Friday 19 October 2012

rigel seven or B-612

I walked outside this morning before daybreak and was reminded I haven’t taken the time to look up at the stars enough lately and be in awe and wonder. It was truly arresting to see the constellation of Orion splayed out with icy clarity bigger than the whole sky.
Though possible not the most hospitable of places by according to initial telemetry, this moment got me excited about the exoplanet discovered orbiting our neighbouring star. With some seven hundred far away planets found with many more candidates, I guess it is not such a rare or extraordinary find, but to think that that companion has always been there, even before the age of myths and the connect-the-dots construction of the constellations and their stories, and from modern times when humans became sophisticated enough to think that the Centauri system (and, depending on what naming convention is decided on and if other planets are discovered, it could be potentially called Rigel 7, from the designation that Arabic astronomers gave it, Rigel Kentaurus, the hoof of the Centaur) wouldn’t host planets, is pretty astounding. What the planet, mineralogical oddities and treasure or even more surprises since, like our moon, it probably has a dark side, always facing away from its broiling sun and might have a whole hemisphere of temperate of night, might host itself is exciting but immaterial, I think, because in that big catalogue of alien worlds, it is incredibly close and technically within our reach, relatively. Under impulse-power, we already could be there within decades, certainly within a human time-frame, and it’s comforting to think, whatever else is there, there is at least a place to land.