More on the Waterworld Goldilocks Planet 107
goldilocksmission writes with this snippet from Goldilocks Mission: "News spread recently about a super-earth-sized planet that has been recently discovered to contain one of the most essential compounds for life to exist in the universe: water. ... GJ1214b is a massive planet that can house about six earths and is about forty light-years away from us. ... The significant discovery leap of detecting Gliese 581d to the more goldilocks planet oriented GJ1214b is a testament to the advances in the technology of detecting earth-like exoplanets."
Re:Goldilocks? (Score:5, Informative)
As a serious answer, the Goldilocks zone is the orbital distance that lends itself to an earth-like amount of incident solar energy and (potentially) a higher likelihood of life friendly conditions existing.
The porridge isn't too hot or too cold... it's just right.
Re:something I could not figure out about waterwor (Score:1, Informative)
"How did they get fuel for the fricking jet skis?"
their home base was an oil tanker.
Higher Ice Phases (Score:3, Informative)
A "waterworld" would actually have a fairly shallow ocean, on the order of 75 to 100 km deep for an Earth size planet, as other ice phases would form at the bottom of the ocean [arxiv.org] at depth.
Re:Goldilocks? (Score:3, Informative)
Not necessarily. It depends on the planet's density. Of course, given that it's 6 times larger than Earth, it's most likely its gravity is significantly higher, but not necessarily, and not necessarily proportional to its larger size.
Inaccurate article (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Goldilocks? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Higher Ice Phases (Score:3, Informative)
Depends on your point of view. The 6 Earth-mass planet modeled by the Léger et al. paper I referenced has a 5000 km thick water mantle, but only the top 100 km of that would be liquid, which seems pretty shallow to me, considering. All of the higher phases of ice are denser than liquid water, and they form under pressure, so this conclusion seems pretty robust to me.
Re:nothing new here (Score:3, Informative)
It has the feel of a new cult.
Not only that, but they have the inane thought that a planet 1/40th of the distance from Mercury to Sol might actually be habitable because "a red dwarf ... is significantly more than three hundred times cooler than our own", neglecting the inverse square law, and that it would be red light, not the rainbow spectrum we require.
Re:Goldilocks? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Actually... (Score:4, Informative)
Umm, no. That particular planet has a surface gravity of 0.9g. Six times Earth's mass, but only 1/3 Earth's density....