[X] My Assistant

[Stu]

http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=26414

See also: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastro...-a-sunlike-star

[Juramike]

And if there was a habitable world orbiting at 1 AU distance, and they sent their New Horizons spacecraft out to explore their distant big planet, (assuming the requisite gas giants were close in as well), it would take 100 years or more to get there.

So for those aliens, even exploring their own system runs into the AI and lifetime problems discussed for the Alpha Centauri proposed mission.

Wow. We are soooo lucky.

[JRehling]

Also, those aliens have only have 5 million years to evolve, which is about 1/800th the time it took multicellular life to get into the fossil record here. And with that giant only having completed a thousand orbits, there has to be a lot of collision still going on in at 1 AU.

[brellis]

Are there (or were there) other stars in the neighborhood? Perhaps this planet is a relic expelled from another solar system and captured?

[Del Palmer]

Are there (or were there) other stars in the neighborhood? Perhaps this planet is a relic expelled from another solar system and captured?

There are 82 stars nearby, but they estimate that the chances of an interloper are 1-in-30,000. Nevertheless, we really need follow-up proper motion studies to verify that this planet is truly bound to the star.