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Newfound Planet Has Earth-Like Orbit

Posted by Zonk on Fri Aug 03, 2007 05:44 PM
from the hooray-for-earth dept.
Space Science
Raver32 writes with a link to the Space.com site, and an article discussing an extra-solar planet that looks a lot like ours from a distance. At least, its orbit does. The planet is located about 300 light years away, in the constellation Perseus. It circles its giant red star every 360 days and was discovered by 'looking for wobble', the shift in a star's movement that hints at orbiting planets. "The discovery could help astronomers understand what will happen to our sun's brood of planets when it exhausts its store of hydrogen fuel and its outer envelope begins to swell. When that happens in an estimated 5 billion years, our sun will be so big that it will engulf the inner planets and most likely Earth. But long before that happens, life on our planet will have perished and its seas will have boiled away."
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  • It will be more exciting when they are able to find planets the same size or same mass as ours.

    • Re:More Exciting (Score:4, Funny)

      by ZeroFactorial (1025676) on Friday August 03 2007, @05:59PM (#20108473)
      In an unexpected turn of events, scientists have discovered that the universe is round and we were actually LOOKING AT OURSELVES through the massive telescope!!!
        • You would have to be at the edge of the spacetime coordinates (WRT the center of the "universe") to have electromagnetic radiation travel in a rough sphere from your postition around the other extremes and back, and it will probably be diffracted into countless directions before then because the passage is far from perfect geometrically. As for the time it would take, that would be 2*PI*R/c where R is the distance from the centre of the universe in light years since inflation began. Or something.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Khashishi (775369)
          No, because you would be looking deep into the past, well before humans or the Earth existed.
          • And who is to say that we aren't wrong in out current theories and the past isn't what we are seeing?
            • Well, if we start by refusing currently accepted theories, we can start go 100% wild and every hypothesis is "valid".
              That is not to say that one day those theories couldn't be proven wrong, but until that day let's stay within the realms of science, instead of that of random fantasy.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Not really, since mass doesn't really have anything to do with life forming. A planet with a similar sized star and distance from it would be much more interesting, since it would mean similar temperatures, and thus more likely to have liquid water and organic molecules, meaning life.

      • Re:More Exciting (Score:5, Interesting)

        by CastrTroy (595695) on Friday August 03 2007, @07:28PM (#20109239) Homepage
        I'm with the other guy. While mass doesn't directly affect forming of life, I would wonder how intelligent beings would exist on a planet the size of jupiter. They certainly wouldn't be able to be as mobile as the life on earth, unless they had much better ways of getting energy. Even ignoring the fact that the would have to have really strong muscles and bones so that they could move (assuming they had muscles and bones), they would still need a lot of extra energy to move around on such a large planet. Also, for them to do any kind of space travel, escaping from such a large gravity would prove very difficult. Even if they were very intelligent, would they have any thought of flying? Since the gravity would be so strong, I would doubt that there would be any flying animals, or even leaves floating through the air to get the inspiration from.
        • There's a chapter in the Carl Sagan's Cosmos book devoted to this issue.

          The flying life forms depicted there are both logical and beautiful.

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by c4miles (249464)
          Gas giants have solid, liquid, and gaseous phases in their planetary sphere, and don't have a surface as such. 'floating' would pose no mobility problem in such an environment, regardless of gravitational forces. Iain M Banks' 'The Algebraist' revolves around a gas giant ecology.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Have a read of the book Rare Earth by Ward and Brownlee ... they postulate that very, very specific earthlike conditions are likely to be necessary for complex life (i.e. above the single-cell level) to evolve. Basically, life here on earth is the culmination of a series of highly improbable happy accidents (as well as unhappy accidents avoided). The case they make is not 100% convincing IMO, but it's still an enjoyable read.

  • A 360-day orbit is all that is earth-like (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The thing is Jupiter or larger in size orbitting a red dwarf.

    I see more and more of these new-found planet stories and building a census is great stuff, but all the stories hype up the earthlike part to new levels of strain to get a headline.

    Call me when we get liquid water and an atmosphere and maybe we can start writing the "Earth-like" headlines.

  • Cool! (Score:2, Funny)

    by nih (411096)
    so does that mean i can skip work on Monday?
    woohoo!

    5 billion years you say?

    ffs :-(

    • so does that mean i can skip work on Monday?

      As you can see, it just doesn't matter, ultimately.

  • A Princeton-led research group has discovered an isolated community of bacteria nearly two miles underground that derives all of its energy from the decay of radioactive rocks rather than from sunlight.

    Subterrainian Microbes [planetary.org]

    This type of bacterium, approximately four micrometers in length, has survived for millions of years on chemical food sources that derive from the radioactive decay of minerals in the surrounding rock, making it one of the few creatures known that does not depend on sunlight for nourishment.

    These will survive any surface conditions, until the heat penetrates two miles deep.

    • If so, only briefly if at all. The zone of habitable rock will get higher and higher in the strata as the above surface temperatures rise since the internally generated heat from radioactive decay cannot radiate to the surface and into space, thus raising temperates below ground in lock step with temperatures above ground.
    • oh, OK... so everything will be alright. that got some weight off of my shoulders. thanks!

  • To The Stars, Then. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bill_mcgonigle (4333) * on Friday August 03 2007, @06:03PM (#20108519) Homepage Journal
    But long before that happens, life on our planet will have perished and its seas will have boiled away.

    Ask ten different scientists about the environment, population control, genetics,
    and you'll get ten different answers, but there's one thing every scientist on the planet
    agrees on. Whether it happens in a hundred years or a thousand years or a million years,
    eventually our Sun will grow cold and go out. When that happens, it won't just take us.
    It'll take Marilyn Monroe, and Lao-Tzu, and Einstein, and Morobuto, and Buddy Holly,
    and Aristophanes...
    all of this... all of this...
    was for nothing.

    Unless we go to the stars.
    - J. Michael Straczynski

    I must be in the mood because there's a box sitting at home for me with The Lost Tales [amazon.com] inside. :) It's been 10 years since I've seen some good new B5, so I may be a bit giddy today.
    • If you want to get all depressive, everything suggests that energy is conserved and entropy increases, which means all power sources will eventually fail because there's no more potential. So whether it's in 5 billion years or 100 billion years when the other stars are dead, it doesn't really matter if we go to the stars or not. In any case, it's not like we're in an immidiate hurry to leave, what's more important is finding out if there's anyone else out there.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by bill_mcgonigle (4333) *
        If you want to get all depressive, everything suggests that energy is conserved and entropy increases, which means all power sources will eventually fail because there's no more potential.

        Don't worry - that's only a problem in this universe, and theory suggests we should be able to signal among the multiverses with gravity. Throw in a little teleportation technology, and voila.
        • I thought entropy was particularly high at the big bang. Or maybe that's just informational entropy, which is different than the normal entropy that physicists think of. Anyway, infinite informational entropy would mean that we can't have any information from whatever happened before the big bang (if that even made any sense), or from the big bang itself. It's one reason why we can only know about events that happened right after the big bang. Infinite entropy doesn't preserve any information at all from an
        • Might I mention that the rest of the properties of the universe were fairly hostile to life at that point in time? If we start collapsing towards a new Big Bang, power supplies starting to work again probably won't be the most important thing to us. Of course, by the time entropy becomes an issue the way the GPP suggests, we won't be overly worried about that either.

  • Not going to engulf Earth (Score:5, Informative)

    by teslar (706653) on Friday August 03 2007, @06:04PM (#20108529)

    When that happens in an estimated 5 billion years, our sun will be so big that it will engulf the inner planets and most likely Earth.
    Actually, this is incorrect. It will engulf the orbits. The planets themselves will just escape to wider orbits. Except Mercury, Mercury's pretty much buggered.

    More Red Giant trivia at Wikipedia [wikipedia.org].
    • Right... because the planets can climb themselves right out of the Sun's gravity well.
      • Lousy rotten Sun, losing its mass. *Grumble* You could have said current orbits, and I might have had the decency to actually look it up before posting.
    • "Mercury's pretty much buggered."

      By Galacticus' lesser known brother?
  • Who cares? The people of Omicron Persei VIII, rulers of the galaxy, will destroy us in about a thousand years from now.

  • ... No. (Score:5, Informative)

    by Cairnarvon (901868) on Friday August 03 2007, @06:50PM (#20108919) Homepage
    Just because it orbits in 360 days doesn't mean it has an Earth-like orbit [badastronomy.com].

  • Earthlike? Not likely... (Score:5, Informative)

    by _mythdraug_ (27158) on Friday August 03 2007, @07:18PM (#20109159)
    Earthlike in that it takes approximately the same number of days? Yes.

    Earthlike in any other way? Not likely.

    The Bad Astronomer [badastronomy.com] had a nice examination of this article earlier today.

    • No, because NASA will come up with a plan to swap our planets' orbit with with Mars, and we'll be saved.

      Tom

  • Final confirmation of Earth-like planet? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by MtViewGuy (197597) on Friday August 03 2007, @08:41PM (#20109805)
    I think this discovery increases the chance that when the Terrestrial Planet Finder satellites go into orbit probably after 2016, we will quickly find a rocky crust planet circling a nearby star (up to 500 light years away) with an atmosphere very much like Earth's. If that is true, then this could be the confirmation that life COULD exist on planets orbiting nearby stars.
    • And the unfortunate part is that dumb people will use this as the final confirmation of the fact that God exists, because Look! There's a planet like Earth that could support life but there's no intelligent life on it and that must be because we're special and God made us.

      However, if we started planning now we could tell them all that we've figured out that the new planet we found is where the Garden of Eden was before God banished us here, and then we could ship all the buggers off.
  • Unless humanity and its derivatives evolve to the point of self-extinction of some insurmountable galactic event wipes out the solar system (e.g. a rogue black hole swallows the entire system) the sun will *never* become a red giant.

    People do *not* understand that once a civilization has become an "advanced technological civilization" (as we are), natural technology developments, esp. molecular nanotechnology, enable the dismantlement of the planets (think swarms of nanorobot miners) and the conversion of the solar system into a Matrioshka Brain. During that time period (centuries to a few million years) a materials shortage develops (one needs *all* those atoms when one starts storing zettabytes and yottabytes of data) and the closest available materials are all harvested -- including a significant fraction of the sun! Remove the material from the sun and it goes from being a G class star to an M class star with a significantly longer lifetime (hundreds of billions of years). The most probable situation in an engineered system is to extract and store much of the Sun's hydrogen and add it back to the star gradually producing a relatively constant fusion reactor power source for a several trillion years. During that time period we have presumably figured out how to navigate the solar system to enable close encounters with undeveloped star systems where we can pick up additional hydrogen resources extending the lifetime of our sun (and the surrounding Matrioshka Brain) until the energy resources of the galaxy are exhausted.

    Once intelligent life arrives on the scene all natural evolutionary vectors (e.g. natural stellar and galactic evolution) are subject to modification. A far more interesting topic for conversation, IMO,is *why*, if 60-70% of the Earth's in our galaxy are significantly older than ours have they not made the KT-I to KT-II transition (converting their systems into Matrioshka Brains in the process)? Or have they? [1]. Note that this is somewhat different from the classical Fermi Question, "Where are they?", which is really derived from "Why aren't they here?" or "Why haven't we heard from them?" and is instead the more modern variant, "Why don't we see more stars disappearing?" Matrioshka Brains can navigate around the galaxy but they don't go solar system hopping on a whim.

    1. "Dark matter" can be explained by the activities of advanced technological civilizations if one sets aside the arguments of theoretical physicists which depend in large part on assumptions of a "natural" universe. I've never observed a theoretical physicist sit down at a table and say, (a) here is a natural (dead) universe and (b) here is a universe developed to its full potential by intelligent civilizations and (c) there must be a phase transition from a dead universe to an engineered universe -- what do our observations tell us about its current state as we look back through its history? Cosmological discussions are inherently incomplete unless they incorporate how intelligence alters the nature of the universe.

    • Re:5 billion years is a long time... (Score:5, Funny)

      by eln (21727) * on Friday August 03 2007, @05:57PM (#20108451) Homepage
      Somehow I doubt they're interested in studying this so they can come up with survival strategies for when our Sun goes all Red Giant on us. I think everyone is pretty much in agreement that when the time comes, a Bruce Willis and nuclear weapons based solution will present itself.

      This sort of discovery is really more useful in a "science for science's sake" sort of way. Plus, as we continue to improve our abilities to spot distant planets, we improve our chances of finding an Earth-like planet that may harbor life, particularly hot green space-babe life. Such a discovery would certainly propel space exploration back into "top priority" status.

    • Re:5 billion years is a long time... (Score:5, Funny)

      by zapwow (939754) on Friday August 03 2007, @06:39PM (#20108799)
      That will be the next great "bad physics" movie: The sun has run out of hydrogen! We must drive a giant drill into the center of the SUN to explode twelve hydrogen bombs or America will be destroyed!
    • 5 billion years is a long time...

      It's not really that long. I mean, just look at where Earth was 5 billion years ago. What's that, you say?

    • Re:Right (Score:5, Insightful)

      by eln (21727) * on Friday August 03 2007, @06:02PM (#20108505) Homepage
      Intelligent people (and all people, really) like to work on things they're passionate about. There are plenty of very intelligent people who are passionate about solving the many issues that plague our civilization, and they are working very hard to do so. These particular intelligent people are passionate about finding new planets.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Aminion (896851)
      Some of the most outlandish and theoretical research have resulted in insights and technology that have helped mankind take a small step forward. A research project might, for example, require the development of better instruments, that can turn out to be of immense value in other domains and help other scientists answer seemingly unrelated but important questions. Also, don't forget that grants and resources are allocated by people far more capable of determining the usefulness of research projects than I
    • Absolutely. All the world's intelligent people should get together, decide what the absolute most important problem is, focus all their intelligence on solving that one problem, and when that's done, decide what the next most imoportant problem is ... Forget about art and science and anything even the list bit speculative. We've got important problems, damn it, and we need to solve those problems right now!

      GMAFB. Pretty much all the important scientific discoveries in human history were the result of pe
    • Sigh. If we all had your attitude, we would still be living in caves.
    • Why do we care?

      You are welcome not to care, of course. Those of us who do care think this is pretty damn cool.

      Here's my question: if you don't care, why did you bother to read and comment on the story? There's lots of stuff on /. I don't care about -- pretty much the whole Games section, f'rinstance. Instead making snarky posts in stories about World Of Bloodshed XVII: Ultimate Pixelated Flying Guts Edition about how much I don't care, I just don't bother to read those stories. Gamers who do care, of

      • It is interesting to me because we are getting a real look at the makeup of nearby solar systems. Even though planets like ours are still just below our limit of detection we have enough data to show that solar systems like ours (with a Jupiter, a Mars, etc) are not going to be the norm.

        And when you think about it, the planetary systems we are seeing, with lots of big, hot gas giants and their presumed moons, is a far better situation than we might have expected. If we were unlucky, there would be hardly

    • Re:What are we learning here? (Score:4, Funny)

      by Original Replica (908688) on Friday August 03 2007, @07:05PM (#20109039) Journal
      why are we really looking at this?

      Hey, I always see things I want to study in greater detail when I'm hanging out "looking for wobble".

    • Re:Change in Orbit (Score:5, Informative)

      by pauljlucas (529435) on Friday August 03 2007, @08:18PM (#20109621) Homepage Journal

      Actually, I have read that the earth may be pushed out to a farther orbit, so we wouldn't get 'swallowed' by an expanding sun.
      Right, because the sun will blow off mass into space. A less-massive sun will have weaker gravity so everything in orbit will move farther out.

      But it probably won't matter much because the sun as a red giant will be far hotter and far more luminous so the orbital distance increase won't be enough to compensate.

      • Re:Change in Orbit (Score:4, Informative)

        by meringuoid (568297) on Saturday August 04 2007, @05:23AM (#20111973)
        But it probably won't matter much because the sun as a red giant will be far hotter and far more luminous so the orbital distance increase won't be enough to compensate.

        It will be far more luminous, but substantially cooler: around 3000K rather than the current 5800K. It'll still cook the Earth without difficulty, though.

    • There are lots of reasons to do this. As I mention in my comment above, we are just now, just barely, getting to the point where our catalog of planets is big enough where we can actually start looking at statistics. That in and of itself is amazing! When I got into graduate school, not that long ago, we knew of no extrasolar planets, and by the time I got my degree the first had been discovered. Now there are over 200! We knew very little about planetary formation, and now we see it happening! And we can

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