Is anybody out there? It’s a question humanity desperately wants to answer. Though we may know the answer sooner than we think, if the things circling star KIC 8462852 are indeed alien superstructures and not exocomets. In this search for life, there’s also a search for habitable planets — a plan B Earth we can escape to should the worst happen. However, the pool has just become a little smaller after scientists discovered what they thought was a habitable world turned out to be just a mirage in the vast wasteland of space.
Turns out Alpha Centauri Bb, a planet thought to be orbiting the Alpha Centauri B star, was just a ghost in the machine, according to a recent study. Back when the “discovery” was announced in the journal Nature in 2012, it showed the possibility of Earth-like planets outside of our solar system, and it was only 4.37 light years away. Xavier Dumusque, one of the authors of the original study, and his team mistook Alpha Centauri B’s wobbling light signature for an orbiting exoplanet. When its existence was just due to gaps in the researchers sporadic data.
It explains why other astronomers couldn’t observe it, unless they used the La Silla observatory in Chile, where the discovery was first made. This incident underscores the importance of having long and continuous observational data to fall back on.
Planets found by NASA’s Kepler telescope won’t likely fall under the same scrutiny, as its data doesn’t suffer from the same gaps. The telescope has been focused on one field of view, staring at 150,000 stars for the past four years, giving researchers a solid history of observable light patterns to fall back on. So far, Kepler has found 4,200 “transiting objects,” 90 percent of which scientists estimate could be bonafide exoplanets, according to Dr. Natalie Batalha, a Kepler Mission scientist.
Image credit: European Southern Observatory/Flickr
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