The Closest Planet Outside Our Solar System Is Within Reach | Proxima Centauri

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you'll note the furthest craft from earth, voyager 1, is only 1 light day from earth after decades of being in flight.

'Only four light years away ', definitely a 'glass half full', statement.

1 light second = 300,000km. There are 126,144,000 seconds in a 4 years. The distance we would have to travel is 3.78432*10^13 km. Voyager 1 travels at about 30km/s. At the rate of voyager, it would still take ... 40,000 years.. Hard to say that's "within reach".

Those darn trisolarians

Something people don't often consider is that space isn't quite empty. A sub-light interstellar voyage would be lucky to ever make it there. Any particle intercepting it would be like a bomb.

"What do you mean 'you've never been to Alpha Centauri'? Oh for heaven's sake, Mankind, it's only four light years away you know! I'm sorry, but if you can't be bothered to take an interest in local affairs, that's your own lookout." - Captain Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz, from The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams.

only 4 light years? Road Trip!

i truly wish i could live to be old enough to see people start colonizing different planets, or by some divine miracle be able to go to one of the planets and breath another planets air, but at 30 i dont think i will in my lifetime, and that makes me incredibly sad.

As we continue to study things that will be a long time in the making, just imagine centuries from now the likelihood that things like Hubble, JWST, etc will be thought of in the same regard that Galileo, Copernicus, Oumuamua, etc are thought of now. We are somebody's ancient history in the making, maybe in our own memories or maybe a discovery made by a civilization far beyond our own stars. We may still be here for that latter part or we may be the equivalent to someone's ancient Egypt either here at home or from afar.

The inhabitants of Proxima Centauri will make it to Earth in 400 years. I saw a documentary about it on Netflix.

Trisolarians!

In galactic scale terms...4 light years is right next door. In human scale, it might as well be on the other side of the universe...considering the tens of thousands of years it would take us to get there using current propulsion methods

Unfortunately for all the challenges we're looking at to try and make a probe fast enough to get there in a "reasonable" amount of time, that's not actually the biggest hurdle. The biggest hurdle is getting the data back to Earth. We're talking about a distance so large that the energy output of an entire star can't be seen without a telescope, and we want to try and send a beam of data that same distance. The beam divergence alone is a problem (we have trouble with that just to the edge of our solar system), but we also need that beam to be distinguishable from all of the radiation the star itself is sending our way, and we're expecting to have enough power to do that in a swarm of millimeter-scale probes? There ain't going to be a convenient 100GW laser array sitting around waiting to help us out when we get there. I'm not going to say its impossible but it's a hell of a lot more challenging than people seem to recognize. Propulsion is only the start of the journey.

What makes them so special is... that they are the closest planets and stars that we can actually observe. And the more we do, the more "special" they become.

Voyager 1. still has 70.000 years to get to Alpha Centurai. Good luck with that journey.

I know i can't be the only one who goes to sleep with these videos in the background. Its soothing, relax and it lets your mind calmly wonder

A 2021 study lead by Ekaterina Ilin (Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam, Germany) presented evidence that M dwarf flares tend to emanate from their polar regions, possibly sparing close in planets from direct hits. Their initial data was taken from a small sampling of M dwarf stars from TESS observations, and further studies showed that this may well be the norm. (from Universe Today 8/7/21)

I am lead to understand that if we can reach 90 percent of the speed of light and keep that speed for as much of the voyage as possible then, thanks to time dilation, the journey time of the craft can be as little as 6 months; - anybody who makes the round trip stands to arrive back at Earth to find everybody they know to be seven, eight or more years older...

It's the San-Ti isn't it?