At 300 light-years away, a red giant with a planet
An artist's concept of an extra-solar planet moving behind its parent star. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt)
Astronomers have found a planet near a red giant star about 300 light-years from Earth.
Alex Wolszczan, an astronomer at Penn State University, led the science team that made the discovery. Wolszczan told Earth & Sky that his planet-hunting strategy was to look for planets around evolved stars, similar to what our own sun will become in a few billion years.
Red giants cool as they age. Their light becomes easier for astronomers to analyze than when the stars were hotter and younger.
Alex Wolszczan: So, we decided to do this and three years later, just about now we’ve got our first discovery and there are more coming. It’s actually quite exciting.
Back in 1992, Wolszczan discovered the first planets ever found outside our solar system. And since then, over 250 extra-solar planets have been found. Wolszczan said that it’s possible that planets might be found orbiting all sorts of exotic objects in the universe – red giants, red dwarfs, white dwarfs, perhaps even black holes.
Alex Wolszczan: Even more exciting is, of course, the fact that at the end of all of this, what hopefully awaits us is the discovery of life elsewhere. This is really the big prize.
Our thanks today to Research Corporation, America’s first foundation for science advancement.
A new planet: astronomer talks about his discovery
Listen to a 13-minute podcast with Alex Wolszczan, who discovered a planet orbiting a red giant star.
The idea of finding another planet with life on it is very fascinating, but seems so far away from now.
Pfff why do people talk about life somewhere else when we cant even reach 1/100 of the speed of lght and even if we did reach the speed of light it would still take us 4 and a half years to reach the closest star.
We cant even reach 1/1000 of the speed of light which is 300 km per seccond!!!
This limited traveling speed is what makes the discovery of other life so far away. Aren’t they done making the real version of the starship enterprise yet? I think I should grab a Snickers.
I think it’s cool that there might be other life out there! I doubt we really understand what that means, though … what “other life” might be …
I think life on another planet would impact us greatly, communicating with life doesn’t soley rely on us getting there in a linear fashion.
It doesn’t really matter how long it takes us to get there or for them to get here when radio communication would be just as exciting.
Are we fully prepared to communicate with life outside our own planet? We can barely communicate among each other, how could we be more brilliant with life in a planet that Dr. Wolszczan has discovered?
The fact that we exist means that life might exsist “somewhere else”.