Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

New Model Helps Predict Earth-Sized Planets

Posted by timothy on from the colonization-time dept.

look over yonder writes "A new computer model created by astronomers from the Smithsonian Center and Astrophysics and the University of Utah predicts that systems which harbour Earth-sized planets will have a fingerprint of a ring of dust orbiting the star. This model will make it much easier for astronomers to locate stars and predict the size of planets orbiting it by simply measuring how bright the star system is at infrared (IR) wavelengths of light. Stars with dusty disks are brighter in the IR than stars without disks. The more dust a star system holds, the brighter it is in the IR."

11 of 25 comments (clear)

  1. Finding life? by Via_Patrino · · Score: 4, Interesting

    "predicts (...) systems which harbour Earth-sized planets"

    I don't think that's not the only way of finding life or an enviroment friendly to humans. Earth-sized moons of big planets can have a more friendly enviroment than earth-sized planets.

  2. Re:Absorption/re-emission? by ktanmay · · Score: 3, Informative

    I wanted to incorporate the details, but just didn't know how to, anyway, if you want details, here you go.

  3. Yet again, maybe not by AtariAmarok · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Earth-sized moons of big planets can have a more friendly enviroment than earth-sized planets.

    Or maybe they can't. We've only found one planet with a friendly environment so far, and this is really too small of a dataset to generalize.

    --
    Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
  4. Re:Absorption/re-emission? by ktanmay · · Score: 3, Informative

    Forgot to add this.

  5. Hum... by Nimloth · · Score: 4, Funny

    I wouldn't have thought models would be any good at science...

  6. Re:Does it predict us? by Patrik_AKA_RedX · · Score: 3, Funny


    hmmm, depends on how many monitors there are in the solar system.

  7. Re:Does it predict us? by barakn · · Score: 4, Informative

    That fact that meteors streak through the sky on a nightly basis is a testament to presence of dust, as are the Zodiacal Light and Gegenschein. Unfortunately there's not much of it. The article is about young planetary systems, which will have much more dust than our own. Mature systems will not have much of an IR component.

    --
    "I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
  8. Re:Absorption/re-emission? by Tau+Zero · · Score: 4, Interesting
    I'm curious as to how they distinguish between a "normal" dust cloud and one that's due to an Earth sized planet.
    The article states "The size of the largest objects in the disk determines the dust production rate. The amount of dust peaks when 600-mile protoplanets have formed." The dust forms in roughly the same orbit as the planet, so presumably you could detect a protoplanet forming at an Earth-like distance by watching for dust at a temperature of ~250 K; if there was the amount of dust you'd expect from an 8000-mile planet (well down from the peak at the 600-mile planetoid size), you might well have something like the prototypical Earth in that orbit.

    I'm not sure how useful this is going to be in locating habitable planets; getting to them long before the intense bombardment phase has stopped isn't going to make for good colonization prospects. On the other hand, as a way of calculating the prevalence of Earth-like planets this is a huge breakthrough.

    --
    Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
  9. Re:Absorption/re-emission? by Pumpernickle · · Score: 3, Funny
    I'm not sure how useful this is going to be in locating habitable planets; getting to them long before the intense bombardment phase has stopped isn't going to make for good colonization prospects.
    They're just planning ahead for when they think they'll have a working interstellar space program. By then, it will be easier to meet the non-earthlings halfway, too. :)
  10. This is brilliant by Free_Meson · · Score: 5, Informative

    I'm not an astronomer, and I guess I never really thought about doing it this way, but this approach is brilliant. Assuming a suitably precise spectral analysis of IR can be made, both the size and distance of a non-gassy planet can be determined. There would be two possibilities at every value, but I would assume that a planet would suck in nearby dust and debris so that "planets" would be present where there was a deviation from the "even distribution" dust curve, and the value at that peak or valley would determine the size of the planet. The habitable zone of each planet should be relatively easy to determine, and (I assume) that a spectral analysis in the visual spectrum could verify the presence of oxygen and water.

    If we ever figure out how to get up to .01c without breaking the bank, this should give us a great idea about where to send probes and, eventually, where to focus any colonisation efforts.

    That being said, I think by the time we, as a people, are advanced enough to travel to another solar system, that we may not be interested in reentering a planetary gravity well once we get there...

  11. Big honkin' Van Allen belts by Latent+Heat · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Given the "hot Jupiters" found orbiting nearby stars, there is nothing to say that a gas giant as to be 5 AU out -- you could have one in Earth's orbit with habitable moons all around.

    But Jupiter has a strong magnetic field and an intense set of radiation belts through which its moons orbit. It would be a reasonable assumption that a gas giant would have a strong magnetic field as it probably has a core of hydrogen in some kind of superfluid, conducting state (compressed liquid hydrogen, metallic hydrogen, and other hypothesized states).

    Are any of Jupiter's moons colonizable from a radiation standpoint?