Newfound Planet Has Earth-Like Orbit

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."

More Exciting

[ChromaticDragon (1034458)]

It will be more exciting when they are able to find planets the same size or same mass as ours.

Re:More Exciting

[ZeroFactorial (1025676)]

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!!!

Re:

[Khashishi (775369)]

No, because you would be looking deep into the past, well before humans or the Earth existed.

Re:

[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

[CastrTroy (595695)]

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.

Re:

[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:

[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

[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.

Life will be there after the oceans boil away

[InterGuru (50986)]

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.

To The Stars, Then.

[bill_mcgonigle (4333)]

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.

Re:

[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.

Not going to engulf Earth

[teslar (706653)]

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].

... No.

[Cairnarvon (901868)]

Just because it orbits in 360 days doesn't mean it has an Earth-like orbit [badastronomy.com].

Earthlike? Not likely...

[_mythdraug_ (27158)]

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.

Re:Earthlike? Not likely...

[The Bad Astronomer (563217)]

Well, thanks for the link love. I don't mean to downplay the discovery; it's very cool, and we're one-by-one building an actual catalog of extrasolar planets, which means we can do taxonomy on them. How cool is that? I just want people to understand that there ain't nothing Earthlike about the planet, so that we don't get people running around overblowing this news.

Final confirmation of Earth-like planet?

[MtViewGuy (197597)]

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.

The sun will never become a red giant...

[bradbury (33372)]

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...

[eln (21727)]

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...

[zapwow (939754)]

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!

Re:Right

[eln (21727)]

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.

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[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

Re:What are we learning here?

[Original Replica (908688)]

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:

[OakDragon (885217)]

so does that mean i can skip work on Monday?

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

Re:Change in Orbit

[pauljlucas (529435)]

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

[meringuoid (568297)]

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.