Earthlike Planet Orbiting Nearby Star 617
The Bad Astronomer writes "Astronomers in Europe have announced the discovery of a planet with only 5 times the Earth's mass, orbiting a red dwarf star 20 light years away. It orbits the star so closely that it only takes 13 days to go around... but the star is so cool that the temperature of the planet is between 0 and 40 Celsius. At this temperature there could be liquid water. Models indicate the planet is either rocky like the Earth or covered in an ocean. While it's not known if there actually is liquid water on the planet, this is a really big discovery, and indicates that we are getting ever closer to finding another Earth orbiting an alien star."
Strange new worlds (Score:3, Insightful)
This is a really big discovery...
And that, my friends, is the understatement of the millennium.
How long to get there? (Score:2, Redundant)
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Re:How long to get there? (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately the traveller would not percieve the passage of time any more, having been transformed into raspberry jam by the accelleration forces.
Re:How long to get there? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:How long to get there? (Score:5, Interesting)
Two other words: Relativity, and Acceleration.
I've read[1] that if we accelerate consistently at 1G we'll reach 0.77 C in 1 year. However, as we continue to accelerate closer to C, we get more and more relativistic and things get screwy... screwy to the point that I'll estimate it would take about 6 years (that's 6 rocket years, not earth observer years) to get there, with 1G accel and 1G deccel. So, human travel would be extremely feasible.
While a probe could accelerate much harder, I figure it would still take 50 years or so to get results from a probe to confirm it's worth sending people.
1. http://www2.corepower.com:8080/~relfaq/rocket.htm
Re:How long to get there? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:How long to get there? (Score:5, Informative)
About the most we could realistically hope for is somewhere between 0.01c to 0.1c. Antimatter-induced microfusion, dusty fission fragment rockets, thermal rockets, nuclear saltwater rockets, various kinds of sails, etc, seem to be the most realistic options. But probably not during our lifetimes.
Re:How long to get there? (Score:5, Interesting)
What about space dust? INAA (I'm not an astro-physicist)but I don't think that the main problem is a lack of speed. Eventually we will work out how to go faster and faster. For me the problem is those little bits of rock and grit in the way. Even at 0.75C travelling in the not-quite empty vastness of space would be like standing in front of a machine gun going full-on.
Re:How long to get there? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:How long to get there? (Score:5, Informative)
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The Calculus result after you take the limit is physically meaningless, in my opin
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Re:Strange new worlds (Score:5, Funny)
That's like saying "I'm dating this girl who's like Jessica Alba. She's latina, has dark hair, and is only five times Jessica Alba's size! So you see, she is plainly like Jessica Alba!".
Heh.
Disclaimer: I am very excited by this news; I'm just being a smartass!
Re:Strange new worlds (Score:5, Insightful)
But it's still a living, breathing girl. By the same token, other discovered extrasolar planets would like trying to have a meaningful relationship with a bulk freighter.
OFQ (Score:5, Funny)
(Obligatory Futurama Quote)
From the Futurama episode Love and Rocket:
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Earthlike Planet Orbiting Nearby Star
Might just pop over there now..
Tag: theresnoplacelikehome (Score:2, Insightful)
Thank you for your support.
Re:Tag: theresnoplacelikehome (Score:5, Insightful)
We could go completely green and make Earth a complete paradise--and then some rock could come along and kill all of us.
And, chances are, the knowledge we would gain just from trying to build a "slowboat" colony ship (one that does not travel at an appreciable fraction of c) would be of immense value in helping preserve Earth's environment. Such a ship would be an entire self-contained, self-sufficient ecosystem, having to last hundreds, if not thousands, of years with no resupply and no dependable external power source. Creating such a system would lead to incredibly-efficient systems, and the lessons could be transferred to everyday engineering projects and other systems. Think water reclamation, ultra-efficient farming and food production techniques (solves hunger problems too!), clean, efficient sources of energy...
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The long-term survival of the species depends on leaving Earth to colonize other Earth-like worlds. Anyone who opposes this simply wishes the human race to become extinct.
Also, the idea that we need to destroy any ecosystem we come into contact with is a false dichotomy. It's people like you who give rational environmentalists like me a bad name. I'm an environmentalist because I want to help save humanity, not because I think we shouldn't be allowed to survive.
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A : ) (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Uninhabital new worlds (Score:5, Interesting)
Also remember that were you got the information on gravitational pull and the atmosphere for this planet is speculative at best.
1) 2.25 times that of our own gravitational pull would not be ideal for us to live but, it doesn't mean nothing could live there. I pull 2.25g's with my car on a dry skid pad, I have not died yet.
2) Really?
3) Yes the planet is closer to its sun that ours, but if this planet is like ours, the atmosphere filters out most of the radiation. The star closest to them does not spit out the magnitude of radiation that ours does due to its size.
4) If there is atmosphere like ours with water in it, it will hold some of the heat as it passes out of its suns rays and therefore should be just as turbulent.
Also some things to think about:
Even if the planet is 2 times as big as our planet, it could be spinning faster than ours. This would help off set the gravitational pull on our bodies at the surface.
No one is saying this is a planet to colonize, but with some of our technology and determination, it could be a waypoint in the stars for us to refuel and grab water before we continue our adventures further into space.
Just my two cents,
-X
Re:Uninhabital new worlds (Score:5, Insightful)
This does raise an interesting point, however. A great deal of money and research time has been spent studying how human and animal physiology react to low- or micro-gravity, but I am not aware of any long-term studies of higher G's, such as raising monkeys in a giant centrifuge or somesuch. Sure, this would take a lot of money, but hopefully less than for sending things to space, and it is vital knowledge for space exploration (long-term acceleration or living on these planets are the two key reasons).
The discovery of this planet provides some hope for those of us who hope the human race will escape Earth before we destroy it, or those who hope for Earth-similar life. And we can only expect the discovery of these planets to accelerate in the future, as out technology makes it easier to find them.
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Surface gravity does not scale linearly with planet mass.
If the planet radius is constant, it does, at least according to Newton's gravitational laws. But gravity also is inversely proportional to the square of the planet radius (given a constant mass), so a low density planet (large, but low mass) has lower gravity than a high density planet (small, but high mass), and the gravity decreases faster with increasing radius than it increases with increasing mass.
The planet in the article would have a gravity of approx. 2.223g according to my calculations.
Re:Uninhabital new worlds (Score:5, Informative)
ORL J Otorhinolaryngol Relat Spec. 1995 Jul-Aug;57(4):189-93.
Effect of prolonged hypergravity on the vestibular system: a behavioural study.Sondag HN, de Jong HA, Oosterveld WJ.
Vestibular Department ENT, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Golden hamsters were exposed to conditions of 2.5 times normal gravity (hypergravity, HG) for 4 months. During this period, tests were carried out to study equilibrium maintenance, swimming behaviour and open-field behaviour of these HG hamsters and of control hamsters living in a normal-gravity environment. The tests proved to be useful devices for detecting differences in perceptive-motor behaviour between HG hamsters and control hamsters. The HG hamsters had more difficulties in balancing on tubes and orientation during swimming. In the open-field study, the HG hamsters showed less locomotor activity than control hamsters. However, no differences were observed between the groups in washing, rearing and number of times having defaecation. These findings indicate that the daily transition from 2.5 to 1 g was not experienced as stressful by the hamsters, although performance on several perceptive-motor tasks was decreased, especially during the first weeks.
Re:Uninhabital new worlds (Score:4, Funny)
Semi-inhabital new worlds (Score:4, Interesting)
I am aware of one experiment of putting someone in a high-G centerfuge and subjecting him to 1.5G's. The experiment was terminated early, due to the participant having a mild heart attack. Keep in mind, the participant wasn't given time to acclimate to the new environment gradually, and the experiment was short in duration, lasting only about a week, as it was designed more towards seeing if a high-G environment could help astronauts overcome loss of muscle mass and bone decalcification faster than normal after returning to earth, rather than colonization of a high-G environment.
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Hmmmmm. It may well be something that the Earth (ie the planet) can't really afford, but it is something the Human Species MUST do at some point if it wants to survive. More than that, it may be something the Human Species can only really afford to do in the next hundred years or so, because as the Earth fills up with more and more people, all the resources will end up being used, leaving nothing left to attempt to get at least some of our species to "safet
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Re:Uninhabital new worlds (Score:5, Insightful)
2) I don't think quakes are a big problem for life in general.
3 & 4) Complex life forms live around thermal vents where the temprature varies by hundredes of degrees over a few inches. Our own biosphere is also a chaotic system where order "emerges" in the form of a dynamic equilibrium.
"Even if I could travel a light-year a minute for a buck, I'd never consider trying to live there."
I think you missed the point (or maybe you were aiming for cynical humour), we are a long way technologically from colonising the stars, so much so that we are only now infering the existance of interesting targets. We co-evolved with Earth's biosphere and it's very unlikely we will find a hospitable duplicate where we can lay around on a beach or picnic by a river. Given the huge technology gap, our species must first learn how to sustain the only hospitable biosphere we have for millenia before we can "consider" moving to another planet.
"Next?"
Yes, by all means keep this research going, great stuff!
Probably not tidally locked. (Score:4, Interesting)
2.25 gees is uncomfortable but tolerable (carry someone your own weight piggyback and you're almost there), and largely irrelevant to any water-dwelling critters.
However, the larger problem -- that I didn't see any of the articles explicitly raise -- it that there's likely a Venus-like greenhouse with the temperature much hotter than the 0-40C based on the equilibrium temperature of a rocky body at that distance from the primary. We can hope not, but we'd need a reason why not.
Based on our system, anything Venus-size or larger has a thick atmosphere, except Earth, and Earth is an anomaly because it got whacked by something massive (Mars mass) late in its formation, blowing most of the volatiles -- and the material that makes up the Moon -- off the planet altogether. (However, such late-stage super-impacts may be not all that unusual; it could explain some other oddities of our system, such as Uranus's tilt.)
Re:Probably not tidally locked. (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm a sucker for this kind of news, so I'll be waiting until somebody can measure and report results with a major presence of either CO2, nitrogen, methane, whatever's there. But then again, Gliese 581 is a red dwarf, has it gone through a red giant stage? If so, any atmosphere may have been blasted into deep space.
Then again, maybe atmospheres can regenerate through the leaking of gases from beneath the planetary crust, volcanic-style, and with 2.5 G's, I would imagine it wouldn't drift into space on its' own very easily. If so, a red dwarf may be extremely stable, creating an exponentially longer window for life on systems like these than with a main-sequence system like our own. But obviously, this is completely speculative territory.
Re:Probably not tidally locked. (Score:5, Interesting)
2) Yes, most planets do leak gasses, although the rates and gasses vary greatly, as does what is retained.
3) Red dwarfs are extremely stable. They burn their fuel extremely slowly. Gliese 581 will be burning long after the sun given up.
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Seems like a very big conclusion to leap to based on a sample size of one and even that single system contains an exception. Is there an underlying model which explains why planets above a certain mass must have dense atmospheres? Mars doesn't and I thought it's gravity was sufficient to stop heavier molecules escaping.
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As for our system, it's not a sample size of one, it's a sample size of six planets of Venus size or greater. Yes, there's an exception, but we'r
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Don't forget the Neptune-mass object that's still inside the orbit of the super-earth. I would guess its gravity would prevent a complete tidal lock.
A tide-locked world, next to a star, isn't going to have a very large habitable zone. Any atmosphere could be expected to freeze solid on the dark side of the world. For starters.
The temperature on Venus is fairly evenly dist
NOT so fast.... (Score:5, Funny)
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Hi-rez imaging (Score:5, Funny)
Peter
Re:Hi-rez imaging (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Hi-rez imaging (Score:5, Funny)
No, it's just devoid of intelligent life.
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(mine tastes better than yours too)
Go to a non-Starbucks coffee shop (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Hi-rez imaging (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Hi-rez imaging (Score:5, Funny)
"It is of course well known that careless talk costs lives, but the full scale of the problem is not always appreciated. For instance, at the very moment that Arthur said `I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle,' a freak wormhole opened up in the fabric of the space time continuum and carried his words far far back in time across almost infinite reaches of space to a distant Galaxy where strange and warlike beings were poised on the brink of frightful interstellar battle. The two opposing leaders were meeting for the last time . . . and a dreadful silence fell across the conference table as the commander of the Vl'hurgs, resplendent in his black jewelled battle shorts, gazed levelly at the G'Gugvant leader squatting opposite him in a cloud of green sweet-smelling steam, and, with a million sleek and horribly beweaponed star cruisers poised to unleash electric death at his single word of command, challenged the vile creature to take back what it had said about his mother.
The creature stirred in his sickly broiling vapour, and at that very moment, the words `I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle' drifted across the conference table. Unfortunately, in the Vl'hurg tongue this was the most dreadful insult imaginable, and there was nothing for it but to wage terrible war. Eventually of course, after their galaxy had been decimated over a few thousand years, it was realised that the whole thing had been a ghastly mistake, and so the two opposing battle fleets settled their few remaining differences in order to launch a joint attack on our Galaxy -- now positively identified as the source of the offending remark.
For thousands more years the mighty ships tore across the empty wastes of space and finally dived screaming on to the planet Earth, where, due to a terrible miscalculation of scale, the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog.
Those who study the complex interplay of cause and effect in the history of the Universe say that this sort of thing is going on all the time, but are powerless to prevent it.
`It's just life,' they say."
Indeed. RIP, Mr. Adams.
omg omg (Score:5, Funny)
on the same day kryptonite is found
coincidence?
of course!
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More links: (Score:5, Informative)
Very cool news!
Caturday reply to the news (Score:5, Funny)
http://x014.uploaderx.net/x/astronautcat.jpg [uploaderx.net]
[m]
When do tickets go on sale? (Score:5, Interesting)
What I think is the coolest thing is that this is the smallest extrasolar planet found so far. We are getting close to being able to detect earth-sized planets. Once we do, I think the number of potentially colonizable planets will go up quite a bit.
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*nostalgic researching on your username*
Huh I didn't know Christian Slater played your namesake in the radio series. No way.
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Re:When do tickets go on sale? (Score:5, Informative)
The optical planet hunters often conveniently forgot this system (or dismiss it for various reasons).
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You have a pretty generous definition of either "underground" or "a bit".
Its diameter appears to be around 20,000Km. To reduce net gravity to 1G, you'd need to go just over 10,000Km deep. Which is awfully close to being as deep as Australia is--from Europe. Reducing net gravity by 1% would require a couple ord
Re:When do tickets go on sale? (Score:4, Funny)
This is worth sending a probe. (Score:5, Interesting)
if you create a probe with an ion drive and send it off in the next 10 years we could be looking at surveys of the planet in question by 2070.
Re:This is worth sending a probe. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This is worth sending a probe. (Score:5, Informative)
still, this is within the realm of practicality, and if it returns promising results it could usher in a new era of colonization.
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Still, It is 20 light years away which makes any reasonable kind of controlling it impossible. It would have to be artificial intelligence surveying, which means we're not getting anything out of it beyond what we put in. But, the signal is already present, here on Earth, in the of observable phenomenons. Perhaps in less time than it would take for the probe to reach it's destination and send back it's information, we could have already developed methods of reading an
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as opposed to all of the other bloated governments out there?
then it communicates back data by laser
Please sit down and do the math. Do you realize the pointing requirements for what you suggest. With the best tech we have the laser would be swinging between Pluto and the Sun thinking it was right on target.
still, this is within the realm of practicality, and if it returns promising results it could usher in a new era of colonization.
right... and
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Re:This is worth sending a probe. (Score:5, Insightful)
Ion drive not up to the task (Score:4, Informative)
The best theoretical ion drive I've read about has an Isp of 10,000 seconds. That translates into an exhaust velocity of 100 kps (rounding up a bit).
Speed of light: A touch less than 300,000 kps.
Plugged into the rocket equation:
Mf+Mp / Mp = e^{300000/100) = 2.72 ^ 3000
Well, the Windows calculator tells me that's 5.0899334329769958439246007097416e+1303
That's the ratio of ("fuel" and payload) to payload.
Um, even if I screwed up somewhere, and I'm off by a factor of a million, that ain't good.
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That is a truly shockingly large number.
ion drives and the speed of light (Score:3, Interesting)
if you create a probe with an ion drive and send it off in the next 10 years we could be looking at surveys of the planet in question by 2070.
Again, correct me if I'm wrong but according to http://nmp.nasa.gov/ds1/tech/ionpropfaq.html [nasa.gov], ion drives only deliver 10x the efficiency of chemical rockets. So to reach 0.6c, wouldn't an ion drive require more propellant than exists in the universe?
Re:This is worth sending a probe. (Score:4, Insightful)
Course correction on the way will be next to impossible, so we'd have to know the exact position of the planet, to the second, of the probe's arrival to the gravitational influence of the planet. Here we are, messing up martian probes with six months' travel time because of measurement glitches, and now this? We'll have to wait much longer for a manned mission.
More information... (Score:5, Informative)
The link in the blog seems to be broken. There is some more information about the planet (Gliese 581 c) on Wikipedia [wikipedia.org], MSN [msn.com], and Space.com [space.com].
Just remember (Score:2, Funny)
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My Hope (Score:2, Interesting)
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I think a true atheist wouldn't capitalize "Atheist." Makes it seem like a religion by a different name.
Re:My Hope (Score:5, Insightful)
Hardly. Atheism is as much a religion as not collecting stamps is a hobby.
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And the designation is... (Score:3, Funny)
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Re:And the designation is... (Score:5, Funny)
How come it's so easy to learn from Star Trek, yet I haven't a freaking clue what happened at work today?
JEM? (Score:2)
So when are we going to invent tactran so we can travel there? And are we going to have wild orgies under the gasbags?
Rocky like Earth? (Score:4, Insightful)
Last time I checked, the Earth's surface is 75% covered by water.
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Um, yeah, *liquid* (Score:4, Insightful)
Errrr, we have liquid water on earth at this temperature. More importantly, what is the air (if any) pressure. That will affect whether you have liquid water at 40C or not.
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Unless this planet also had a collision with a similarly sized planetoid (such as is speculated with the Earth and the current favored theory of the creation of the Moon) that would have stripped much of the original atmosphere away, I don't see ho
That's awesome (Score:5, Funny)
Seti @ Home (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Only one thing to do! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Only 5X the mass of Earth! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Only 5X the mass of Earth! (Score:5, Funny)
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quick maths on gravity (Score:5, Informative)
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The star is only about 47%-56% enriched as our Sun in elements heavier than hydrogen, so it stands to reason that any planets that formed around the star are similarly deficient in heavy elements/metals. See the following web page about the star, but keep in mind it has not been updated with this latest planetary information:
http://www.solstation.com/stars/gl581.htm [solstation.com]Re: (Score:2)
Remember: gravitational acceleration is directly proportional to the mass of the planet but inversely proportional to the square of the radius.
If this planet is made of the same stuff as Earth, my guesstimate is that surface gravity would be something like 1.71 times what we're used to.