New Planets Found - Don't Pack Just Yet

Just recently, NASA announced that they have found planets orbiting a star that is light years away. These planets are most likely very large - probably something like the size of Jupiter.

These are not the first planets that have been found by astronomers by any means. I think it was about a decade ago that a couple of astrophysicists developed a way of detecting planets by looking at the gravitational 'wobble' of a star. Basically, planets orbit stars because of the star's powerful gravitational field, however, a star is also affected by the smaller planets in orbit around the star. So, they started watching the 'wobble' of the stars, and were able to determine the mass of the planets. So far, the technique can only find large planets.

While it is interesting that there are other planets in our galaxy that are 'relatively' close, it always makes me think about the impossibility of any type of extraterrestrial contact.

The biggest problem, of course, is space. It is really really big... and that may be the my understatement of the month. To give you an example of how far we are from our star, the Sun, it helps to think about it in terms of our moon. (which is an awful name for a moon, and should be named something better, but that is a topic for another day.) Our moon is just under a quarter of a million miles away from the earth. Although, the perigee (smallest orbit) and the apogees (largest orbit) do vary. The sun, on the other hand, is 93 million miles away. This means that a radio signal/beam of light will take about 1.5 seconds to go from the earth to the sun, but a radio signal/beam of light takes almost 8 and a half minutes to go from the earth to the sun. Even though propulsion technologies have gotten better since the 1970s, it would still take about three days to travel from the earth to the moon. Without a gravitational slingshot to help, a trip to the sun would take just over 1,100 days.

While a thousand days may be something we can accomplish, our closest star is Proxima Centauri which is about four light years away. To put this in perspective, we can travel at about 1 mile per second when traveling to the moon. With a gravitational slingshot or two, we've been successful in increasing that speed to about 3 miles per second. In other words, our best efforts to date have reached 0.000016 the speed of light. That means it would take us 250,000 years to reach our closest neighboring star. A quarter of a million years seems a bit daunting.

On the off chance that we developed a way to travel an astounding 1,000 times faster than we can travel right now, Proxima Centauri is 250 years away.

Besides the distances, interstellar space is not a good place to be. As it turns out, one of the reasons our planet is perfect is that it protects us from a lot of very nasty radiation. The magnetic field created by the earth's molten iron core protects our planet from solar wind. But outside of the earth's protection, a burst of solar wind would kill any biological being within minutes, or even second if severe enough.

So, not only is space too vast to travel between stars or solar systems, outside of our planet's magnetic protection, we cannot survive. And that is why we have never been visited by aliens from another planet. Sure, some people theorize that a space faring race could travel at the speed of light, or near the speed of light. The problem with this explanation is twofold. For one thing, as anything with mass nears the speed of light, is becomes infinitely massive. And two, as mass becomes infinite, it takes infinite energy to travel the speed of light. What does this mean? Basically, for a space shuttle sized ship, you'd need a source of energy that puts out as much energy as the sun.

The point of all this is that we have one planet, and we will never have the means to get another. We'd better treat this one with respect. And I say we name the moon "Bob", at least until we think of something better.