Astronomers have discovered a new exoplanet that is 37.7 light-years from Earth. And it is a very short trip too, at 50,000,000 miles per hour, an intrepid space traveler could reach it in 43.86 average Gregorian years. That is not long at all. At 8000,000,000 kilometers per hour, our space travelers would reach it in 4.412 average Gregorian years. But we do not have the technology to reach that massive speed, and a grain of sand hitting the ship at that speed would destroy it. 8000,000,000 kilometers per hour is 2.222×10^6 km/s or 7.4x the speed of light in a vacuum. That is an impossible speed. The spacecraft would travel 1 kilometer in 450 nanoseconds. Impressive. Even 500,000,000 miles per hour is 0.7456x the speed of light and it would require immense amounts of energy to sustain this velocity. And they say it is “only” 32.7 light-years away. If the space travelers are in the Starship Enterprise E, then this is no problem. At warp 7, it would take 18 days to get to the new exoplanet in the Enterprise E. So Jean Luc Picard would be the first to see the new planet and explore the surface with some unsuspecting red-shirts. Then they are picked off one by one by the monster in the jungle.
Apparently, the planet is outside the habitable zone of its star, it might be too hot for life. At five times the mass of Earth, the gravity would be higher than Earth and this would make walking on the surface harder. This planet is orbiting GJ 536, a red dwarf star. This would give the planet`s surface a blood red hue. Very sci-fi indeed. This would be quite different than Earth with a yellow dwarf star. But this planet will not be visited until we have some sort of warp drive technology. The em-drive is promising, but this would only work if you could continuously accelerate until the craft was traveling at a very high speed to reach the planet in time. But there are some amazing things in the wide universe that are waiting for us to discover them and we really should get started.