Space: the final frontier, an endless plane of opportunity amongst the stars. As Tim Curry said in the Soviet Premier in the 2008 video game “Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3,” “the one place that hasn’t been corrupted by capitalism.” With the developments of Elon Musk, the founder, CEO and lead designer of SpaceX and the proposal of a Space Force in the US Military by President Trump, it won’t be long until we manage to colonize other planets. The question is where humanity will go after exploring our solar system.
On Sept. 21, Ashley Strickland of CNN reported that Dharma Planet Survey and Dharma Endowment Foundation Telescope on Mt. Lemmon, Arizona recently found an exoplanet, a planet outside the solar system, that is about 16 light-years away from Earth. The astronomers categorized the exoplanet as the first “Super-Earth” detected in our universe. A “Super-Earth” has a higher mass than our own Earth, but “Super-Earths” are not gas giants like the planets Jupiter and Saturn.
“The planet is roughly twice the size of Earth and orbits its star with a 42 day period just inside the star’s optimal habitable zone [the range of orbit around a star where a planet can support liquid water],” University of Florida astronomer Jian Ge said.
The exoplanet orbits around an orange star classified as HD 26965, which is smaller than our own Sun but has the same magnetic cycle or rotation around a star. This has led astronomers to think the exoplanet has the possibility for extraterrestrial life.
“HD 26965 may be an ideal host star for an advanced civilization” Tennessee State University astronomer Matthew Muterspaugh said.
One of the interesting aspects of this exoplanet is that it has been compared to the planet Vulcan from the Gene Roddenberry media series “Star Trek.” A 1991 letter written by Roddenberry addressed to the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics revealed that the host star for the planet Vulcan was inspired by the star 40 Eridani A. The exoplanet was found right where Roddenberry had drawn inspiration for his work and stories.
“Spock served on the starship Enterprise, whose mission was to seek out strange new worlds, a mission shared by the Dharma Planet Survey,” Tennessee State University astronomer Gregory Henry said.
With the discovery, astronomers are hoping to use this as a stepping-stone to not only find potential habitable planets for humans to explore, but also to find the possibility of extraterrestrial life in the universe.
“This discovery demonstrates that fully dedicated telescopes conducting high-cadence, high-precision radial velocity observations in the near future will continue to play a key role in the discovery of more super-Earths and even Earth-like planets in the habitable zones around nearby stars,” Ge said.
Personally, science fiction has been one of my passions growing up and continues to be one of my favorite genres to watch movies, play video games and read novels. Space travel was one of the fascinating things I saw in science fiction and our history throughout the Space Race of the 1950s-1960s. The reasons for traveling to other planets could range from being a way to prevent overpopulation by colonization to moving humanity due to a lack of resources or destruction of the planet. However, I would like to see the actualization of the possibility of finding extraterrestrial life in the universe, with hopes of a peaceful first contact and improvement our technology. With hope, humanity would go “where no man has gone before” in the near future.
