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Speculoos-2c: A new potentially habitable earth
- moconnor 4y ago36% larger radius than Earth means ~2.5x more volume. If it has a similar density to Earth 2.5g would probably stretch the definition of habitable for humans. This doesn't rule out habitation by other life, of course. Cool that we're finding interesting planets though! An actually human-habitable planet would, I think, have a significant cultural impact here on Earth.
- ShredKazoo 4y ago2.5g means you weigh 2.5 times as much. So if you're 150lbs on Earth that means you'd weigh 375lbs on this new planet. Weighing 375lbs is certainly inconvenient, but it's not like habitation at 375lbs is impossible, especially if you have a scooter. I wonder what happens if a human child grows up in a 2.5g environment. I imagine they grow up to be short, stocky, and extremely muscular. Adaptation probably plays a big role here. If you give a 150lb person a suit that weighs 225 lbs and tell them to wear it all the time, they probably give up after a few days. But if you tell a 150lb person to eat more until they're 375lbs, their body has time to adapt. Since the new planet is 100 light years away, even at the speed of light we're talking about a 100-year journey minimum. Maybe the generation ship used to make the journey could use artificial gravity to smoothly transition from 1g to 2.5g over the course of 100 years. Loading the ship with people who are stocky & muscular is another option. I don't think living in enhanced gravity needs to be terrible. Astronauts have to exercise more in order to maintain fitness in low-gravity environments. It appears to follow that if you're living in an enhanced-gravity environment, you can get away with exercising a lot less and still maintain fitness :-)
- spaceman_2020 4y agoWhat evolutionary changes would human beings need to adapt to 2.5g?
- gizajob 4y agoThicker legs
- otikik 4y agoIt might be more feasible to remove a big chunk of matter from the planet in question
- avereveard 4y agoId's say a stronger circulatory sistem. Muscles and bone density will need to increase, but we do that as part of adaptation, evolution will favor the trait long term but regular use will already compensate in part or totally the need. Possibly ankles and knees will need to get stronger as well
- callamdelaney 4y agoWe would only be adapting to 1.36g according to mamikonyana - this sounds more plausible. Because gravity is a function of size, mass and density. Not only mass.
- a3w 4y agosame density, higher size does not mean 2.5 g. Only some of that mass is below you. Some is to the front, right, back, left, where vectors in sum are zero.
- throwawaymaths 4y agoThis is incorrect, the decrease comes from being at a higher altitude from the center of the planet, see gauss' law for gravity. If you kept the altitude the same the force would be exactly proportional as expected.
- anonymous_sorry 4y agoAlso, all the "extra" mass is further away from you, and gravitation is proprtional to distance cubed. Interesting. Apparently surface gravity is proportional to mass/radius^2 [0] Assuming constant density as per the grandparent, the mass increases with the cube of the radius. Which simplifies to surface gravity being proportional to the radius of the planet. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_gravity https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_gravity
- mamikonyana 4y agoIt actually gets you 1.36g, given the same density (your assumption) and using the fact that you are further away from the center of mass you get g ~ density x radius [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_of_Earth#Depth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_of_Earth#Depth
- chasil 4y agoMore importantly, this sounds like planets tidally locked around a red dwarf. Red dwarfs are known for flares that would destroy the atmosphere of any nearby planet. "Although this planet orbits very close to its star, at a distance about 10 times shorter than that of Mercury around our Sun, the amount of stellar irradiation it receives is still low... the star LP 890-9 is about 6.5 times smaller than the Sun and has a surface temperature half that of our star."
- ncmncm 4y agoIn any case all its water would be locked up in ice on the night side.
- callamdelaney 4y agoIf only we could invent a method to turn ice into water..
- ncmncm 4y agoNeeds heat. But that is all found thousands of km away.
- dylan604 4y agoJust use mirrors strategically placed so that light can bounce around the horizon so solar can be used to melt the ice. Or orbit a giant mirror beaming that heat source down. The fact that you think thousands of km away is a hard limit just means you're not fully caffinated just yet.
- ncmncm 4y agoIf you are in orbit, why land on it at all? Surely there are construction materials and ice only light-minutes away and not so deep down a gravity well. God knows there is nothing else down there of any interest.
- shireboy 4y agoAssuming organisms adapted to live there, it would be harder for them to reach escape velocity to leave their planet. Is there a cut-off where known physics says it’s impractical to leave a planet? Ie the most powerful practical fuel wouldn’t be enough for any mass to reach escape velocity?
- jmillikin 4y agohttps://space.stackexchange.com/questions/14383/how-much-bigger-could-earth-be-before-rockets-wouldnt-work/17576#17576 https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/14383/how-much-big... There's a table in that link of how much reaction mass is needed to reach orbit. At 1.5g it requires about 500% as much rocket as Earth. At 2.5g the number is ... much larger.
- est31 4y ago> 36% larger radius than Earth means ~2.5x more volume. If it has a similar density to Earth 2.5g would probably stretch the definition of habitable for humans. Volume scales cubically, yes. And therefore, also does the gravitational pull by the object at the same distance to the center. But due to the larger radius, you are also further away. Gravity respects the inverse square law. This means that the surface gravity of an object that maintains the same density increases linearly with the object's size. In other words, you would have 1.36g on the planet's surface, not 2.5g. But that's assuming same density. Even within our own solar system this is not true: Mars's surface gravity is 0.38 of earth's gravity but 0.53 of earth's radius. The gravity is lower than it would be if Mars had the same density as earth.
- imglorp 4y agoAtmosphere unknown.
- ncmncm 4y agoMost likely none.
- Agingcoder 4y agoA speculoos is a belgian biscuit. Someone had fun coming up with a backronym I think! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speculoos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speculoos
- thenthenthen 4y agoCant wait for MITRAILLETTE next to my TRAPPIST
- keyle 4y agoThey're from Liege, it would be called a ROUTIER :)
- cafeinux 4y agoCan't wait for two binary system stars to be called BELCANTO and MEXICANO
- johnchristopher 4y agoThat's an Herstal thing and it's already being used but for a different kind of products, not for space stuff.
- abecedarius 4y agoAnd Mallomars. Always seemed like an sf/fantasy name already.
- Agingcoder 4y agoYour wish has been granted : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRAPPIST-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRAPPIST-1
- johnchristopher 4y agoI am still not over the whole Biscoff scandal.
- 4y ago
- anvandare 4y ago>SPECULOOS (Search for habitable Planets EClipsing ULtra-cOOl Stars) I like silly backronyms like that[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speculoos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speculoos
- stinos 4y agoUsing a type of beer, TRAPPIST, as 'Transiting Planets and Planetesimals Small Telescope' wasn't bad either [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRAPPIST-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRAPPIST-1
- torstenvl 4y agoTrappist is not a type of beer. It is a type of Catholic monastic order. They just happen to make decent beer (and jam, and many other things). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trappists https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trappists
- samatman 4y agoSo this is a category error much like saying French is not a type of poodle. I assure you, it is, just as, well, two can play at this game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trappist_beer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trappist_beer .
- torstenvl 4y agoThe link you posted shows the opposite: Trappists brew many types of beer, though arguably Trippels are the most common lately. Saying Trappist is a type of beer is like saying French is a type of poodle — if you used the label only to refer to a poodle bred in France. A more apt comparison is saying Bordeaux is a type of wine. Bordeaux is a region in France; it is well-known for 5-6 types of wine; any Bordeaux wine that qualifies for AOC proudly displays its Bordeaux heritage on the bottle.
- JoachimS 4y ago
- Freak_NL 4y agoThey named their project, and thus this object, after the popular Belgian¹ speculoos cookie and backronymed it. I'm not sure how I feel about that. I don't dislike names with some pop culture basis, or even better, old sci-fi (given that there a more of those objects than we can dream up names for). On the other hand, naming it after a cookie seems frivolous. 1: Known as speculaas in Dutch.
- oboes 4y agoAnother project from the same university is TRAPPIST. Named after Trappist beers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRAPPIST https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRAPPIST https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trappist_beer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trappist_beer
- CaptArmchair 4y agoWell, they've already rounded that corner a while ago with TRAPPIST: > TRAPPIST (TRAnsiting Planets and PlanetesImals Small Telescope) is a project led by the Origins in Cosmology and Astrophysics group (OrCA) of the Department of Astrophysics, Geophysics and Oceanography (AGO) of the STAR Institute of the University of Liège (Belgium). https://www.trappist.uliege.be/cms/c_5006023/en/trappist https://www.trappist.uliege.be/cms/c_5006023/en/trappist
- Majestic121 4y agoDon't worry, it will soon be integrated in Stellaris like the TRAPPIST one, so it will become pop culture/sci-fi
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- eythian 4y agoSpeculaas and Speculoos are somewhat different things. Speculaas is older and has more spices, apparently.
- Bakary 4y agoI don't see how pop culture is a-okay as a naming scheme but this lekker cookie isn't. It is in fact pop-culture in its own way. Sci-fi names tend to be tiresomely similar since they overuse gods names and anglocentric concepts
- helsinkiandrew 4y agoAn orbital period of 2.73 days would mean there's no (earth like) seasons and agriculture would not be constrained to growing things at specific times of the year. A wheat farmer could split their farm into sections and be sowing and harvesting continuously. That's assuming there isn't a cycle from freezing to boiling every 2.73 days.
- simmerup 4y agoThe theological implications of finding planets even more hospitable than earth will be interesting.
- pygy_ 4y agoMirroring the fact that the cephalopod eye doesn’t have a blind spot unlike the vertebrate one.
- a3w 4y agoOh yes we still have theology. I don't know why. But as long as good books like Scott Alexanders Unsong tell me that American Pie is a song about the old testament, I do get entertainment out of it. Training your mind to find patterns everywhere can be fun, unless you get QAnon out of it. Or, IMHO, religion that influences states or bothers non-followers. Contrast the good things, though: The aforementioned authors shows in Unsong that "Harry Belafonte - There's a Hole in the Bucket" is actually about the singluarity in AI/AGI development.
- cwillu 4y agohttp://unsongbook.com/ http://unsongbook.com/ for the curious: “Erica,” said Ana calmly, “you’re going about this the wrong way. When Aaron is like this, you can’t argue against him. You have to beat him at his own game.” “What?” “For example,” said Ana, “Aaron, I propose that the Chevy does not represent the Tribe of Levi, but rather the Tribe of Issachar.” “Huh?” I asked. “Why?” “Because,” she said, with an ethereally beautiful smile, “a Chevy is a car.” “AAAAARGH!” I said. “AAARGH AAAAARGH AAAARRGH AA – ouch!”
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- scotty79 4y agoIt's really hard to imagine earthlike planet without vegetation. Deserts would look the same. But how would temperate zone look with soil and rocks and streams and lakes but zero plants.
- genocidicbunny 4y ago> Deserts would look the same. I don't think this is 100% the case. Most deserts on Earth actually have a relatively large variety of life in them -- even the most desiccated deserts will often have at least bacteria of some sort living in them.
- johnchristopher 4y agoSo, they would basically look the same when looking at them through my space suit helmet.
- mirekrusin 4y agoAs it's so much closer to the star, doesn't it mean it is much more seismic?
- ncmncm 4y agoProbably. And certainly tidally locked, so 1 year = 1 day, with a permanently boiling day side, a hard-frozen night side, and a temperate, twilit ring straddling them. All moisture would naturally migrate to the dark side and freeze there, permanently, if it doesn't sublimate away into the vacuum left after all the air is blasted off the day side.
- boredumb 4y agoIce mining is honest work.
- SyzygistSix 4y agoFor robots.
- somedude895 4y ago> temperate, twilit ring straddling them. That sounds like a cool sci fi setting
- AndrewStephens 4y agoThe City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders from a few years ago has this exact premise. It was nominated for a Hugo - I thought it was just OK.
- jkestner 4y ago2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson has a city on Mercury that stays at twilight on the terminator, but being on a rotating planet, it has to keep moving on a massive track. Until it doesn't.
- kemayo 4y ago
- goombacloud 4y ago100 light-years is out of reach for humans, I would say :D
- _fat_santa 4y agoIf only wormholes stopped being "theoretical structures"
- speed_spread 4y agoHaven't you heard? Wormholes are tired, Alcubierre drives is where it's at nowadays. All we need now is a way to shovel away that pesky dark matter.
- claytongulick 4y agoOh, that problem has been solved. Haven't you heard? Dark matter doesn't exist [1] Off to the stars! [1] https://scitechdaily.com/dark-matter-may-not-exist-these-physicists-favor-of-a-new-theory-of-gravity/ https://scitechdaily.com/dark-matter-may-not-exist-these-phy...
- layer8 4y agoNot necessarily, if we could reach significant fractions of light speed. The subjective travel time can be shorter than 100 years, and approaches zero as you approach the speed of light. (Photons don’t experience time, so to speak, they are everywhere on their trajectory at once.)
- awestroke 4y agoAs your target speed approaches the speed of light, the energy required aproaches infinity
- layer8 4y agoOf course. But it’s a common misconception that traveling a distance of N light years will take at least N years subjectively. At something like 70% of light speed the subjective time already drops below the distance number: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/109776/how-long-would-it-take-me-to-travel-to-a-distant-star https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/109776/how-long-...
- swamp40 4y ago> completes an orbit around the star in just 2.7 days I wonder if you feel centrifugal force spinning that fast around a sun?
- jerf 4y agoThe equator of the Earth is spinning much faster, on a much tighter radius. Do you "feel centrifugal force" when standing there? It does actually affect your weight a bit, but if you mean what I think you mean that it would be something you perceptibly feel, it is not. Moreover, this merely shows that the idea that the magnitude is significant isn't a good one. Even more importantly, you don't "feel" anything in an orbit ever, because when you're on a geodesic, you're in "zero g". You never "feel" anything in an orbit, no matter how fast it is. People on the ISS don't "feel centrifugal force", because they're in zero G. (Except tides, if you're large enough, but a single person in this orbit is nowhere near large enough or sensitive enough to feel any tides.)
- layer8 4y ago> The equator of the Earth is spinning much faster, on a much tighter radius. Centrifugal force is proportional to the radius, so a smaller radius actually decreases it, for the same angular velocity. The reason we associate smaller radiuses with increased force is actually because if the energy stays the same, reducing the radius increases the angular velocity (like in a pirouette), which then “feels” like a stronger force.
- ncmncm 4y agoCentrifugal force is v^2/r, so smaller r increases it. And we have higher v, besides.
- layer8 4y agoCentrifugal force is mω²r. Of course, v = ω2πr, which is why you have to divide v² by r. But if you compare based on the rotation period, increasing r increases the force, for the same rotation period.
- dvh 4y agoIsn't parent star flare star stripping atmosphere from any planet in habitable zone?
- rdevsrex 4y agoIt would be great if one day we could visit planets such as these, even if just with robots. I mean, the ethics of commiting your descendants to life aboard a generational ship is very sketchy.
- a1pulley 4y agoEthics have a cultural and temporal context: if you believe strongly enough in the expansionary imperative of humanity, you would gift the generational ship's inhabitants with a suitable religion.
- douglaswlance 4y agoIt's possible store billions of humans as embryos that are grown and raised by robotic parents upon arrival. And it should also be possible to genetically engineer those humans to be better suited to that new planet's environment. Though, by the time we figure out how to do that, "we" probably won't be purely biological, naturally evolved beings any longer.
- dzonga 4y agoI would gladly take a one way trip to one of these planets. provided I have a way of reaching there and spending at least 1 day alive there. 100 light years is no joke - but if the math on this is correct https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/612645/does-special-relativity-imply-that-i-can-reach-a-star-100-light-years-away-in-le https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/612645/does-spec... I can leave say when i'm 60 and hopefully reach star at age 70. Trade-off I'm willing to do
- holoduke 4y agoYes with a 1g rocket you can travel millions of light years in less than 80 years, when you come back earth is millions year older. In the future people will only live a billion years from now.
- marssaxman 4y agoThe ethics of creating descendants at all are sketchy. Once you've gotten past the fact that you are inflicting a possibly-unwanted life which will definitely include suffering, and certainly end in death, onto a soon-to-be-conscious being who is not yet capable of giving consent, the specifics of where that life takes place are not so significant.
- erehweb 4y agoDoes this or other discoveries give us any better estimates for terms in the Drake equation?
- tsol 4y agoInteresting, but if we have a hard time keeping this one habitable we'll likely have a much harder time traveling 100 lightyears and terraforming this one to be organic. It's fun to think about but we're centuries from such capabilities(if possible at all)
- Nanana909 4y agoAmazing. Fantastic research continually coming out of ESO. Had the opportunity to chat with someone involved (not on this project). Super talented. Wondering what the follow up opportunities to study this more are coming up.
- danabrams 4y agoPhew! Found a new one just in time.
- alecfreudenberg 4y agospeculoo 2: electric boogaloo
- hoseja 4y agoPlanet-finding is (understandably) restricted to very extreme types of planets, those which influence their host star in a detectable manner. Certainly cool but I doubt the usefulness.
- sposeray 4y ago[dead]