Planets around Alpha Centauri

An article about the likely magnitudes and feasibility of terrestrial sized rocky planets in the Alpha Centauri system:

http://www.astroscience.org/abdul-ahad/ext...lar-planets.htm


AA
http://www.publishedauthors.net/aa_spaceagent/

 

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Your first link doesn't work.
Your second link is blatant advertising for a poorly written sf book.

 

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Let's see. Hmmmm.....Alpha Centauri would take about 4.3 years to get there traveling at the speed of light. So I think I'm good for another 17.2 years, so get me a ticket to Alpha Centauri. Just tell the pilot of the spaceship to put the 'pedal to metal' and hold it at 1/4 of the speed of light to save on gas and I might just make it before I croak. In the mean time, make sure and book me a room at the Alpha Centauri Space Travelers Inn. I plan to stay a while. Maybe take a quick trip to Proxima Centauri too while I'm there.

Okeydoke

 

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Sorry... for some weird reason, that first link just didn't get pasted right. Here it is again:

http://www.astroscience.org/abdul-ahad/extrasolar-planets.htm


Apologies for the inconvenience.
A. Ahad
http://www.publishedauthors.net/aa_spaceagent/

 

If we can build a ship 9x6 miles large, then im sure it would move faster... 50,000 years to alpha centauri? Sheesh. And New Earth? definitely from another book or show, i know ive seen that somwhere....

 

Hi AA.

You do realize that Heinlein beat you to it by sixty some odd years: "Orphans of the Sky, 1941"

 

Hi,

The basic idea of sending a slow craft to Alpha Centauri is not new, as I'm pretty certain people had those kinds of ideas around for a long while, possibly even pre-dating the 20th century. But in my story there are many new elements in the design of the mission's architecture, such as taking advantage of the icy material within overlapping Oort clouds between Sol and Alpha Centauri, control of law and order onboard the ship through use of modern security systems, population growth and fertility control, gravity gradients and climatic modelling, nuclear reserves for power and propulsion needs, semi-autonomous robotics that's visualisable in the foreseeable future, etc. Those are all the "hard-science" things covered in greater depth in the book.

And then there are all the fantasy elements to go with that, to add spice as a work of fiction.

To be perfectly honest, I've never read that much sci-fi beyond '2001: A Space Odyssey' by Arthur C. Clarke. Much of what's in my book, is just my own envisioning of what I perceive to be a realistic execution of a dramatised (yet life-like) multi-generational voyage to Alpha Centauri. Is it a good story? Does it sound like a re-hashed version of everything else that's out there? I haven't got a clue. I will just have to leave that for my readers to decide...

AA
http://www.publishedauthors.net/aa_spaceagent/

 

Sounds good.

 

It hasn't been "Officially" named yet. Although it is common to see it by it's designation 2003 UB313. And the unofficial names of "Lilah" and "Xena"

 

beark terrible names. Where is the mystery, the defines that this is absolutly the last one. I agree it should be greek, and somthing with clouds (oort cloud). Altough I like the ID of banning those rerun soaps to the edge of space.

Anyway about some planet around alpha/beta centauri. In 2014 The ESa well send up darwin
and NASA will send their Terrestrial Planet Finder up in 2020.

Anyway I do believe that the change off finding planets will be quit large. Both alpha and beta centauri contain enof metals.

And Proxima centauri is by itself a teaser, it's proberly less then a billion year old and the 2 main stars are 5-6 billion years old.
Perhaps it was a collsion between 2 exoplanets.
chek it out .
Anyway a space ship or a probe are probebly not for recent years but that's yust my opinion.

 

Well, the rate at which these discoveries are extending the outer limits of our known solar system is very interesting. I quote from a research article I did about this time last year:

"The discovery of Sedna is only the latest in the forever outward march of new and surprisingly distant physical bodies found around our Sun. At one time not so long ago, the Earth and the five naked eye planets as far out as Saturn were thought to be all that revolved around the Sun. Then, as our technological capabilities improved, came the discoveries of Uranus, the asteroids, Neptune, Pluto and eventually many smaller objects in the Kuiper belt. I am fully confident this trend will continue beyond Sedna well into the future.

From a dynamical perspective, as predicted by Isaac Newton's well known gravity equation:

F=G(m1*m2)/r^2

the Sun's sphere of influence reaches well beyond the distance of Alpha Centauri."
---- From ----

http://www.astroscience.org/abdul-ahad/firstarktoalphacentauri/interstellar-propulsion.htm



I suspect that this new "Planet X" may not be the last; there may be larger bodies inside the inner Oort cloud still awaiting discovery.


AA
http://www.publishedauthors.net/aa_spaceagent/

 

Well your right if you say that our suns gravity reaches far behind alpha centauri, but don't expect to much of that.
I do believe that any planet found between the heliopauzes of stars should be classified as rough planets (They probebly exist).
So in our happy solar system we their won't be anything afther the oort cloud. The entire ID of keeping adding planets is silly that eventually lead to the point that there like a million planets in the solar system.
There eleven places of intrest in the solar sytem I believe
1. The Sun (sol if you like) 7.Jupiter
2. Mercurius 8.Saturn
3. Venus 9. Uranus
4. Earth 10.Neptune
5. Mars 11. The oort cloud
6. The asteroid belt

So PLuto and Planet x'ses don't count to me.
Hey but's that yust my tought.

The fact that there haven't been any planets found is actually pretty good, because that means there probebly to small to be detected may gues would be terrestrial (not necesairly life).
I believed I readed some pdf file that any planet around 5 AU could have a pretty stable orbit, around both suns. And that the main distance from the stars wouldn't have that much influence

I got my info from this rechearge paper read it if you like.
http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9609106

 

5 AU? That's odd. The distance between the sun and alpha centauri is of about 1 parsec, which is aproximately 265,000AUs, or some 4.6 light years, if I'm not mistaken... Doesn't sound like a stable orbit between the two stars....

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Not only that, but 1 AU is he distance between the sun and earth! 5 AUs would be like the distance between the sun and Jupiter! As far as I know, I don't think Jupiter could have such an orbit!!!

 

Well yes that's a minor difference in owr point of origon calculation. Any planet around Alpha centauri would travel around alpha centauri and not around the sun, so we start to calculate from the surface of alpha centauri and not from the sun.

This zone is not the habitale zone where liquid water is, but it is the place were there can be a stable orbit.
This may not look like much, but keep in mind that alpha and beta centauri make part of a double (triple if you want to go exact) solar system.
SO the 2 suns orbit each other in a elleps with a distance between 11 AU to 35 AU. So basicly any planet that orbits 11 AU from one star would within a 100 year crash against the other sun.
So for beta centauri that limit is around 2AU
and for alpha centauri, it's a little bid more.

But if you go further away to proxima centauri (the third star at around 130000 AU), then both stars act like 1 single one, so afther some distance you again have some sort of stable zone, but this zone is to far for to have any habital zone

 

Oh ok. I'm sorry. I thought you were talking about a stable orbit between our star and alpha centauri.

It's just that you use "sun" in place of "star" and that really confuses me....

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Well to be precise alpha centauri is a sun like star. Beta gets close to being a sun, but is a bid redder so it isn't exactly a sun yust a star that closly resembles the sun.
Proxima on the other hand is not a sun and hardly a star, it's yust worth entioning because it's the closed extra sol object around.

... Yeah to many suns and stars mixed up your right I'm sorry

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why do they also make those names that long.

By the way some nice facts Alpha/beta/proxima centauri can only be seen from the southern hemisphere.
So I'm guesing that the closed star visible to the norther hemisphere (America/Europe and Asia) would be Sirius?? but I'm not actually sure.

 

For the same reason we have "Homo Sapiens" instead of just "Sapiens"

 

Strictly speaking the binary pair are called Alpha Centauri A and Alpha Centauri B.

Beta Centauri is an entirely different star, 335 light years away;
http://www.astro.uiuc.edu/~kaler/sow/hadar.html

Yes, Sirius is the closest star visible from northern latitudes.

 

Well that was something I forgot sorry.
It also seems that their names would be Rigel Kentaurus or Toliman, depending from where you come from, because their actually 2 instead of 1 thore are actually pretty good names.

Regardless of their names their certainly a good places for terrestial planets to develop inside a habitable zone.

 

It's a triple star system though, so the gravity and such would make it hard for planets to form, wouldn't it?