Tek-Bull

The Closest Habitable Planet – A real life Tatooine?

A real life Tatooine? It looks like Astronomers have found a potentially habitable planet with two suns. Its about 40 light years away from our Earth. The planet has 2 suns, a red one and an orange one, similar to Tatooine, you know what that is right?

These kinds of stories come up almost every other month, a potential “habitable” planet found. The only reason this one is different from the rest is the proximity. While 40 light years is pretty close, it’s still over 150,000 years away. Just to put it into perspective, Voyager 1 which was launched in1977 has been on the run for 34 years, it’s traveled about 15.5 light Hours. So don’t let that “40” fool you, this planet is still pretty far.

The planet is called 55 Cancri F, and just recently, it was added to the list of potentially habitable planets currently orbiting other stars. The habitable planet list is pretty small, it has maybe a few dozen planets on the list. 55 Cancri F is about the size of Neptune, meaning it’s going to have very strong gravitational forces. But, it does spend about 74% of it’s time inside the “habitable zone” where liquid water can exist.

This new life Tatooine is just another addition to our bigger speculation list of future Earths, like I said before, we see these kind of stories pop up every single month. I’m not saying I think stories like these are stupid, I’m just being realistic, even if we do find a habitable planet, were about 150k years away from reaching it so we won’t get the chance to see it. Planets are discovered on the regular basis and scientist somehow make a determination whether or not the planet is in the habitable zone. If it is, it must contain water and thus, it should sustain life… the basis of observation and conclusion of some scientist is just plain… absurd. Check out this video where Carl Sagan describes exactly what goes on through Astronomer’s heads when they see a planet.

Via Tech Review