📷Photo of Elon Musk Royal Society and an artist’s conception of the planet Proxima Centauri b orbiting the star Proxima Centauri. Image Source: Wikipedia.org
Mr. Musk says that it might be “Practically the Next Door”.
He often talked about his vision of “making humans a multi-planetary species”. He says “We must do this for increasing our human consciousness and increasing the chance of humankind’s survival“. He also claimed that we need to set up self-sustaining colonies on planets like Mars for humanity’s long-term survival.
The Tech Titan Elon Musk has made SpaceX, the private space company for the purpose of Colonising Mars within a few decades. The journey is going to be exciting and SpaceX is already becoming prepared by manufacturing reusable Starship rockets that can carry people and cargo to other planets like Mars.
Let me explain in simple words, Earth-like planets are highly habitable, also called exoplanets and what makes them interesting is “they have liquid water”. They are of size like Jupiter and are very hot, so we can easily detect them through telescopes.
When researchers studied Proxima Centauri b, they found that it can sustain liquid water where possibly life may thrive. “Simulations show that there’s a high chance for the planet to be habitable”, said Anthony Del Genio, a planetary scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
This planet has nearly the same size as Earth and is the closest “highly habitable” planet found till now. Its distance from the sun is 4.2 light years away (it means light takes 4.2 years to reach there and the speed of light is 300,000 km/s).
According to Wikipedia, Proxima Centauri b shares a characteristic with Earth’s moon, known as Tidal Locking, it means that the same side of the planet always faces its parent star, Proxima Centauri. This occurs when there is a gravitational interaction between two celestial bodies, causing one body to rotate at the same rate as its orbit, resulting in a fixed orientation towards the other body.
The other side which is always dark, is not fully ice. This means there is liquid water sustainable for possible life. The frozen is converted into liquid water because there is a proper transfer of heat throughout the planet due to circulating oceans and atmosphere.
Although this planet is nearest to us, still it takes 4.2 light years. Our current technology is unable to make us reach there. The only way seems to be our theoretical technologies like spaceships. So, let’s hope we might go there in the near future.
How much time it would take Present Space Technology to reach Proxima Centauri?
NASA’s Voyager 1, a deep interstellar travel space probe, which was launched the finding whether aliens exist or not, would take 80,000 years to travel to Proxima Centauri.Â
The DEEP-IN program by the US space agency claims that they can do this within 20 years (within the lifespan of a single human), they can do this by giving thrust to the small crafts, reaching the spacecraft to the speed of 161 million kilometers per hour.
