A Next Door Neighbor

Earth.

Home to seven billion people.

Unique in size to all the other planets.

All alone.

Wait! What do you mean it now has a neighbor?

An Artist's Rendition of the New Planet.
Photo Courtesy of Nytimes.com

That’s right. On Wednesday of this week a team of European astronomers announced the discovery of a new planet. Great, another planet to learn about. Go stick it on the shelf next to ALL the other new planets. However, this planet is special. It is Earth-sized and relatively speaking, very close to us. It lies in the orbit of Alpha Centauri which is the closest star to us. Only 4.3 light years away! (That’s eighty-one thousand years in our fastest spaceship)

Scientists, astronomers, and  astrophysicists all around the world are very excited about this discovery because this new planet, which is currently unnamed, is so close to Earth and is not exponentially smaller or larger than Earth.

Imagine how this could affect us here on Earth. For starters, if there is one there are more. Even though this one is rocky and it’s closeness to Alpha Centauri causes temperatures that are unlivable there most likely are other ones out there that may be the right distance away from their sun that there would be livable conditions. There could even be a planet out there with life on it.

One small planet can make so many differences in our life. There is now discussion of having telescopes focus specifically on that area of the galaxy and, if they find more planets of similar size, sending a probe there!

I was so excited to hear about this because I firmly believe that there is other intelligent life somewhere in our universe and I think that this discovery has sparked new flames to work harder and dig deeper on our way to finding life. I also think that this is such an important discovery simply because of the fact that we were able to see it. The planet is 4.3 LIGHT YEARS away. That is 25,277,000,000,000 miles away. To know that we can find planets that far away and be able to tell things about them like what their surface is made of never fails to astound me. 

This new little planet means the start of a new era of space exploration. A search to find other Earth-like planets. Who knows what this has is store? I sure don’t but I am very excited to find out!