'Second Earth' to be revealed...

[Ninurta]

OK, so,,,,,, That's a Damn Small Craft and I always thought that Proxima Centauri was a long ways away or am I wrong.

Proxima Centauri is the closest star to Earth at the moment other than the sun. It's just under 4 1/4 light years away, the third star in the Alpha Centauri trinary system, orbiting in a wide orbit around the binary pair forming the primary of the system.

That's the good news. Now for the bad.

Proxima Centauri is a class M red dwarf star. It outputs low power, but will outlive both Alpha Centauri A + B and the sun itself. The reasons for that are sort of complicated, but the essence is that it burns so cool that it will burn longer than the others mentioned because it burns it's fuel at a much slower rate, even though it has far less mass to burn. That also means that the so-called "Goldilocks zone" is so close to the star that any planets in it would likely be tidally locked, always keeping the same side facing the star, making for a hot side and a cold side, permanent day on the hot side, permanent night on the cold one.

This can have some bizarre effects. I had a long discussion with my physics advisor a few years ago regarding just such a planet. Conventional wisdom would not allow for life to develop on such a planet because if the permanent hot/cold sides, but he had a different take. He reasoned that there might be a zone at the terminator (the area where night becomes day and vice versa) that could have conditions amenable to life. Neither too hot nor too cold, this zone (from the surface it would be the "twilight" area, so we could call it the Twilight Zone in honor of Rod Serling) could have the right temperatures, and the right amount of light and so on and so forth to support a ring of life around the planet.

Because of the way heat and cold affect air flow, the atmospheric currents would probably be violent, perhaps with long lived or more or less permanent hurricane force winds, meaning any life there would have to be exceptionally hardy, and likely without enough leisure time to develop any sort of technology. Intelligence is a different matter - dolphins are very intelligent, perhaps as intelligent as humans, yet have been unable to develop technology because of their circumstances.

Fascinating possibilities to run with in speculation, but I'd wait for spectral analysis of the planet to see if it even has an atmosphere, or what that atmo may be composed of, as well as analyses to determine possible mass ranges and the like.

Part of my work at that university was research into habitable extrasolar planets (the other part was mapping "local' space in 3 dimensions for interstellar navigation), and there is an amazingly narrow range of possibilities to support life as we know it. That would include possible humans as colonizers.

This planet has potential, but don't hold your breath until they get the parameters narrowed down.

ETA: for a good, scientifically sound discussion of the "solar sailboat" concept driven to 20 PSOL by lasers, see the "Rocheworld" Speculative science fiction series by Robert L. Forward. The star in it is Barnard's Star, 5.9 light years away (and so farther out than Proxima Centauri). I actually at one time made a 3D model for use inside the program Celestia of the Rocheworld System from studying those books, so it's as accurate as possible within the Rocheworld universe. You can actually fly there yourself inside Celestia by using it, and see what the explorers in the books saw.