The planet near the nearest star Proxima Centauri should have three key ingredients of life - water, an atmosphere of carbon dioxide and a rocky surface, says one of the discoverers of this analogue of the Earth, Mikko Tuomi, reports the online edition Astrowatch.net
“Three things are needed to give birth to life. First, we need a rocky surface, and Proxima b has it. Second, we need water. We do not yet have evidence that there is water on Proxim, but there is no reason to believe that it is not there - there is water almost everywhere in space, and on the surface of this planet the temperatures will be high enough for the existence of oceans of liquid water. And third, we need a CO2 atmosphere, the simplest and most widespread molecule in the atmosphere of all the planets of the solar system,”the scientist said.
According to him, if all these three components are on Proxima b, then the formation of future “building blocks of life” is “inevitable”, and not a unique coincidence, one chance in a million.
On the other hand, Tuomi admits that so far we have no proof that both water and CO2 actually exist on this planet. For example, all the water reserves that could be on its surface can be carried away into space by the solar wind and radiation from Proxima Centauri, if Proxima b does not have a magnetic "shield" similar to the Van Allen belts of the Earth.
To all possible questions about the habitability of Proxima b, Tuomi hopes, will be able to answer the under construction orbital telescope James Webb, which will replace Hubble in 2018. In his opinion, its capacity will be enough to obtain the first direct photographs of the planet, study its spectrum and assess its suitability for life.
At the end of August, astronomers from the European Southern Observatory announced the discovery of the nearest Earth-like and potentially habitable planet - Proxima Centauri b, a "twin" of the Earth with a mass 1.2 times greater than that of our planet, located inside the "zone of life" in red the dwarf Proxima Centauri, four light years from Earth.
The discovery has already attracted the attention of scientists and engineers working on the Starshot platform for launching interstellar probes, which Yuri Milner and Stephen Hawking, co-founders of the Breakthrough Initiatives Foundation, spoke about in April this year. Astronomers are also keeping up with them - this weekend the online observatory conducted a session of observations of Proxima for everyone, and astrobiologists have already prepared a list of possible inhabitants of Proxima b's oceans that can survive X-ray flares of the star.