SO’s HARPS instrument finds Earth-mass exoplanet orbiting Alpha Centauri B
European astronomers have discovered a planet with about the mass of the Earth orbiting a star in the Alpha Centauri system — the nearest to Earth. It is also the lightest exoplanet ever discovered around a star like the Sun. The planet was detected using the HARPS instrument on the 3.6-metre telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile. The results will appear online in the journal Nature on 17 October 2012.
- Most pleased, yes?
The European team detected the planet by picking up the tiny wobbles in the motion of the star Alpha Centauri B created by the gravitational pull of the orbiting planet [2]. The effect is minute — it causes the star to move back and forth by no more than 51 centimetres per second (1.8 km/hour), about the speed of a baby crawling. This is the highest precision ever achieved using this method.
Alpha Centauri B is very similar to the Sun but slightly smaller and less bright. The newly discovered planet, with a mass of a little more than that of the Earth [3], is orbiting about six million kilometres away from the star, much closer than Mercury is to the Sun in the Solar System. The orbit of the other bright component of the double star, Alpha Centauri A, keeps it hundreds of times further away, but it would still be a very brilliant object in the planet’s skies.
This is one of the first cases in which an earth sized planet has been located around a sun-like star, making it an exciting find. The only problem is – being only about 3.6 million miles away from its star (we are 93 million), it’s extremely unlikely that there’s any life poking around there. So, it would seem that we still haven’t yet found our sister planet … which, in my opinion, is good since we clearly don’t understand how to take care of the place we have now.
In the meantime, I need to make sure I live long enough to see us get there …
Crimes Against Divinity 