Astronomers Find An Earth-Size World Just 11 Light Years Away (arstechnica.com) 175
Astronomers have discovered a planet 35 percent more massive than Earth in orbit around a red dwarf star just 11 light years from the Sun. "The planet, Ross 128 b, likely exists at the edge of the small, relatively faint star's habitable zone even though it is 20 times closer to its star than the Earth is to the Sun," reports Ars Technica. "The study in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics finds the best estimate for its surface temperature is between -60 degrees Celsius and 20 degrees Celsius." From the report: This is not the closest Earth-size world that could potentially harbor liquid water on its surface -- that title is held by Proxima Centauri b, which is less than 4.3 light years away from Earth and located in the star system closest to the Sun. Even so, due to a variety of factors, Ross 128 b is tied for fourth on a list of potentially most habitable exoplanets, with an Earth Similarity Index value of 0.86. In the new research, astronomers discuss another reason to believe that life might be more likely to exist on Ross 128 b. That's because its parent star, Ross 128, is a relatively quiet red dwarf star, producing fewer stellar flares than most other, similar-sized stars such as Proxima Centauri. Such flares may well sterilize any life that might develop on such a world.
May as well be a billion miles away (Score:1)
Too far.
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If there was technologically advanced civilization there you could send them a message and get a response in your lifetime. Seems pretty close to me.
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If there was technologically advanced civilization there you could send them a message and get a response in your lifetime
But if they're really advanced, they might never reply to our message.
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Or come and take our planet. Of course, if they're more advanced than us, they know about us already and are likely on their way.
It has always amazed me that scientists believe it's a good idea to broadcast our presence. We have zero reason to expect a warm welcome.
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Considering that the laws of life, no matter what form that life takes, are universal, I cannot help but agree. If there is even remotely any kind of competition for resources on a planet, a more advanced, more aggressive species will displace others, and it is likely that the one that prevails is one that is aggressive, xenophobic, competitive and ruthless, at least towards those that don't belong to their own species.
Considering that we barely manage to leave this planet, and even that only for rather bri
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If there is even remotely any kind of competition for resources on a planet, a more advanced, more aggressive species will displace others, and it is likely that the one that prevails is one that is aggressive, xenophobic, competitive and ruthless, at least towards those that don't belong to their own species.
On the other hand, for a species to reach the level of interplanetary travel, there's a good argument that they'd need to be very good at communication and cooperation. Isolated animals don't develop technology. Cultures do. What's more, a lot of the need for competition of resources comes from those resources being limited. If a species became advanced enough to randomly go roaming the universe picking fights and conquering planets, it's not clear that they'd bother, since they could likely go find ano
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It's 'pretty decent' for us, because we are adapted to these conditions. Life from another planet would probably find Earth to be at least partially uninhabitable. They are very unlikely to be able to breath out mix of atmospheric gases.
Detecting our signals would be very, very difficult and would require a gigantic receiver. Don't see it happening tbh.
More resources in the asteroid belt than on Earth (Score:2)
It would be like flying to Europe for a Big Mac and passing about 15,000 McDonalds on the way.
To travel long distances in space you have to really not need anything. If you did need something, you won't last long. So we are probably talking about a post-scarcity society. To them gold, diamonds, jewels will be trifles. To space faring civilizations, "Money is a sign of poverty".
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... it is likely that the one that prevails is one that is aggressive, xenophobic, competitive and ruthless, at least towards those that don't belong to their own species.
It seems equally - or more - likely that an agressive, xenophobic, competitive, and ruthless life form would destroy itself before it could travel between the stars, or keep itself in a state of near-constant war that would make interstellar ambitions a perceived waste of resources. The kind of individual who would lead such a civilization would almost certainly have to be so concerned with maintaining their power and privilege that it seems unlikely they would ever become technologically advanced enough t
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It's the Carl Sagan "all sufficiently advanced civilisations must also be benign" view.
Oddly enough Mars Attacks lampoons this very effectively. E.g.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt01... [imdb.com]
Professor Donald Kessler: We know they're extremely advanced technologically, which suggests - very rightfully so - that they're peaceful. An advanced civilization, by definition, is not barbaric.
Which is basically a bit of equivocation - technological prowess and being civilised aren't the same thing. As Orwell observed
http://orwell.ru/library/revie... [orwell.ru]
The early Bolsheviks may have been angels or demons, according as one chooses to regard them, but at any rate they were not sensible men. They were not introducing a Wellsian Utopia but a Rule of the Saints, which like the English Rule of the Saints, was a military despotism enlivened by witchcraft trials. The same misconception reappears in an inverted form in Wells's attitude to the Nazis. Hitler is all the war-lords and witch-doctors in history rolled into one. Therefore, argues Wells, he is an absurdity, a ghost from the past, a creature doomed to disappear almost immediately. But unfortunately the equation of science with common sense does not really hold good. The aeroplane, which was looked forward to as a civilising influence but in practice has hardly been used except for dropping bombs, is the symbol of that fact. Modern Germany is far more scientific than England, and far more barbarous. Much of what Wells has imagined and worked for is physically there in Nazi Germany. The order, the planning, the State encouragement of science, the steel, the concrete, the aeroplanes, are all there, but all in the service of ideas appropriate to the Stone Age.
I.e. technological advancement doesn't necessarily make a society less barbaric - the Nazis and Commies used then modern technology to exterminate groups their leaders h
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All of your examples are science fiction stories. Stories need to have protagonists and antagonists. Nature does not.
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Except they've already mined a lot of the minerals, and identified the location of most of the rest.
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"They" = the natives, that's to say us.
Now excuse me, I have to pop to the Chemist's.
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You're assuming the aliens are rational and think the way we do.
No, I'm making the pretty rational argument that rational thought is a prerequisite to become a starfaring species. I have no doubt that a certain percentage of alien life is predatory and irrational. I DO doubt that that life would be able to achieve the advanced technology necessary to make it off their planet.
And, like I say, there are plenty of examples of human civilisations going on a conquering spree of their less advanced neighbours for reasons that weren't really rational from the perspective of the whole civilisation.
None of who had to find a way to achieve escape velocity, near-light propulsion, long-term life support, psychological techniques for dealing with long term space travel, or any of a number of ot
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Even so, they lost the empire, and saw its folly before we briefly put a man on the moon. Once again, I submit that this is a prerequisite to becoming a starfaring species. As you point out, it was a net drain on resources. If a species can develop the needed technology to make it from inhabitable planet to inhabitable planet, they've developed the accounting theory, financial metrics, and economic understanding necessary to realize the folly of such a course of action.
Well the British needed to develop all those by the time they had an empire, and it didn't make them give it up. Sure it collapsed eventually but as Orwell pointed out 'societies based on slavery have persisted for such period as four thousand of years'
http://orwell.ru/library/essay... [orwell.ru]
The British Empire had the accounting theory, financial metrics and economic understanding necessary to become a starfaring species before they had an Empire? Seems like a bit of a stretch, given that we haven't figured out that stuff in the US, even after sending men to the moon and probes beyond the solar system.
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All except for the two subspecies homo sapiens lawyeruous and homo sapiens politicalis. They tend to taste as if they are full of shit, which they are, but the taste lingers even after a thorough cleaning.
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Oh, you've tried them too, eh?
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With space being 13bln years old, and us being 11 light years away, and humanity being maybe 200 years into industrial revolution (and at most 300 years from being able to send something there), what, in your opinion, is the chance they have developed just enough to be able to detect us but not enough to have blown past Earth completely ignoring its life as too primitive to be of any interest?
Pick a ~500 year long window they'd need to get from beginnings of ability to listen in to space waves, until being
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You could argue that life on earth was 'primitive' (e.g. the literal meaning of the word, being similar to ancestors) up until maybe 600 million years ago or so. The explosion of multicellular life after the Cambrian resulted in life that is definitely not primitive.
Any advanced civilisation worth its salt would be extremely interested in Earth's biosphere.
My own opinion is that if advanced civilisations are up there, they are very far away indeed. Probably not even in our galaxy. And maybe we should be tha
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Personally, I believe even observable universe is too small. There are some elements of abiogenesis that are ludicrously improbable - compound probabilistic properties (like nucleotides arranging themselves into chains that make sense) have this nasty habit of rapidly exploding into numbers much higher than "iterative" stuff like the count of nucleotides in primordial ocean times count of earth-like planets in the observable universe.
Still, with the universe (entire, not just observable) being infinite, eve
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They even banded together and made a movie to support their point a few years back.
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It has always amazed me that morons like you believe that a more advanced civilization needs for us to broadcast our presence in order for them to find us.
Any civilization that is a threat to us will know that we're here without our help. If we do find an intelligent exoplanet civilization in the local neighborhood (let's say, within 5000 ly), we'll likely know about them well before we're technologically able to leave our own solar system.
You're petty easily amazed. So how exactly do they find us then? Telepathy? The Yellow fucking Pages?
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You are assuming that the culture had followed the same technology progression we have.
Lets assume there is a civilization that is on par with us.
However there was emphasis 2 hundred years ago, on glass production vs metal. So other then radio communication they may have an optical communication infrastructure. With a massive fiber-optic infrastructure, and laser based transmitters to cross areas where a wired connection may not be practical. They may be just a generation into radio communication, techno
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And they may have had radio for 500 years and radio is used primarily for children to do simple astronomy projects. You don't know, you can only guess at what is on the other end. But what is certain is you will never get a response if you never send a message.
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Lucy was beemed out there 65 years ago.
That's right, if at first you don't succeed: give up and quit trying.
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That's right, if at first you don't succeed: give up and quit trying.
Or do the same thing again and expect a different response. Either/or.
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Or do the same thing again and expect a different response. Either/or.
Is it doing the same thing? It's a sending a different message, at a different time, to a different location.
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Is it doing the same thing?
No. I didn't mean to imply that it was, but I can certainly see how it came across that way. I was just giving a general alternative to "...if at first you don't succeed: give up and quit trying.".
Re:May as well be a billion miles away (Score:5, Interesting)
Oxygen may be easy to detect, but we have found oxygen also on other planets. And even though it is very rare that there is an abundance of oxygen, even enough to have some left over after everything that could react with it (which is, well, pretty much everything) has, it's far from impossible and as far as I know it's also not easy to determine whether that oxygen is elementary or part of some oxide compound.
But there is one molecule that exists on our planet and only on our planet, and we have not found a single one anywhere else: Chlorophyll. Which is also the foundation of multicellular life on our planet, and since we only know life on this one, it is basically (if we ignore a few methane breathing bacteria) the foundation of any form of higher life.
And it can also be rather easily detected, chlorophyll absorbs light in two rather narrowly defined bands. You find a planet with oxygen that absorbs heavily in the 680-700nm wavelength range? Time to align your large listening dishes!
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>we have found oxygen also on other planets
Really? In the atmosphere? Where? From what I can find, Mercury is the only other planet known to have (relatively) high concentrations of oxygen in it's atmosphere - and at a trillion times thinner than Earth's it doesn't have an atmosphere so much as vaporized surface that hasn't yet been blown away by the solar wind.
An oxygen rich atmosphere is generally considered a beacon for the existence of life simply because gaseous oxygen is extremely volatile, and ra
Re: May as well be a billion miles away (Score:2)
Interesting point. Really, you need to look for *anything* low entropy, anything where the improbable has become probable through natural selection and reproduction: polarization, chemical, boulders balanced on hills, etc. Anything weird.
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Yes. And like nearly all life directly or indirectly dependent on plants, which in turn depend on chlorophyll to synthesize sugar with solar power. What's the point of the question?
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There are plenty of other options for plant life with equivalents to chlorophyll: https://www.livescience.com/13... [livescience.com]
Also we usually can only detect light spectrums of the atmosphere, not of the flora on ground.
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Maybe there is a way to calculate the adsorbtion spectrum of plants given an EM frequency output of a star? Even a rough estimate could be enough.
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You're assuming Chlorophyll will optimize (adapt /evolve) to the same adsorbtion spectrum at a star with a different EM frequency output. I don't think that is a safe assumption...
Perhaps we can calibrate our assumptions to expect a certain type of photosynthetic absorption as a function of a start's EM frequency output. I don't think people are expecting to find evidence of "green" photosynthesis around a red dwarf, for example.
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While true, all "higher" plant life relies on two forms of chlorophyll that have roughly identical wavelength maxima (680 and 700nm IIRC).
If you're searching for "any kind of life", we'd have to take into account that there are actually obligate and facultative anaerobic lifeforms that breathe methane, sulfur or even stranger stuff. But they never evolved to multicellular life. And I guess if we want to look for someone to answer a call, we will probably have to assume that whatever life this may be will ha
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Of course we could wonder what anaerobic life might have evolved into without having to compete with faster-living oxygen-fueled life.
Using atmospheric oxygen as a beacon is more a matter of looking for what is easy to find - it's easy to spot, and is a promising indicator of life since it's volatile enough to react almost immediately. Other, more broad-spectrum indicators are liable to require much more subtle techniques to spot. Such as looking for imbalances in molecular chirality, as life is (one of?)
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The point is that there is NO place in the known universe that contains chlorophyll. We find iodine and manganese, and the Miller-Urey experiment showed that even very complex organic compounds are far from impossible without life under certain external conditions.
The only place so far where we have found chlorophyll also happens to be the place where we know life exists.
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Too far.
A billion miles is only around 1,5 light hours. About the distance between the Sun and Saturn.
Re:May as well be a billion miles away (Score:5, Informative)
I would go on a limb and say it is 65 trillion miles away.
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A billion miles? It's 6.466e+13 miles. A lot more than a fucking billion. Saturn is roughly a billion miles from the sun.
Every extrasolar planet ever seen is 'too far' you mong. Distance is fucking relative.
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You mean, like, somewhere around Saturn, which we've sent four probes to so far, one of which actually landed on Titan?
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Heck, if we had evidence of a habitable planet that close, I'd be willing to bet we'd already have colonists there. The biggest thing holding back our space program has been the lack of a sufficiently lucrative return on investment.
Just 11 light years away (Score:3)
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We might reach this new world in just 200,000 years, great!
Right now, the current President of the USA is talking about building a wall to keep folks out.
I'm thinking, that the next candidate for the President of the USA, Mark Zuckerburg, has plans to build Wormholes.
This one would be just around the corner.
So we could stop by there for a Panzarotti and a Cheesteak for lunch.
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It seems it'd be easier to integrate Facebook with government databases and use it in place of birth, death, and marriage certificates, land registration, drivers' licenses, public school diplomas, maybe even health records (you can trust those privacy settings, we swear!).
Think of all the cost savings!
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Our best tech - with the theoretical worked out and needing only the relatively minor engineering effort to assemble it - could hit 0.5c and get us there in a 220 years. If we allow for some credible and fairly certain tech improvement, we can double the speed and halve that time. In both cases, adding 11 years for a signal to get back to Earth.
However, I'm of the opinion that anything we can't reach within the working lifetime of a human isn't something we're terribly likely to put any effort into reachi
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A 4-light-years-away planet system is an awesome test bed for interstellar probes, though.
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>A 4-light-years-away planet system is an awesome test bed for interstellar probes
We're not ready yet. Despite the success of the Voyager probes, there is a world of difference between throwing a more-or-less dead probe into the void, and building a device that will still be working and able to navigate after decades in interstellar space.
And multiple delicate instruments would have to be functional, with an onboard computer that is completely autonomous (an 8 year round-trip comms delay means any degre
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I assume you mean 0.05c and the 220 years is the correct part. Still impressive - can you offer a link, a name, something to start my investigation?
I know of a few theoretical technologies that might pull it off after a *massive* R&D effort, but nothing offhand that only requires "minor" engineering effort. (even if minor means what, less than 10x the man-hours invested in the technology so far? 100?)
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Nuclear Pulse Propulsion - the original Orion - can achieve 0.05c. No new technology required, just the will to put a large portion of the economy into moving a lot of mass into space.
More or less you build a big-ass spaceship (that's a metric big-ass, too!) into orbit, mount an ablative shield on the front and a big pusher plate on the back... and then toss the occasional nuclear bomb out behind you and ride the resulting explosions. It's a very 'blunt instrument' approach to moving at high velocities.
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I hadn't realized the Orion had even that much speed potential.
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However, I'm of the opinion that anything we can't reach within the working lifetime of a human isn't something we're terribly likely to put any effort into reaching.
Unless we develop some kind of hibernation, which is tricky but by no means impossible.
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Damn. I keep doing that. Decimal places...
I actually meant 0.05c, which is what would be expected out of an Orion nuclear pulse drive.
0.1c should be achievable with a fusion drive that doesn't require any incredible new scientific discoveries.
>unless Einstein is suddenly and completely unexpectedly proven wrong
I want my personal warp drive so badly, but I'm betting Einstein was right. :)
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A fusion power plant would provide far larger amounts of energy to a spacecraft (at the expense of considerably increasing size and mass). It would do nothing about providing propulsion. For that we've got a choice of throwing reaction mass out the back (or sides) of the vessel - the rocket principle and it's reaction mass problem - or throwing photons out the back (sides) to achieve the same transfe
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1) Fusion rockets are a thing. You don't worry about complete magnetic confinement in a very specific way, and the result is that you get a particle stream that provides thrust.
2) " the putative NASA EM-cavity drive, and the physics of that are definitely not sure"? It's pure fantasy.
So, basically you've ignorantly discounted an actual thing while promoting something that isn't a thing. You're not ready to take part in this discussion quite yet.
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So it's a completely regular rocket, although having a fusion power source, not hampsters in a cage. Meh. You still have to provide reaction mass of some sort - in this case, refined hydrogen/ deuterium/ tritium mix - which gets thrown out of the back end of the spacecraft and in the process produces momentum forwards. A rocket. You'
Re: Just 11 light years away (Score:1)
Not necessarily the case. If you read carefully, Ross 128 is extremely stable red dwarf. It has a tiny fraction of Sun's mass and, due to it's stability, low radiation.
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A tidally locked planet would have some very interesting energy gradients for life to harvest - winds and ocean currents would likely be extremely strong, driven by intense thermal mixing. Provided the atmosphere doesn't freeze out on the dark side of course.
It also potentially widens the habitability zone, since the light and dark sides will be "comfortable" at very different distances, while the "twilight zone" would offer temptingly steep energy gradients regardless. Whether life could arise there is a
Re: Just 11 light years away (Score:3)
That's really only an effect if you travel at 0.5c or faster. As it is we'd struggle only reaching something like 0.001c.
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Just do what Kirk and Spock did - slingshot around the sun.
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Okay. Now it took 81,000 years, plus a few months for a slingshot that can't impart any net momentum (you can slingshot around planets for a boost because you're stealing momentum from them, the sun is already your reference point)
Honestly that bit always struck me as ridiculous - even at light speed you basically need a black hole to get a sttep enough gravitational gradient to get any major deflection in your path, much less be able to pull off a slingshot maneuver. At warp 9 you could fly straight thro
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Nope nuclear pulse propulsion achieves more like ~0.1c
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Hypothetically of course. Assuming you could build a recoil plate that would survive millions of atomic bombs going off at point-blank range, while avoiding killing your passengers with either the radiation or acceleration.
But it's coming our way! (Score:2, Interesting)
In 79000 years, Ross 128 will be the closest star to the solar system. That's the most exciting part and somehow not included in the sunmary...
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Illegal Aliens (Score:2, Funny)
We are building a wall at the edge of the solar system - and we'll make the aliens pay!
Send them an IM (Score:4, Funny)
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Will it be tidally locked? (Score:5, Interesting)
The paper gives the planet's orbital period as 9.9 days. I don't know the maths, but I assume the closer a small body is to a large one the quicker it becomes tidally locked . What impact would tidal locking have on the habitability of the planet?
Re:Will it be tidally locked? (Score:4, Interesting)
It will be tidally locked. That doesn't mean it can't support life, though.
Imagine if earth was tidally locked to the sun. Will there be life? Sure. But maybe not on the dark side, and maybe the area in direct perpetual sunlight will be a hot desert. However near the edges of the terminator should be pretty habitable. Maybe a "ribbon" world.
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bro do u even Asimov?
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Mercury is tidally locked to the sun, and has no wind.
No, it's not:
Mercury is gravitationally locked with the Sun in a 3:2 spin-orbit resonance,[15] and rotates in a way that is unique in the Solar System. As seen relative to the fixed stars, it rotates on its axis exactly three times for every two revolutions it makes around the Sun.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_(planet) [wikipedia.org]
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Good question. To which, nobody knows the answer. Discussions about the question have been tossing from the world of science fiction to atmospheric physics and beyond for decades, with on average neutral results. Nobody knows, still.
Solar Flares? (Score:2)
Ha, Tardigrades eat 6 of those before breakfast.
It's cold outside (Score:2)
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Ross 128 has a high X-ray luminosity (Score:5, Interesting)
The authors of the paper use measurements of the host star's optical spectrum to infer that it doesn't produce a lot of UV emission, and note that it doesn't have frequent optical flares. That's good news for the habitability of the planet around it, as they point out.
However, they apparently did not note that Ross 128 is a relatively strong X-ray source, as measurements by the ROSAT X-ray satellite show. A colleague of mine worked out the X-ray luminosity of the host star, and it turns out to be not unlike that of the Sun, or even larger. That means that the X-ray flux striking the planet -- which is very close to this host star -- is likely high enough to remove the atmosphere of the planet. No atmosphere means not so interesting a planet, alas.
Obligatory... (Score:2)
Seedship. [philome.la]
There are also native mobile versions of this space exploration game. [boingboing.net]
I'm outta here (Score:2)
Now I know where to point my ship, time to buy the hull build and install my engines with FTL, and I'm *gone*.
You can keep Trumpolini & co.
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If you think this is not new, you should wait for the dup coming tomorrow!
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Well, we certainly won't be sending humans there any time soon, but we could get a pretty good look at it if we ever decided to build a serious space telescope, and it's potentially within range of a multi-century insterstellar probe if we ever decide to build one.
11 light years away is practically in our backyard astronomically speaking - there's only 12 known stars within 10 light years of Earth.
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The kinetic energy of a planet in orbit is humongous, about 2.7x10^33 Joules. If you wanted to change that kinetic energy by 1%, and you had access to all the solar energy hitting the Earth, 3.2x10^20 J/h (89,000 TW), it would take nearly 10^12 h, over 100 million years. And that's without figuring out what to use for reaction Mass. Nope. Terraforming has to be a whole lot easier.
That or we buy a planet mover from the Outsiders. http://larryniven.wikia.com/wi... [wikia.com]
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In terms of cubic metres of environment per gigajoule of investment, living inside rotating space stations (or lunar stations) will be ridiculously more efficient - and many millennia quicker to achieve - than terraforming anything. Even assuming that sufficient materials for your terraforming project exist in your planetary system, which is not subject to any sort of guarantee.
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Hey, look at it this way.
We'd be good entertainment. They'll have a good laugh if nothing else.