Planets that can potentially support life... - Page 19

On December 21 2011 11:37 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:
Well not life sustaining, unless something we don't know, earth size planets have been discovered.





Source

On December 21 2011 18:34 Felo wrote:
Reading such articles always gives me a strange feeling of ... I don't know.

Its hard to get a grasp on the thoughts that it creates in my head but its a sense of ... non-significance. Whenever I read something like this I question the sense of life as the only viable option seems to be to life his own life to the fullest as there are no huge accomplishments that can be made compared to the greatness of the universe.

And it also reminds me that the life that we are all living is man-made, the rules that we follow, the way we live and so on and so forth - I wonder how society works on other planets.

The Milky Way is home to far more planets than previously thought, boosting the odds that life could exist on at least one of them, according to a newly released study.

Until recently, astronomers counted the number of "exoplanets" outside our own solar system in the hundreds.

But the new study, published on Wednesday, provides evidence that there are more planets than stars in our own stellar neighbourhood.

"We used to think that Earth might be unique in our galaxy," said Daniel Kubas, a professor at the Institute of Astrophysics in Paris, and a co-leader of the study.

"Now it seems that there are literally billions of planets with masses similar to Earth orbiting stars in the Milky Way."

Two methods have dominated the hunt over the past two decades for exoplanets too distant and feint to perceive directly.

One measures the effect of a planet's gravitational pull on its host star, while the other detects a slight dimming of the star as the orbiting planet passes in front of it.

Both of these techniques are better at finding planets that are massive in size, close to their stars, or both, leaving large "blind spots".

On January 12 2012 19:41 DenSkumle wrote:
It would be cool to build a self supplying independent spaceship, and set course for an exoplanet. When the ship had flown 50.000 years making it halfway to their destination, humans back on earth had developed technology far superior to the first spaceship, and set out on the same mission once more. When the second spaceship had traveled 25.000 years they caught up with the first spaceship, giving them the opportunity to laugh at the "stone-age" vessel. This process repeated itself whit the second spaceship aswell, and the third...and fourth..

On January 12 2012 19:56 BlaCha wrote:


Sounds like a nice idea for a movie script !

On January 13 2012 00:21 Krikkitone wrote:



There was an interesting sci-fi short story.... humans in a generation ship come up to their destination world and find out that it is already populated with humans who passed by them. The travellers then get one of the more advanced (0.99.. light speed) ships and set out for the nearest galaxy (so they will probably be surpassed again...but if not)

A potentially habitable alien planet — one that scientists say is the best candidate yet to harbor water, and possibly even life, on its surface — has been found around a nearby star.

The planet is located in the habitable zone of its host star, which is a narrow circumstellar region where temperatures are neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water to exist on the planet's surface.

The researchers estimate that the planet, called GJ 667Cc, is at least 4.5 times as massive as Earth, which makes it a so-called super-Earth. It takes roughly 28 days to make one orbital lap around its parent star, which is located a mere 22 light-years away from Earth, in the constellation Scorpius (the Scorpion).
What's so super about super-Earths?

"This is basically our next-door neighbor," Vogt said. "It's very nearby. There are only about 100 stars closer to us than this one."

The planet lies in what they describe as a 'habitable zone', neither too near its sun to dry out or too far away which freezes it.

And the discovery could help answer the question of whether we are alone in the universe, which has been plagued astronomers and alien fanatics for years.

Scientists found the planet, Gliese 667Cc, orbiting around a red dwarf star, 22 light years away from the earth.

Red dwarf stars are the most common stars in the neighbourhood of the sun, usually hosting planets called gas giants, which are not composed of rock matter.

Re-analysing data from the European Southern Observatory, the astronomers found Gliese 667Cc is a solid planet with roughly four and a half times the mass of Earth.

The University Göttingen and University of California scientists have calculated the planet recieves ten per cent less light from its red dwarf star than the Earth gets from the Sun.

As the light is in the infrared area, the planet still receives nearly the same amount of energy as the Earth, meaning water could be liquid and surface temperatures could be similar to ours.

A new estimate of the number of habitable planets orbiting the most common type of stars in our galaxy could have huge consequences for the search for life.

According to a recent study, tens of billions of planets around red dwarfs are likely capable of containing liquid water, dramatically increasing the potential to find signs of life somewhere other than Earth.

Red dwarfs are stars that are fainter, cooler and less massive than the sun. These stars, which typically also live longer than Class G stars like the sun, are thought to make up about 80 percent of the stars in the Milky Way, astronomers have said.

One of the largest concerns about planets circling red dwarfs is radiation. A red dwarf's habitable zone is generally closer to it than Mercury is to our sun, so a planet there would receive a strong shock of particles when storms erupted on the red dwarf.

"They could essentially give everything on the surface that's exposed to the sky ... a heavy dose of radiation," Shostak said. "It could be fatal."

However, if the alien planet had a magnetic field, this could provide some protection. So, too, could an ocean of water. Life that evolved beneath an ocean might be shielded from the brunt of the radiation.

(That's not necessarily good news for SETI, which searches for signals from extraterrestrial life. "We're not sure intelligent life, if under water, will be building radio transmitters and we're going to hear from them," Shostak said. "But it's possible.")

Another problem with planets tightly bound to their host star is a phenomenon known as tidal locking, in which one side of the world is perpetually turned toward the sun and receiving almost all of the heat.

But this isn't considered as big of a problem now as it had been.

For one thing, research over the past few years has indicated that the presence of other planets can ease the grip of the parent star, keeping a planet from being perfectly stagnant.

Furthermore, if the planet has an atmosphere, it might also boast wind, which could move the hot atmosphere to the dark side and the cool atmosphere to the sunlit side.