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Does that mean it's possible to have living creatures on that planet? Looks like a prefect environment to grow bacteria.
by dongsheng 15y ago
Does that mean it's possible to have living creatures on that planet? Looks like a prefect environment to grow bacteria.
- hartror 15y agoYes, IF there is water on the planet. So far we're not sure how Earth came to have so much water and it is thought that our water was a relatively recent addition in our planetary formation. The method HARPS uses, which discovered this planet among 50 others announced today, is spectrography on the host star to detect the wiggle as the planet orbits. This method doesn't give us the density or composition of the planets, which are the other two values of primary concern in evaluating it for whether it could host life or not. As always Bad Astronomy provides a no BS rundown of this all this news: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/09/12/50-new-worlds-join-the-exoplanet-list/ http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/09/12/50...
- guelo 15y agoThat would be life as we know it on earth, there could be life that uses different chemistry. But really the life questions seem unanswerable since all we can detect is the wobble of these distant stars.
- hugh3 15y agoFor transiting exoplanets at least, we should be able to measure spectra pretty soon. That'll mean getting some kind of chemical information, hopefully.
- bfe 15y agoThese discoveries are so tantalizing, yet so frustratingly data-poor. We know now that the galaxy around us is teeming with planets, with untold new configurations and environments we can't imagine waiting to be discovered. We need bigger telescopes.
- lucaspiller 15y agoAm I right in assuming that the stated temperatures are just estimates based on proximity to the star? The Bad Astronomy article suggests this, but doesn't explicitly state this.
- hartror 15y agoCorrect given the characteristics of the star and the planets distance from the sun we can deduce the amount of energy reaching the planet. Whether the planet like Earth, Mars or even the moon is however beyond current measurements.
- rquirk 15y agoAlso for people interested in planet detection there was a Google Tech Talk posted not too long ago about the methods they use. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Av67Ab0tF-8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Av67Ab0tF-8
- jodoherty 15y agoPerhaps the water on earth became trapped as part of a migrating space biosphere, just one of many oceans floating around in space, insulated by the frozen ice coating the outside and given energy by small collisions with other matter until it collides with a solid body and forms a planet like ours.
- JoeAltmaier 15y agoPlenty of speculation in that article too. A little more science is all.
- hartror 15y agoThe speculation is obvious unlike the OP and couched in the science.
- Tichy 15y agoHm, perhaps the right bacteria could convert the whole planet into cheese :-/ ponders startup idea...