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IAC confirms existence of a Super-earth in the habitable zone of a Sun-like Star
- kidsil 2y agoInitially thought Infrastructure As Code achieved this discovery.
- madduci 2y agoWell, the planet is terraformed
- flerchin 2y agoSuper Earths are a one-way trip right? If you land, you can never take off again due to the tyranny of the rocket equation. Barring science fiction, of course.
- 6177c40f 2y agoDepends on the radius, as I understand it. It could have more or less gravity depending on that, but we don't know what the radius of this planet is yet. Wolfram Alpha has a good calculator if you want to play around with this [0] [0] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=surface+gravity+calculator https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=surface+gravity+calcula...
- hmmmcurious1 2y agoHelldivers predicted this
- stuckinhell 2y ago?
- robotnikman 2y agoHumans live on a planet called 'Super Earth' in that game
- candyapplecorn 2y agoFOR SUPER EARTH!!!
- mxfh 2y agoArrowheads marketing team moving heaven and Super-Earth for the 1-year anniversary of the release on February 8th?
- Arch485 2y agoMy life for Super Earth!
- platz 2y agoIt's not in the habitable zone 100% of the time because of its eccentric orbit.
- ceejayoz 2y agoIt's not in our habitable zone. Life on such a planet seems likely to hibernate just like some Earth life already does.
- doctoboggan 2y ago> It's not in our habitable zone. The habitable zone is defined as the area around a star where liquid water could be found, there is no "our" habitable zone and "their" habitable zone.
- ceejayoz 2y agoParts of our own Earth aren't in the habitable zone, by that definition. Even here we get big surprises - undersea vents were unexpected oases, microbes miles deep underground, microbes living in boiling water in Yellowstone... Not all life in the universe may require liquid water, nor require it 24/7. In our own solar system, some planetoids outside our supposed habitable zone likely have some liquid water - Europa and Enceladus, for example.
- patmorgan23 2y agoDo any of those zones actually have life? The two examples you gave... Include liquid water. As far as I know there is no life native to the coldest parts of the earth that have no liquid water. It is entirely possible there is some other form of life that does not require liquid water, but we have yet to discover it.
- ceejayoz 2y ago> The two examples you gave... Include liquid water. This specific planet spends half its orbit in said zone. Here on Earth, we have creatures like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mudskipper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mudskipper that can survive severe dry spells, and fish that can happily freeze sold in ice for months. Europa spends zero time in our solar system's "habitable zone", but because of its conditions, may still possess large amounts of liquid water. It's a perfect example of why the "zone" may be overly narrowly defined, even for Earth-like water-dependent life. > It is entirely possible there is some other form of life that does not require liquid water, but we have yet to discover it. And we certainly won't if we only look in Earth-defined "habitable" zones.
- strictnein 2y ago> Unlike most planets in the Solar System, HD 20794 d’s orbit is not circular but elliptical Kepler's First Law says otherwise.
- ceejayoz 2y agoIt has an eccentricity of 0.40 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/82_G._Eridani https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/82_G._Eridani). That's about twice as eccentric as Pluto/Mercury; Earth's is 0.016. It's a reasonable layperson-friendly summary of the situation.
- close04 2y agoThe orbits of planets in our solar system are quasi-circular, with only Mercury (e=0.20) and Mars (e=0.09) being more elliptical. Every other planetary orbit in our solar system has e<0.05, even 0.00x for Venus or Neptune. They're not perfect circles but close enough for all practical purposes.
- dylan604 2y agoIf a "humanoid" from this planet visited Earth with 1/6 of their normal gravity, would they be a super athlete, or barely functional?
- ceejayoz 2y agoEver pick up what you thought was gonna be a really heavy box and it turned out to be empty, and got briefly thrown off-balance? I'd imagine that, but for everything.
- dylan604 2y agoOh good, so it's not just me that happened to!
- tokai 2y agoThe moons gravity is 1/6 of the Earths. So looking at our moon visitors performance, a super earth visitor would probably be great at high jump but pretty shaky at anything else.
- gpm 2y agoI wonder if jumping even makes sense at 6x gravity... maybe they would never have learned how to jump at all and always keep some limbs in contact with the ground. Or if "humanoid" even makes sense. Something snake like that can spread out the pressure along a longer surface might be better. Or at least something with more than two legs.
- josefx 2y agoWhat body shape would creatures living at six times the gravity even have? Would they be able to jump? Would they have a skeleton as we know it? I would almost go looking at deep sea creatures that have to deal with extreme pressures on earth.
- short_sells_poo 2y agoThey might have to be entirely aquatic at that point or perhaps have some very exotic skeletal structure that can support their weight. Perhaps ball shaped beings who roll around instead of any sort of walking? I'm unsure how would they deal with a small incline. Weight lifters are able to lift 6x their body weights, but it's not a sort of load that we could profitably exist under long term. We'd need to have extremely thick limbs and at some point that won't help either because of the cross-section vs. weight scaling law. It's also a sort of weight where any kind of leverage against a joint will generate massive forces. E.g. try catching a 50kg falling weight, you are likely to dislocate your joints and/or break some bones. And yet 1/6 of that is entirely manageable.
- Arubis 2y agoMy second, more intelligent, rational take: goodness, that's exciting! I can't wait to see more research as it follows. My first, drowned-in-doom-news take: can I move there? Immediately?
- tonetegeatinst 2y agoI pray we get star treck replicators.
- fragmede 2y agowe're a long way from there, but 3d printers are the very first step to getting there
- MrLeap 2y agoI invite you to stay on Earth. Balance compassion for yourself and others. Finding the balance is really hard, maybe impossible to do perfectly, so you have to try constantly. When you get close, I think you'll find that negativity evaporates in yourself in a way that's infectious to those near by you. Take care.
- pc86 2y agoThe only thing more exhausting than people acting like an election instantly makes everything great and the world is now going to be amazing is the people acting like it's literally the end of the world. You will not be substantially better or worse off a half-decade from now than you would have been in a slightly different circumstance.
- myko 2y agoHonestly a really bad take given the current environment. This is the not the thread for it but I'll point out that just today funds families around the USA and world require to live were pulled out from underneath them, regardless of law. I have a child who depends on those funds so it impacts me greatly, and I don't know if that child will be around long enough without funds for her care. So please do not minimize what people are going through, it may not impact _you_, but many people are negatively impacted by the insurrectionist taking over the USA.
- notpublic 2y agoHighly recommend listening to In our Times (BBC) episode "The Habitability of Planets" that was aired last month. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0025vvd https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0025vvd
- wiz21c 2y ago> HD 20794, a star with a slightly lower mass than the Sun and located just 20 light-years away I'd prefer to hear about interstallar travel news rather than DeepSeek ones :-) The pale-blue-dot is really generating anxiety :-/
- prewett 2y agoCheck out https://www.centauri-dreams.org/ https://www.centauri-dreams.org/, it's a blog dedicated to interstellar travel. It's on hiatus at the moment, but there are plenty of back articles to read! However, I recommend you figure out how to reduce your anxiety, because after reading it for a while it will become clear that interstellar travel isn't happening any time in the foreseeable future. Fortunately, I don't think that a species that flourishes from the hot tropics to the freezing arctic is likely to be in much existential danger from climate change, and even less from the volatile vagaries of politics. (Climate change might bring very substantial changes, but escaping off-planet isn't going to be less change)
- wiz21c 2y ago> I don't think that a species that flourishes from the hot tropics to the freezing arctic I'm sure you are talking about bacteria, not humans. Don't you ??? :-)
- hajola 2y agoNext year there is a plan to send a space telescope to L2 with the main objective being to search for Earth-like planets around Sun-like stars in the habitable zone. Like Kepler and TESS telescopes it will use the transit method to find new exoplanets, but unlike any mission before, it's going to look at the same spot in the sky for over a year. Super excited to see what data it brings back to us. The telescope is called PLATO ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO_(spacecraft) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO_(spacecraft) ) I contributed to the project a few years back, very happy to answer any questions.
- fragmede 2y agoWhat was your contribution?
- hajola 2y agoFiguring out the optimal placement of CCDs on Plato's 24(+2) cameras. Due to the way CCDs are fabricated, their properties vary a bit, they are not identical. For example, they can vary how much light they can hold before they become saturated. Given the high cost of fabricating these CCDs, and the fact that for each camera 4 CCDs are used, and all these 4 have to share front-end electronics, it was prudent to optimize their grouping to we maximise the dynamic range we get. More dynamic range means that we can tell more about the planets we find with higher confidence.
- adamrezich 2y agoWhy does it seem like one of these stories pops up yet again every few years?
- hajola 2y agoIt might be because we keep discovering more exoplanets. So far we have confirmed 5830 of them ( https://exoplanetarchive.ipac.caltech.edu/ https://exoplanetarchive.ipac.caltech.edu/ ).
- adamrezich 2y agoWhy is discovering another headline-worthy then?
- AnimalMuppet 2y ago"In the habitable zone". I believe we have some of those, too, but very few. Another one is still a bit of a big deal.
- hajola 2y agoFor many reasons. 1 - it might be very unique itself 2 - it might be very close to us 3 - it might be orbiting a very interesting star, a star type we didn't expect to have that planet type or so many planets, or so close, or so far, etc 4 - the more exoplanets we discover the more we learn how star systems come to be. the more we know how rare ours is, how it might have formed, etc. It helps us answer age old questions.
- casenmgreen 2y agoEccentric orbit. Too cold is one thing, but too hot I suspect is harder to handle.
- ceejayoz 2y agoNot sure how "artist's impression" the graphic in the article is, but it shows the innermost orbit being just on the edge. Given we have ice on Mercury right around here, and the fact that I have to pressure can stuff like garlic because boiling won't kill spores, probably not a dealbreaker. https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/ice/ice_mercury.html https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/ice/ice_mercury.html
- hersko 2y agoAnd only 20 light-years away...
- tetris11 2y agoThat's only one generation that would need to be raised on a ship
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- laxd 2y agoIf we managed to build the ship and if we managed to get it to same speed as our fastest space probe, it would take around 35000 years.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- bradly 2y agoAt 99% the speed of light it will take the traveler less than three years, while 20 years passes on earth. If they then turn around they will return to earth, they will arrive aged 6 years while 40 years have passed on earth. You can come back younger than your children.
- jedberg 2y agoWhich then makes for an interesting moral or ethical dilemma: is it ok to embark on such a mission after having children, knowing that they will live half a lifetime without you and, assuming you left before the age of 34, will be older than you when you get back.
- UltraSane 2y agoIt might as well be a billion. Humans in our current form can't survive interstellar travel. We would need a far more durable substrate.
- parpfish 2y agoso... not the Barry Diller IAC that owns all the dating apps?
- jillyboel 2y agoDoes it have Super-humans?
- perihelions 2y agohttps://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full_html/2025/01/aa51769-24/aa51769-24.html https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full_html/2025/01/aa51769-... ("Revisiting the multi-planetary system of the nearby star HD 20794")
- vivzkestrel 2y agoLet me remind you guys that "just 20 light years" = roughly 200 trillion kms. At the speed of voyager 1, it takes roughly 1600 yrs to travel 1 trillion kms. 200 trillion kms would take 320,000 years to reach there. Even if you increased the speed of voyager 1 by 10 times, it would still take 32000 years to reach. We really need to up the speed by a factor of 10000 before we can get anywhere close to human lifetime achievable travel times.
- RobotToaster 2y agoEven the fastest spacecraft ever made (the parker solar probe) "only" went at 692000kph. So 1,000,000,000,000/692,000 = 1,445,086 hours, or 164 years.
- foobarian 2y agoHow fast could a ship get going with a RTG powered ion engine like AEPS? Rough back of the envelope figures come out to 100 years to cover 1 light year, or a few thousand to reach 20 ly out, which is... nothing like science fiction books but not impossible either.
- CrimsonCape 2y agoAccounting for acceleration and deceleration seems like an unspoken obstacle in your timeline. How can a human comfortably accelerate or decelerate at a rate greater than 9.8m/s^2 for long periods of time? “Hey guys, we will need you to pull 9Gs for the next seventy years as your ship slows down to enter a stable orbit”
- PartiallyTyped 2y agoOr alternatively, we make Alcubierre spacecraft work, or we move our whole planet system. All entirely plausible approaches :D
- throwawayk7h 2y agoAccelerating consistently at 1G (and then -1G for the second half), should take 6 years of proper time (from the perspective of the traveller) to get there.
- aaroninsf 2y ago"Intersecting" the habitable zone isn't the same as "within," I find it curious that discussion of the ramifications are far down, it seems pretty salient to me... The idea of an ecosystem hence culture for which a fundamental cycle is a year of fallow hibernation followed by a year of fertile plenty is quite compelling as a scifi trope though. Me I'd name the planet Persephone for this reason.
- zombiwoof 2y agoI’m sure we will see a sign that says “go away stupid humans”
- yapyap 2y agocool, ultimately meaningless but cool.
- nicksrose7224 2y agoI don't think this is a good take. Discovery & science are inherently meaningful even if the applications are not immediately felt. Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) was discovered in 1938, but there was no obvious applicability of it to everyday life. In 1971, 33 years later, Paul Lauterbur used it to develop the first MRI
- pmayrgundter 2y agoMeanwhile on Earth, UAP disclosure is kicking into full swing How long until HN community picks up interest
- pmayrgundter 2y agoIt's turning into a comic sub-genre https://www.facebook.com/share/r/1HuP9d2T9j/ https://www.facebook.com/share/r/1HuP9d2T9j/
- asdfman123 2y agoOk, when's the next flight out?
- robertlagrant 2y agoThe existence of the Super-earth was not directly observed, but was instead inferred by the gravitational lensing of all the democracy[0] being spread in a sphere around the planet. [0] https://helldivers.fandom.com/wiki/Super_Earth https://helldivers.fandom.com/wiki/Super_Earth
- escapecharacter 2y agoWe know that, due to the lack of observable galactic civilizations, if there is a Space War For Democracy, it is a Shadow War [0]. Perhaps with one exception [1]. [0] https://babylon5.fandom.com/wiki/Shadow_War_(disambiguation) https://babylon5.fandom.com/wiki/Shadow_War_(disambiguation) [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabby%27s_Star https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabby%27s_Star
- gobins 2y agoIs there a way to estimate gravity on remote planets? Wouldn't the mass of this body, which is six times larger than Earth rule out the habitability?
- ashoeafoot 2y agolets have a look https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_gravitational_lens https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_gravitational_lens
- jmyeet 2y agoJust a reminder that if, for some reason, we discover technological civilization on that planet, it's very, very bad news for us as a species. I'm talking about the Fermi Paradox. Basically, given all the stars we can see and that we see planetary systems around virtually every star we look at, then a decent portion of them should have rocky planets in the habitable zone. A portion of those should have the conditions conducive to life. A certain percentage of those will develop technological life. Each of these steps that reduces the likelihood of technological life is called a "filter" in Fermi Paradox parlance. These vary from small filters to so-called "Great Filters". The idea of a Great Filter is almost no species gets beyond it. All the heavy elements we have access to might be a Great Filter. As a reminder, anything heavier than helium is made in a star. Normal stars only make elements up to iron. It takes a supernovae or a neutron star merger to make elements heavier than this. So, for Earth to exist as is, there had to be a star relatively close to us that was the right size to basically go supernova. It had to be born, live and die before the Sun formed and that material had to be captured in our proto-planetary disk and ultimately become part of Earth. We have thus far found absolutely zero evidence of these alien civilizations so the question is why? If we find an equivalent civilization to us on a really close neighbour then by Bayesian reasoning, it means it's significantly more likely that a Great Filter is still ahead of us.
- elevatedastalt 2y agoI love that the planet is similar to Earth in mass and orbital time. Feels like our older cousin from just 20Ly away
- 29athrowaway 2y agoSuperearth means super gravity too.
- ChuckMcM 2y agoI'm sure the aliens reading that are saying "Thank god! They aren't coming here." :-) But on a more serious note, this is some great science. I am super impressed by how sensitive the instruments need to be to chart the fluctuations due to mass here at 20 light years. I'm always on the fence about whether or not we should focus a beam of RF with some modulation on it in their direction, on the one hand it would say "hello! we see you!" on the other that might not be a good idea.
- didgetmaster 2y agoSince each star is different, it seems like the inner and outer limits of each habitable zone would also be different for various stars. Is it just the mass of the star that determines this, or are there other factors?
- rurban 2y agoOnly 20 lightyears sounds good, and the elliptical orbit within the habitable bounds sounds also good, comparable to our summer-winter shifts. Now they need to detect water
- boxed 2y agoSummer and winter on Earth isn't due to elliptic orbit, but the tilt of the planet. This planets orbit takes it both inside and outside the habitable zone on each orbit. That's very very bad. Going from Mars-like to Earth-like to Venus-like every year.
- rurban 2y agoNot very bad per se. It would be summer and winter for the whole planet, in longer cycles. It didn't hurt the development of advanced civilizations on earth at all. You have pressure to adapt.
- boxed 2y agoNo, it would have summer and winter PLUS normal summer and winter. Think about that. If the ellipse would be small enough to produce summer/winter for the equator, imagine what a tilt would do to the tropical regions. DOUBLE the size of winter and summer temperatures would be VERY BAD. And this isn't the case for this planet. This planet goes entirely outside and inside the habitable zone. By a lot.
- rurban 2y agoTheir stats say all boundaries are inside the habitable zone. And the more climate fluctuation, the better for advanced organisms. Very good. You need to shake the bottle for growth
- sagarpatil 2y agoJust 20 light years away (As a normie I giggled a little).
- gorgoiler 2y agoThe Raleigh criteria for 1km resolution at 20ly requires an interferometer with a baseline of 120,000km. That’s about a third of the way to The Moon or 10x the diameter for The Earth. How far away is such technology? For 1000km resolution the requirement is three orders of magnitude smaller, or ~120km. Could such a device be terrestrial?
- scooke 2y agoWell, let's go!
- metalman 2y agoSo can we now have a trio of ulra large optical telescopes, flying in an ultra high resolution formation, used to create images useing optical interferometry, now. Now? Want! And if the international astronomic comunity drags there feet , advocating for more "science" missions, and getting proof of exo habbitats befor they can look for them, tenures safe, then lets defund the whole mess, and build telescopes at scale, get optical data, and THEN they can theorise in they very own arm chairs at home, about all the anomalies they want.
- rbanffy 2y agoMy napkin math says the surface gravity would be around 30 m/s2. I'm not looking forward to a visit. Maybe it has a large moon like Earth. If it is in the same proportion as ours, the moon might even be friendly to humans.
- openrisk 2y agoHabitable exomoons is a cool idea [1]. "Scientists estimate that there are as many habitable exomoons as habitable exoplanets" [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitability_of_natural_satellites https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitability_of_natural_satell...
- rbanffy 2y agoI see all those big gas giants in the habitable zone and always imagine the kind of civilisation that can emerge from that scenario.
- einpoklum 2y ago"the new planet ... tak[es] 647 days to complete an orbit around its star, 40 days less than Mars. This orbit places it within the habitable zone of the system, meaning it is at the right distance from its star to sustain liquid water on its surface" 1. That orbit make it really cold relative to Earth - like Mars is. 2. It doesn't say that the planet has a human-breathable atmosphere; it might, but it might not - like Mars. Also, 3. Gravity force is gMm/R^2 right? Let's say same density as earth, and that density is uniform. Now, the mass relates to the radius by R^3, so the gravity force will be higher by 6^{1/3}, or about 1.817x higher than Earth. So, would you say this is a habitable planet? It's kind of a stretch.
- GONE_KLOUT 2y agoGreat! Let´s go there, kill all life and destroy everything, like we are doing on our own planet! Just imagine how RICH we can get!