Podcaster: Richard Drumm
Title: Space Scoop: Our Nearest Star is Looking More and More Familiar
Organization:365 Days Of Astronomy
Link : astrosphere.org ; http://unawe.org/kids/unawe1730/
Description: Space scoop, news for children.
Bio: Richard Drumm is President of the Charlottesville Astronomical Society and President of 3D – Drumm Digital Design, a video production company with clients such as Kodak, Xerox and GlaxoSmithKline Pharmaceuticals. He was an observer with the UVa Parallax Program at McCormick Observatory in 1981 & 1982. He has found that his greatest passion in life is public outreach astronomy and he pursues it at every opportunity.
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Transcript:
This is the 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast. Today we bring you a new episode in our Space Scoop series. This show is produced in collaboration with Universe Awareness, a program that strives to inspire every child with our wonderful cosmos.
Our Nearest Star is Looking More and More Familiar
Life in the Universe doesn’t necessarily mean aliens – it could mean us. WE could be the aliens!
So far, as best as we can tell, no extraterrestrial life has visited the Earth, but we humans haven’t traveled very far out into the Universe either. It makes you wonder, will we ever have the chance to leave our Solar System and explore deep space?
Well, if we did, the obvious destination would be the nearest star to our Solar System, Proxima Centauri.
With current rocket technology, it could take us tens of millions of years to reach the star. But a new project, called the Breakthrough Starshot Project, plans to lower the travel time to just 20 years.
Using dozens of powerful lasers, scientists plan to propel miniature space probes towards the star at speeds of about 60,000 kilometers a second. At that speed it would take less than 7 seconds to get to the Moon!
But is Proxima Centauri even worth visiting?
With every new picture, it seems the space around this star grows more interesting. Last year a rocky planet similar to the Earth was discovered orbiting it.
Recently, we discovered that the star was surrounded by so-called “dust belts”, filled with fragments of rock and ice. The astronomers were using the ALMA radiotelescope array in the Atacama desert in Chile to make the discovery.
This is the sort of stuff you’d use to build planets!
But don’t get TOO excited. It appears that the total mass of the dust belt is 1% of Earth’s mass. That’s about the mass of our Moon.
Also, if that wasn’t enough, the Proxima system is as old as our own solar system, around 5 billion years. If these dust belts were going to form any planets they’d have done so billions of years ago.
Dust belts are surprisingly familiar, our own Solar System is home to two such regions called the Asteroid Belt and the Kuiper Belt. These areas contain the spare parts of our Solar System, material that did not form into larger objects such as planets or moons.
These rocky belts tell us that Proxima Centauri is probably home to more than just a single planet, even though that one, called Proxima b, is all we’ve been able to detect with certainty so far.
The data hints at a possible large planet at the inner edge of the dust ring, but more work needs to be done to make the detection official.
The data also hints at the possibility of an outer dust belt that’s 10 times farther out from the star than the main dust belt. It also hints at a possible inner dust belt that’s almost as close in as Proxima b is.
The discovery could also help with that future Starshot Project. A precise knowledge of the space around the star is essential for planning a safe and successful mission.
The typical way Hollywood depicts the asteroid belt would make you think of heavy traffic, where you have to weave in & out between tumbling space rocks. But it’s just not that crowded in the asteroid belt.
Sorry.
Hey, Here’s A Cool Fact:
The pieces of rock and ice in the dust belt around Proxima Centauri are very similar to those in our Asteroid Belt and Kuiper Belt.
They vary in size from the tiniest dust grains up to rocks many kilometers across. The belt is from 1 to 4 AU from Proxima. One AU is 93 million miles, the average distance from the Sun to the Earth.
Since Proxima is a red dwarf star, and is small and dim, this distance is one that makes the dust belt well outside the habitable zone.
It’s estimated that the dust has a temperature of 40 Kelvin. That’s 40 Celsius degrees above absolute zero.
Brrrr!
End of podcast:
365 Days of Astronomy
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The 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast is produced by Astronomical Society of the Pacific. Audio post-production by Richard Drumm. Bandwidth donated by libsyn.com and wizzard media. You may reproduce and distribute this audio for non-commercial purposes. Please consider supporting the podcast with a few dollars (or Euros!). Visit us on the web at 365DaysOfAstronomy.org or email us at info@365DaysOfAstronomy.org. This year we will celebrates the Year of Everyday Astronomers as we embrace Amateur Astronomer contributions and the importance of citizen science. Join us and share your story. Until tomorrow! Goodbye!