Life everywhere

It’s called Project Blue, after astronomer Carl Sagan’s famous picture of our own 'pale blue dot.' But there are a gazillion other pale blue dots, and maybe Alpha Centauri has one too. Hallelujah!

Trappist-1 is so close that in a few hundred years we could probably get there in a generation ship. Meanwhile, a private consortium led by the BoldlyGo Institute and Mission Centaur is working on an orbital telescope that will look for planets around our closest stellar neighbour, Alpha Centauri, only 4.4 light-years (40 trillion kilometres) away.Illustration courtesy of Wikipedia Commons

Opinion

BY GWYNNE DYER

March 6, 2017

LONDON, ENGLAND—Only 39 light-years away, astronomers have found seven planets circling a very small “red dwarf” star called Trappist-1. All seven are in or near what we call the “Goldilocks zone”: not too hot, not too cold, but just right for water to remain liquid on the planet. So we al...

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