If such a world exists, that will only make the science fiction seem even more prophetic... although I wouldn’t hold out too much hope when it comes to the details. Down the decades we’ve had the natives of Alpha Centauri envisaged as pygmy elephants with multiple trunks (Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s Footfall*), six-armed, one-eyed giant green hermaphrodites (the two Dr Who Peladon serials) and robots in disguise (it’s where the Transformers home planet Cybertron originated before it was thrown out of orbit). And even though it’s the highest-grossing film of all time, amid the 3D spectacle it may have slipped some people’s notice that Pandora, home of the blue-skinned Na’vi in Avatar, is a moon of the gas giant Polyphemus orbiting Alpha Centauri A.
Were Pandora real, that would technically make it Alpha Centauri Ab or Ac or whatever depending on what else was round the same star and the order they were detected in. But Pandora sounds much better. So can’t we put aside the convention for real exoplanets and come up with some more befitting than Bb for what is and always will be the closest world beyond our solar system? Or would that open a Pandora’s box?
* I was amused to see when I checked it in Wikipedia the novel had an entry beginning “Not to be confused with the Samuel Beckett play Footfalls”. Which seems unlikely.
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