Naming planets is difficult.

The name comes IIRC from where first contact took place between humans and the Centauri. I'm not sure, but I think humans might have mistakenly thought the Centauri came from the system, just as the Centauri mistook humanity for a lost colony (unless that was just a ruse).

Disney hasn't taken over Ghibli. They only do the localization for American audiences. The two companies are otherwise completely unrelated.

"This is a bit outside of my knowledge base, but before this I would have just as easily said the Kuiper Belt was never the 'outer limit', we just hadn't discovered the new 'outer limit' (which also wouldn't be the outer limit, and etc). "

"mars and the moon are both habitable with minimal effort of mining water and converting oxygen."

And your point is...?

Luke never actually says it's habitable. He just says that "a planet is a planet."

Classic.

Not the right star. They're actually all about Sirius, which is the brightest star in the night sky as seen from Earth.

Ask and you shall receive.

Sorry, meant that for the above poster.

It's uninhabitable but that doesn't really matter. The fact that we've discovered a planet in our nearest stellar neighbor is still huge news regardless, if for no other reason than that the Kuiper Belt is no longer the outer limit of possible space exploration possibilities.

I may be wrong, but my understanding is that it's much harder to detect planets far away from their star, since their effect on the star's light is milder (for larger planets) and gravitational interactions are weaker (for larger and smaller planets). That's why so many of the planets we've discovered so far orbit in…

It's exact position? Yes, that was 4 years ago. The fact that it's orbiting Alpha Centauri B? No, it's still there, unless some kind of cosmic catastrophe has occurred, ejecting it from orbit.

While that's certainly true, the fact that we've discovered one opens wide the possibility that there are other planets in the system which are further out.

Fair enough. And yeah, we need more substance in our media, I'll grant you that.

Using our current standard of drives? A few tens of thousand years probably.

Fuck yeah!

I think it kind of is. But is that a problem? Macarena was fun too as a I recall (granted, I'm close enough to your children's age that I wasn't aware of the craze at the time).

I can see that I guess. I don't frequent clubs often (money, among other things), but I've definitely experienced that kind of atmosphere before.