4 ms·
A Habitable Exoplanet - for real this time
- hugh3 16y agoBorderline habitable, anyway. Rocky planet, two Earth masses, looks promising, but so close to its (small, dim) star that it's probably tidally locked, meaning the same side will always point towards its sun. This means that the vast majority of its surface will either be too hot or too cold for life. But a certain ring will have constant perfect weather!
- aaronbrethorst 16y agoFTA: "That means the planet has...a band of eternal sunrise or sunset where water — and perhaps life — could subsist comfortably."
- ugh 16y agoThat would be awesome as premise for a science fiction short story or novel!
- anigbrowl 16y ago20 lightyears is a long way, but not that long. What we're 'seeing' via our instruments was taking place around 1990.
- patio11 16y agoSo if we had pointed Voyager at it back in the 1970s, we would only have 19.997 lightyears left to travel! Space is big. We are slow. Everything cool about scifi is fiction. None of this will change in our lifetimes.
- phreeza 16y agoWhat about something along the lines of Project Deadalus?
- grackle 16y agoI would argue that this falls into the "cool" part of what, until now, has been entirely scifi - and that I'm absolutely ridiculously excited about seeing more and more of these discoveries in the years to come. No, there's no hope of ever visiting this place in our respective lifetimes (sans cryogenics), but I'd put money on the prediction that we will certainly see real imagery of exoplanets within 50 years. And that's cool. Really cool. So cool that we'll look back and laugh at the original question of "are all exoplanets bigger than Jupiter and closer to their suns than Mercury?"
- cma 16y agoWith an Orion-type ship we could make it to this thing in a decade (from the time-perspective of the travellers).
- anigbrowl 16y agoI was thinking more of spectroscopic interferometry. We probably can't make laser strong enough now, but a 40 year round trip for a light probe to start feeding data is enough for one person to consider making it a lifetime endeavour.
- tocomment 16y agoWould gravity there be three Gs? I don't think we could handle that. The atmosphere might be too thick for us too. May it has a nice moon?
- kqr2 16y agoAccording to http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20100929/sc_afp/usastronomyplanet_20100929210707 http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20100929/sc_afp/usastronomyplane... , surface gravity might only be slightly higher than earth's.
- tocomment 16y agoHow is that possible?
- cryptoz 16y agoDensity of a planet's interior is not uniform, and gravity tapers exponentially with distance. So, a planet with a dense core and a less-dense middle area could easily have less gravitational force than you might expect since the surface is so far away from the dense core.
- hugh3 16y agoSurprisingly not so. If you have a body with a spherically symmetric mass distribution, from the outside it always has exactly the same gravitational field as a point mass at the centre. Proof: http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/mechanics/sphshell.html http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/mechanics/sphshel...
- cryptoz 16y agoWait, but didn't I specifically say I was referring to a body without a spherically symmetric mass distribution? Maybe I'm incorrect in my understanding of symmetric, but I was definitely referring to a non-symmetric case in my text.
- phreeza 16y agoLink to the actual paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/1009.5733 http://arxiv.org/abs/1009.5733