'll be set.
Top
Wed, 2012-11-07 19:43
rfmcdonald rfmcdonald's picture
Schroeder is Canada's
Schroeder is Canada's optimistic response to Peter Watt. (Curiously, as Watt noted in [i]Blindsight[/i], they ended up converging on the same views of the likelihood of consciousness in the universe despite very different starting points.) The current consensus is that Barnard's Star is [URL=http://news.discovery.com/space/barnards-star-is-a-barren-star-120822.ht... of planets of any size[/URL], whether gas giants or rocky worlds in the habitable zone.
Quote:
A team of astronomers led by Jieun Choi, of the University of California, Berkeley, analyzed 248 precise Doppler measurements of the star in an effort to detect the gravitational tug of any exoplanets in orbit around it. These measurements were harvested from the Lick and Keck Observatories over a 25 year period from 1987 to 2012. Sadly, there appears to be no habitable worlds orbiting Barnard's Star. "The habitable zone of Barnard's Star appears to be devoid of roughly Earth-mass planets or larger, save for face-on orbits," the researchers conclude in their paper published on the arXiv preprint service (arXiv:1208.2273v1). For decades, it was thought that Barnard's Star played host to one or more exoplanets with masses larger than Jupiter. Dutch astronomer Peter van de Kamp had studied the star since 1938 claiming that, through the use of astrometry (the study of a star's wobble to detect planetary bodies in orbit), large exoplanets were there. These new findings, using precise Doppler data, don't only rule out the existence of massive worlds, they also discount the existence of smaller worlds within the red dwarf's habitable zone.
Proxima Centauri is more likely to have planets on account of its greater youth; the planets excluded from possibility are merely Jupiter-size gas giants.
Top
Thu, 2012-11-08 03:43
Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture
So it sounds like the proper
So it sounds like the proper GM thing to do is to say the Titanian mission is for AC. It has always been to AC. Anybody saying anything else needs their brain checked. (I always felt Tirane was a bit too *normal*. Maybe that is just what all Core worlds eventually turn out like... Planet on the other hand! Now there's a place to strand some gatecrashers. Together with the Argonaut researcher Zakharov, the Ultimate mercenary Yang, the Titanian admin Lal and the anarchist biologist Deirdre...)
—
Extropian
Top
Thu, 2012-11-08 20:19
rfmcdonald rfmcdonald's picture
Hey, don't blame me for being
Hey, don't blame me for [URL=http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~dheb/Tirane/Frei/freihafen.htm]being personally invested in Tirane[/URL]! (Or do.) Hmm. What 2300AD worlds would fit as exoplanets? King is already a nightmarish hypercorp colony on a superterrestrial world, Aurore and Nibelungen are exotic low-G/thin-aired garden worlds, Kie-Yuma is an, Cold Mountain's ecology is interestingly exotic ...
Top
Fri, 2012-11-09 19:48
Extrasolar Angel Extrasolar Angel's picture
Arenamontanus wrote:So it
Arenamontanus wrote:
So it sounds like the proper GM thing to do is to say the Titanian mission is for AC. It has always been to AC. Anybody saying anything else needs their brain checked.
I wouldn't be so sure. While exoplanet research is no longer in infancy, it is still a...toddler so to speak. We can't rule out that Bernard's Star has a habitable planet, until we get more refined instruments like SIM or TPF This nice discussion on Centauri Dreams(a site which I warmly recommend) does mention that the results are actually inconclusive http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=24114
Quote:
The tone of this blog posting seems unduly pessimistic. Lets quote the paper’s conclusion: — “For orbital periods under 10 days, planets with M sin i greater than two Earth masses would have been detected, but were not seen. For orbital periods under 100 days, planets with minimum masses under ∼ 3 M⊕ would have been detected, but none was found. For periods under 2 years, planets with minimum masses over 10 M⊕ are similarly ruled out. ” — If I understand the above correctly, Venus, Earth, Mars, and additionally, a planet 1.5 times the mass of the Earth, all would not have been detected by this search, regardless of how closely they orbited Barnard’s star
Quote:
The tone of this blog posting seems unduly pessimistic. Lets quote the paper’s conclusion: — “For orbital periods under 10 days, planets with M sin i greater than two Earth masses would have been detected, but were not seen. For orbital periods under 100 days, planets with minimum masses under ∼ 3 M⊕ would have been detected, but none was found. For periods under 2 years, planets with minimum masses over 10 M⊕ are similarly ruled out. ” — If I understand the above correctly, Venus, Earth, Mars, and additionally, a planet 1.5 times the mass of the Earth, all would not have been detected by this search, regardless of how closely they orbited Barnard’s star
—
[I]Raise your hands to the sky and break the chains. With transhumanism we can smash the matriarchy together.[/i]
Top
Sat, 2012-11-10 20:39
rfmcdonald rfmcdonald's picture
Point.
Point. It's also worth noting that in the context of Eclipse Phase, with its multiplicity of morphs both biological and synthetic capable of existing in a very broad range of environments, that "habitable" doesn't necessary mean "ideally, springtime in Toronto".
Top