The New Horizons spacecraft, launched in 2009, took nine-and-a-half years to make the 3 billion mile trip from Earth to the vicinity of Pluto. (To be clear, “vicinity” in this context means 7,750 miles away.)
I mention this because today’s paper contains the interesting news that one of the planets orbiting the star Trappist 1 may have an atmosphere and is in the goldilocks zone of that star: not too far, too close. On the down side, Trappist 1 is a hyperactive red dwarf star which sends out frequent murderous flares. But while astronomers using the Webb telescope have ruled out the presence of hydrogen and carbon dioxide, they have found suggestions that nitrogen may be present. And if there is an atmosphere, liquid water may be present.
This is exciting news for science. But before we imagine continuing to poison our own planet and then relocating to Trappist 1-E I’ll just remind you that it is 40 light-years away, or roughly 235 trillion miles. I know those are big numbers so I’ll do the arithmetic: 78,300 times as far as Pluto.
Still too big? It means that a mission traveling at the speed of New Horizons (which, by the way, was about the size of a grand piano) would take about 740,000 years to arrive in the vicinity of Trappist 1. So if the first anatomically-modern humans had launched a spacecraft to go there, they would be texting us “Arrived safe” right now.
But we would receive that text in 2065.
