A Habitable Exoplanet - for real this time

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/09/real-habitable-exoplanet/

by hugh3 • 16 years ago

18 20 16 years ago

hugh33• 16 years ago

Borderline 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• 16 years ago

FTA:

"That means the planet has...a band of eternal sunrise or sunset where water — and perhaps life — could subsist comfortably."

ugh• 16 years ago

That would be awesome as premise for a science fiction short story or novel!

anigbrowl2• 16 years ago

20 lightyears is a long way, but not that long. What we're 'seeing' via our instruments was taking place around 1990.

patio11• 16 years ago

So 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.

phreeza2• 16 years ago

What about something along the lines of Project Deadalus?

grackle• 16 years ago

I 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• 16 years ago

With an Orion-type ship we could make it to this thing in a decade (from the time-perspective of the travellers).

anigbrowl2• 16 years ago

I 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.

tocomment2• 16 years ago

Would 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• 16 years ago

According to http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20100929/sc_afp/usastronomyplane... , surface gravity might only be slightly higher than earth's.

tocomment2• 16 years ago

How is that possible?

phreeza2• 16 years ago

Link to the actual paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/1009.5733

A Habitable Exoplanet - for real this time

Related Stories