Anybody heard of it? An exoplanet around 20 LR away. Super earth classified and is right in the habitable zone of it's parent red dwarf star. Life chances are VERY high if it's atmosphere has the right stuff in it. However it's tidally locked(like the moon) making it always day on one end and always night on the other. The place where night and day meet however is a promising area for life. What do you think about it?
I read about it as well, it's amazing that we are finding small planets like that so "close" to earth.
Though I wouldn't be too hopeful about it holding life, as Venus is close to the goldilocks zone, but it is one of the most inhospitable planets in the solar system.
There are simply far too many factors that influence a planet's habitability to make too many assumptions yet. But it is definitely the most promising planet that we have discovered as far as possibly practically finding life outside our solar system.
I just wish 20 light years wasn't so far away.
Even if we had a spacecraft that could go 0.5 light speed (an unimaginably fast speed; to put it in perspective, a 4000 lb spacecraft going 0.5 light speed has a kinetic energy equivalent to the energy released by a 9571 Megaton Nuclear bomb)
At 0.5 light speed it would take 40 years to go to the planet (assuming it can start and stop instantly) and then another 20 years for the data from the spacecraft to start coming back to earth.
40 years is an ungodly long time for a spacecraft to survive, only the Voyager spacecraft are near that mark with Voyager 2 at 35 years 3 months of age and still going strong. So it's possible for us to reach it, but it definitely wont be easy.
The closest we have come to 0.5 light speed, is the Helios 1 spacecraft which managed to travel at 0.0002342 Light speed (157,078 mph)
Xrain for spacemission Gliese - 581G anyone?