New Transiting Extrasolar Planet

Shooter6947 writes "A new transiting extrasolar planet has been announced -- the only other known object that passes between its star and the Earth each orbit, a situation known as a transit, is HD209458b. The new planet, OGLE-TR-56b, is 0.9 times the mass of our own Jupiter and 1.3 times Jupiter's radius. It is the closest-in extrasolar planet yet found, with its year being only 1.2 days! Read about it from a cnn.com article or from the original scientific paper."

Comments

Re:Sounds like paradise

[Captain Nitpick]

29-hour day? Must be very very close to its star.

That's a 29-hour year. A 29-hour day isn't impressive in any way.

Hold off on the colony ships.

It's a gas giant. Colony ships wouldn't be useful even if it was at a livable temperature. Granted, overly large moons might be habitable for some gas giants, but we'd have to be able to find them first.

I wonder what alien astonomers looking at our solar system are thinking? (Something like: "No chance intelligent life could exist there.")

Molecular oxygen in an atmosphere implies life of some sort, as most non-biological processes reduce the amount of free oxygen. Once you've got evidence of life, you've crossed one of the major hurdles to finding intelligent life.

If you've got enough viewing ability to take spectral readings of individual planets in a system, you can make pretty good guesses about which ones have some sort of life on them.

If our alien astronomers have a technology level equivalent to ours roughly ten years ago or earlier, they're not going to see anything other than the Sun. If they're as advanced as we are, they might be able to see Jupiter, if they're close enough. If they're more advanced, then what they can tell about us depends on just how advanced they are.

Re:Sounds like paradise

[Idarubicin]

However good the odds are that there are Earth-like planets in the galaxy, what are the odds that any are within reach of any human exploration that will ever take place? It's a big place, and barring "warp drive" the prospects of anything more than observation seem dim.

The odds kinds of depend on how long a trip we decide is worthwhile. In principle, we could build large, slow vessels that cross the distances between stars over generations. In the next twenty or thirty years, I would be surprised if some sort of 'hibernation' technique were not developed that could be applied to long trips. (I'm sure it would be designed for other, more profitable purposes, but would be useful nonetheless.) The real problem is that we have no good way (right now) of investigating potential destinations.

Our current detection techniques are inadequate for observing (or inferring) an Earth-size planet at an Earth-normal distance from even the nearest stars. There could be Earth-like planets in our own stellar backyard, but we can't yet see them. All the current observations do is bolster the idea that the formation of planets is not in and of itself an unusual occurrance. To really do a proper planet search, we're going to need some long baseline interferometric telescopes--preferably including some in space so we can get good infrared data. With such telescopes, we can resolve (and do direct spectroscopic measurements on) Earth-size planets at light-year distances, looking for oxygen atmospheres and water vapour.

Such observations (if they suggested any sort of life-bearing world) would no doubt spur quite a bit of research into techniques for interstellar travel. If I were a biologist, I'd gladly spend the rest of my life in space in exchange for a look at alien plankton--as long as I was reasonably sure there would be something to look at once I got there.