Earth-sized planet around nearby star is astronomy dream come true

[PJMcK]

30. Hard to know, I suspect

The article indicates that the planet could be in danger from solar flares.

Proxima Centauri fires off powerful flares, and the planet therefore experiences a much higher dose of high-energy X-ray radiation than Earth does, Hatzes, who is not part of the discovery team, wrote in an accompanying "News and Views" article in the same issue of Nature.

"Energetic particles associated with the flares may erode the atmosphere or hinder the development of primitive forms of life," Hatzes wrote. "We also don't know whether the exoplanet has a magnetic field, like Earth, which could shield it from the dangerous stellar radiation."

But the higher X-ray flux is not a "showstopper" for life, Anglada-Escude and his colleagues said.

"None of this does exclude the existence of an atmosphere, or of [surface] water," co-author Ansgar Reiners, a professor at the University of Göttingen's Institute of Astrophysics in Germany, said during Tuesday's news conference.

It's possible that the most important things from this discovery will be for improving the scientific techniques to use in other planetary searches. Still, it's very cool news! In the 1960's science fiction television show "Lost in Space," the Robinson family was supposed to visit Alpha Centauri:

The astronaut family of Dr. John Robinson, accompanied by an Air Force/Space Corps pilot and a robot, set out from an overpopulated Earth in the spaceship Jupiter 2 to visit a planet circling the star Alpha Centauri with hopes of colonizing it.

Life imitates art, although the TV show was pretty un-artful!