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A blip of light between two stars may finally be the planet we've been looking for all these years.
Or it may just be a blip of light. https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/have-astronomers-finally-found-a-planet-around-alpha-centauri-maaaaaaaaaybe
Or it may just be a blip of light. https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/have-astronomers-finally-found-a-planet-around-alpha-centauri-maaaaaaaaaybe
2/ Looking for planets around stars can be frustrating, even for nearby stars. And they don't come any more nearby than the Alpha Centauri system. It's a trinary, with two stars similar to the Sun, and Proxima, a red dwarf. Proxima has planets, but what about the binary?
3/ The binary is made of α Cen A, which is a wee bit brighter than the Sun, and α Cen B, which is about half the Sun's brightness. Years ago, astronomers thought they found a planet around B, but it turned out to be a false alarm, sadly. Still, we keep looking.
4/ A team used the Very Large Telescope to look at the pair for 100 hours, using some sophisticated hardware and software techniques to reduce the glare and look for a faint planet.
And they found... something.
And they found... something.
5/ The image on the left is a heavily processed one, showing the two stars (top and bottom) which look weird due to the processing. In the middle is some noise, but when that's cleaned up (right) a blip of light (C1) appears.
Is this a planet orbiting α Cen A? Well…
Is this a planet orbiting α Cen A? Well…
6/ I'll be clear: It might be. But it might not. It could be some weird artifact left over from the processing. Or it might be real, but a big dust cloud orbiting the star.
Or it might be a planet orbiting in the habitable zone of α Cen A, where temperatures are clement.
Or it might be a planet orbiting in the habitable zone of α Cen A, where temperatures are clement.
7/ That's an exciting prospect! If real, it would be 3-7 times the mass of Earth, so more like Neptune. So we're not talking an Earth-like planet, even if it's in the star's HZ. Still, whoa.
8/ What really gets me is that in the final image it's elongated, which is what you'd expect if it were blurred due to orbital motion over the 19-day observations. What we really need are observations spaced out to see if the object moves consistently with it being a planet.
9/ So again, we don't know what this thing is. I saw some tweets yesterday that really implied this was a confirmed planet, or at least a real object, but *we don't know that yet*.
Still, I think this is absolutely worth following up on!
Still, I think this is absolutely worth following up on!
10/ Until we know more, a soupçon of skepticism is not only required, but healthy! I would dearly love this to be real, which is *precisely* why I am inclined to want more evidence. I'll note the astronomers themselves were quite properly circumspect in their paper, too.
11/11 So until more evidence comes, I will file this under "Keep an eye on this and hope to be VERY excited soon".
If it's not real, well, bummer. But if it is, well, YOWZA.
https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/have-astronomers-finally-found-a-planet-around-alpha-centauri-maaaaaaaaaybe
/fin
If it's not real, well, bummer. But if it is, well, YOWZA.
https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/have-astronomers-finally-found-a-planet-around-alpha-centauri-maaaaaaaaaybe
/fin
