11 ms·
Wolf 1069B: Earth-mass planet in the habitable zone of a nearby, low-mass star
- bobsmooth 4y agoAlways nice to have options on where to send the colony ships.
- cantwaitzz 4y agoFollowed by an ALM movement a hundred years later. Aliens will rise up complaining of how they were treated in the mines by no other than the earthling colonists.
- zapdrive 4y agoWhich begs a question. If the Africans colonized Europe first, would they eventually give them equal rights?
- vba616 4y agoI am under the impression that Africans did colonize Europe "first" - it is said a group of about 1,000 people came out of Africa about 50,000 to 75,000 years ago and most people outside of sub-Saharan Africa are supposed to be descended mostly from that group. But it's arbitrary to call them "Africans" now, since they became Europeans and Asians and... I doubt the intellectual honesty of using the settlement of Europe to excuse subsequent atrocities by Europeans with "Africans do the same thing". Because all you would be doing is relabeling the same group of people we call Europeans and speculating on what evils they may have committed prior to learning to document it.
- TMWNN 4y agoAlmost certainly not. The entire concept of equality, and civil rights for all, is a creation of the Wester European Enlightenment with no precedent or counterpart elsewhere. To put another way, slavery has been present in every human society throughout recorded history. The only ones to have ended it across the board are a) the Roman Empire under Christianity, and b) the UK, France, US, and Brazil (roughly in that order) in the 19th century.
- andrewstuart 4y agoI’m pretty sure the safest bet is to send the colony ships out at relativistic speeds, back to earth 50 million years in the future.
- zaroth 4y agoWhy have I never heard this? It’s actually brilliant and almost too simple.
- ttul 4y agoA little farther out than Wolf 359, where of course humanity will one day battle the Borg.
- andrewstuart 4y agoHow do you know that? Suspicious. You’re probably one of them.
- thangalin 4y agoHere's a render from part of a poster I've made that compares the size of Wolf 359 to our host star: https://dave.autonoma.ca/star-sizes/01.png https://dave.autonoma.ca/star-sizes/01.png That is, I modernized the following image into a poster: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Star-sizes.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Star-sizes.jpg Email me for a copy of the full poster.
- loxias 4y agoWe were all thinking it. I am NOT looking forward to the Bell Riots next year. Being as I lived in SF in the late aughts, me and other friends would joke about the Bell Riots. Then 2016 happened, then 2020 happened, and all of a sudden it's not a very funny joke. :(
- mach1ne 4y agoDon't worry, it will cause the public opinion to finally turn against the Sanctuary Districts.
- CyanBird 4y ago15 day orbit, 170 day planetary rotation, that's an interesting one Sucks for the amount of radiation ofc Would be interesting to hypothesize of it being a larger mercury like planet than a earth like one Please some more up to date astro-duders out there, is the James Webb currently capable of direct spectrography of exoplanets? We can do spectrography during the transit I am aware, but direct spectrography, is that possible? Specially when we are talking of an infrared telescope
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago> is the James Webb currently capable of direct spectrography of exoplanets? Yes [1]. [1] https://www.sciencenews.org/article/james-webb-space-telescope-first-exoplanet-image https://www.sciencenews.org/article/james-webb-space-telesco...
- ethbr0 4y agoThat's sheer insanity. It's mind boggling that at that distance (and therefore footprint on the optical elements) you can directly resolve something even as small as 7x Jupiter.
- nick889996544 4y agoYes, but... Wolf 1069B is much smaller and closer to its star than this one, so we probably couldn't observe it with Webb.
- nigerianbrince 4y agoCould be a non problem depending on the atmosphere
- CyanBird 4y agoThat's the thing, this rock wont have athmosphere, so close to the host star, it would have been blown away That's why I mentioned the hypothesized mercury situation, as mercury has got a very thin mantle and its core is VERY outsided, so it has got a very strong magnetic field. This is consequence of likely early solar system crash, Mercury might just be the core remnants of a planetary collision elsewhere But yeah, this rock wont have athmosphere
- nick889996544 4y agoDetected by the radial velocity method, measuring the parent star being pulled toward and away from us by a variation of at little as 2-3 meters per second! It always blows my mind that we can measure that.
- rqtwteye 4y agoRead up about the precision LIGO needs. Pretty mind boggling.
- vba616 4y agoI don't understand anything about it, but I think I read that LIGO has been enhanced with a technique involving "squeezed light" which allows some bypassing of heretofore assumed fundamental physical limits through quantum wizardry. Something else I read about, that doesn't sound like it involves far out voodoo tech to me, that I wish I'd live long enough to see, is putting a probe out far enough and in the right position, to use the Sun's gravity as a telescope lens. ...and (maybe) actually get pictures of extrasolar planets. I don't know if those pictures would be like Hubble's view of Pluto, or in principle could be much better. If I could have one wish for something extraterrestrial, that is more achievable, it would be close up pictures of Haumea. Eris and others too, but Haumea most of all. I care nothing at all for Mars colonies, but the most exciting thing about Starship for me is the hope that maybe combining it with in-orbit refueling could enable quicker travel to the outer solar system and loitering/orbiting instead of flying by at top speed.
- nkrisc 4y agoPretty good explanation of the technique and challenges involved: https://youtu.be/4d0EGIt1SPc https://youtu.be/4d0EGIt1SPc One figure that stands out, the probe would need to be about 550 AU from the sun. Voyager 1 is about 150 AU away from the sun right now, for comparison.
- HyperSane 4y agoThe Solar Gravitational Lens is very neat but with current propulsion technology it would take a very long time to get the satellites into position. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQFqDKRAROI&t=411s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQFqDKRAROI&t=411s
- RyanShook 4y ago31 light-years away. Proxima Centauri b is about 4. Don't think I'd like to visit either. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxima_Centauri_b https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxima_Centauri_b I'd like to visit Kepler-452b but it's 1,500 light-years away: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler-452b https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler-452b
- djmips 4y agoWhy not Wolf 1069B? Kepler-452b has 2X Earth gravity.
- BeefWellington 4y agoKepler-452b has 2X Earth gravity. Eternal leg day. But seriously, these are all too far away for us to reach in any of our lifetimes, barring some insane discovery that breaks all the rules as we know them.
- danw1979 4y agoFusion propulsion, clever shielding and general relativity gets you anywhere in the galaxy in your lifetime, or so I thought …
- vkou 4y agoYou 'only' need to maintain a steady 1g acceleration for years, rather than seconds. (What's a mere six orders of magnitude when it comes to physical engineering, anyways? Just spin up a few more jobs on the borg clusters, and if that doesn't work, Moore's law will rescue you in a decade or two...)
- floxy 4y agoRoundtrip Interstellar Travel Using Laser-Pushed Lightsails: https://web.archive.org/web/20220826053918/https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.1079.9524&rep=rep1&type=pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20220826053918/https://citeseerx...
- bloaf 4y agoSo I thought this would be big news, so I did some reading. Turns out that in like the past 5-6 years we've gone from "who knows how many habitable zone planets there are" to "we're finding them all freaking over the place!" Does anyone have a good blog/news site that covers topics like this? Because evidently I'm missing out.
- chrsw 4y agoWe're severly resource constrained in this field. The harder we look the more we find.
- _dark_matter_ 4y agoWhat's the resource? Satellite time, compute power, grad students?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- adastra22 4y agoYes.
- flanked-evergl 4y agoAll of these are proxies for money.
- lostlogin 4y agoNo, money is a proxy for them.
- porcheetoh 4y agoMoney and intention I think. There’s plenty of money, but it must be paired with the intention to use it in such a way. This is what is rare.
- loxias 4y ago
- wyldfire 4y agoI wonder if it's anywhere near Kepler-22b. Romulus and Remus were raised by wolves, after all [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raised_by_Wolves_(American_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raised_by_Wolves_(American_TV_...
- xeyownt 4y agoThe star is much smaller than the Sun. What is the expected life of that star?
- bagels 4y agoSmaller stars typically live longer than large stars.
- moloch-hai 4y agoNone of these "habitable" planets is really plausibly habitable. In particular, orbiting so close, they are all tidally locked 1:1 to their star, presenting always the same face. If they have any water, it is frozen on the dark side. But they might have no water anyway because they (might!) have no magnetic field to fend off the solar wind that would take away all their hydrogen, as happened to Venus. Earth has its big moon helping it not get tidally locked, thus still spinning and generating its strong magnetic field. Probably Earth-size planets with a Moon-size moon are vanishingly rare. Dual planets might do better. Or maybe a dual moon of a gas giant, but the radiation belts of the gas giant would be a problem. So actually-habitable planets must be much, much rarer, among those announced, than astronomy departments' PR crew would have us think. Inside moons of Jupiter and Saturn might even present a better prospect. That is not to say actually habitable planets must be rare; rather, we can't spot them yet. But our big moon might be important.
- bagels 4y agoMars and Venus are not tidally locked. Earth, Jupiter and Ganymede have magnetic fields, and Mars used to. Do we know that these exosolar planets don't have moons, don't have magnetic fields, and are tidally locked?
- moloch-hai 4y agoMercury and Venus are very near to being tidally locked, despite being thousands of times farther from the sun than the planet cited is from its star. Mars is a good distance off. Earth got its moon via a nearly, but not quite, fatal collision. Probably most other planets did not. Ganymede's magnetic field is news to me. I don't think we know exactly what gives a body a magnetic field, or how it is maintained, but rotation seems to be important. Ganymede's is much, much weaker than ours, and some suggest it is a remnant frozen into rock.
- irq 4y ago> I don't think we know exactly what gives a body a magnetic field, or how it is maintained, but rotation seems to be important. The magnetic field on Earth is caused by electrical currents flowing in the rotating molten metal of the outer part of our planet’s core. You’re right, rotation is an important factor.
- bryanrasmussen 4y agoIf Science Fiction has taught me anything then going to a planet named Wolf {alphanumeric sequence} is a really great idea that won't get most of your crew horribly killed.
- loxias 4y ago"ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS, EXCEPT EUROPA. ATTEMPT NO LANDING THERE." We should throw a huge party to coincide with the Europa Clipper landing. You know, in case it pisses G-d/advanced aliens/&c off and they wipe us out.
- caf 4y agoMax Wolf catalogued over a thousand high proper motion stars, which tend to be relatively nearby which I guess makes them popular locations for sci-fi.
- bryanrasmussen 4y agothanks, I find it amusing the guy named Max Wolf catalogued over a thousand stars named Wolf.
- sneak 4y ago"nearby" = 30ly