What we'll find at Alpha Centauri
Our nearest galactic neighbour is Alpha Centauri.
If we ever poke our nose out of our own solarsystem, chances are we'll be heading in its direction as it's a mere four light years away or so.
That's still about 41,000,000,000,000km from us. So we're gonna need a faster spaceship to get there as using current technology it would take is 100,000 years to make the trip.
But if we are going to set sail, it might be good to know if they'll be much to see at the end of the journey.
Well, first thing first. Even though it looks likes one point of light to anyone glancing upwards, Alpha Centauri is a triple star system.
It's a system of three stars, called Alpha Centauri A, B, and C. Centauri A is a star much like our own Sun; Centauri B orbits around it. Centauri C, (sometimes called Proxima Centauri) orbits around both of them.
Scientists do believe the system hosts rocky Earth-mass worlds, but this assumes they could form in the turbulent conditions associated with the opposing gravitational tugs of the stars.
Rocky planets are created from the merger of moon-sized planetary embryos which, in turn, form from the accretion of kilometre-sized planetesimals. However, there is no guarantee that such embryos could form in turbulent conditions.
To find out, the University of Florida built a computer simulation of Alpha Centauri, which showed that moon-sized protoplanets could indeed form after about a million years.
No gas giants would be created though, as any gas would be dispersed by the turbulence.
This means that finding any life would be unlikely as we know our gas giants have protected us from being hammered by big chunks of rocks.
Jupiter and Saturn act as the vacuum cleaners of the solar system, sucking up all the left-over rubble from its creation.
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Daniel Smith - a long time ago, in a galaxy far away just north of Watford, Daniel fancied himself as a scientist but turned out to be the worst scientist since that bloke who mapped out all those canals on Mars that turned out to be scratches on his telescope's lens. Luckily, he is now not working on the Large Hadron Collider inadvertently creating a black hole that would swallow the world but is safely behind a desk writing this blog, bringing you the fantastical underbelly of nature... weird science.
