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Earthlike Planet Orbiting Nearby Star
The Bad Astronomer writes "Astronomers in Europe have announced the discovery of a planet with only 5 times the Earth's mass, orbiting a red dwarf star 20 light years away. It orbits the star so closely that it only takes 13 days to go around... but the star is so cool that the temperature of the planet is between 0 and 40 Celsius. At this temperature there could be liquid water. Models indicate the planet is either rocky like the Earth or covered in an ocean. While it's not known if there actually is liquid water on the planet, this is a really big discovery, and indicates that we are getting ever closer to finding another Earth orbiting an alien star."
This is a really big discovery...
And that, my friends, is the understatement of the millennium.
Turns out it's just Rosie O'Donnell
Beat 'Em and Eat 'Em
Hi-rez imaging of the planet shows that there's already three Starbucks stores, a bridge project sponsored by Ted Stephens, and fourteen RIAA lawyers looking for copyright infringers.
Peter
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planet orbiting a red star?
on the same day kryptonite is found
coincidence?
of course!
back in the day we didnt have no old school
The BBC and Scientific American have good quotes from Stephane Udry of the Geneva Observatory, lead author of the scientific paper reporting the results. Others are already calling it "possibly habitable".
Very cool news!
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I threw this together in a couple minutes after reading this.
http://x014.uploaderx.net/x/astronautcat.jpg
[m]
lose != loose
So, the temperature range indicates that it can probably be made hospitable for humans. Sure, we might have to bring a lot of our own oxygen and water to start with, but otherwise, we just need a colony ship. And, of course, the gravity is pretty strong (2.25 Gs) so we will have trouble with that. And, it being so close to the star, there might be a big radiation problem, forcing humans to go underground. But that wouldn't be too bad, because it would make gravity a bit less of a problem.
What I think is the coolest thing is that this is the smallest extrasolar planet found so far. We are getting close to being able to detect earth-sized planets. Once we do, I think the number of potentially colonizable planets will go up quite a bit.
We are currently developing technologies which allow a maximum speed of 0.6 X the speed of light.
if you create a probe with an ion drive and send it off in the next 10 years we could be looking at surveys of the planet in question by 2070.
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You could send them in the third ark, but then who would sanitize our telephones?
You forgot to account for the fact that the radius is 1.5 times that of Earth. The best estimate puts that planet at around 2.25 times earth gravity.
The link in the blog seems to be broken. There is some more information about the planet (Gliese 581 c) on Wikipedia, MSN, and Space.com.
Ronald said nothing. He flung himself from the room, flung himself upon his horse, and rode madly off in all directions.
So should we classify a planet like this as Class "M"?
Assuming its the same density as Earth, cube root of 5 is 1.7, so 1.7x the radius. Gravity is mass/r^2, 5/1.7^2 x earth, so 1.7 or 70% more. ie surface gravity only goes up with the cube root of mass, for a constant density, so 5x isn't as bad as it sounds. But if it has more rock, and less iron core, the surface might me much nicer.
How do you know he didn't account for that? Maybe he's a 500 lb chair bound computer geek.
instantaneously by the perspective of the traveller
Unfortunately the traveller would not percieve the passage of time any more, having been transformed into raspberry jam by the accelleration forces.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
Models indicate the planet is either rocky like the Earth or covered in an ocean.
Last time I checked, the Earth's surface is 75% covered by water.
It is good to see everyone has a positive attitude for space exploration. I must assume that, in your opinion, there is no good reason to go to Mars or the Moon?
Also remember that were you got the information on gravitational pull and the atmosphere for this planet is speculative at best.
1) 2.25 times that of our own gravitational pull would not be ideal for us to live but, it doesn't mean nothing could live there. I pull 2.25g's with my car on a dry skid pad, I have not died yet.
2) Really?
3) Yes the planet is closer to its sun that ours, but if this planet is like ours, the atmosphere filters out most of the radiation. The star closest to them does not spit out the magnitude of radiation that ours does due to its size.
4) If there is atmosphere like ours with water in it, it will hold some of the heat as it passes out of its suns rays and therefore should be just as turbulent.
Also some things to think about:
Even if the planet is 2 times as big as our planet, it could be spinning faster than ours. This would help off set the gravitational pull on our bodies at the surface.
No one is saying this is a planet to colonize, but with some of our technology and determination, it could be a waypoint in the stars for us to refuel and grab water before we continue our adventures further into space.
Just my two cents,
-X
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We don't propose abandoning Earth like a "foreclosed duplex"--and we certainly don't advocate letting things go to hell here while we look for a new place to trash. The idea is survival--colonizing other planets helps ensure survival of the species.
We could go completely green and make Earth a complete paradise--and then some rock could come along and kill all of us.
And, chances are, the knowledge we would gain just from trying to build a "slowboat" colony ship (one that does not travel at an appreciable fraction of c) would be of immense value in helping preserve Earth's environment. Such a ship would be an entire self-contained, self-sufficient ecosystem, having to last hundreds, if not thousands, of years with no resupply and no dependable external power source. Creating such a system would lead to incredibly-efficient systems, and the lessons could be transferred to everyday engineering projects and other systems. Think water reclamation, ultra-efficient farming and food production techniques (solves hunger problems too!), clean, efficient sources of energy...
The meek may inherit the earth, but the strong shall take the stars.
1) So mice have thicker bones and birds run rather than fly.
2) I don't think quakes are a big problem for life in general.
3 & 4) Complex life forms live around thermal vents where the temprature varies by hundredes of degrees over a few inches. Our own biosphere is also a chaotic system where order "emerges" in the form of a dynamic equilibrium.
"Even if I could travel a light-year a minute for a buck, I'd never consider trying to live there."
I think you missed the point (or maybe you were aiming for cynical humour), we are a long way technologically from colonising the stars, so much so that we are only now infering the existance of interesting targets. We co-evolved with Earth's biosphere and it's very unlikely we will find a hospitable duplicate where we can lay around on a beach or picnic by a river. Given the huge technology gap, our species must first learn how to sustain the only hospitable biosphere we have for millenia before we can "consider" moving to another planet.
"Next?"
Yes, by all means keep this research going, great stuff!
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I haven't run any mathematical models, but given that there's a Neptune-mass (15 Earth mass) planet orbiting inside this planet's orbit (5.4 day orbit vs 13 day orbit), I'd guess that that's enough of a disruption to at least prevent a 1:1 tidal lock. There may be some kind of lock at another resonance (eg Mercury's 2:3 lock) but that would allow for rotation relative to the star and thus more-even heating.
2.25 gees is uncomfortable but tolerable (carry someone your own weight piggyback and you're almost there), and largely irrelevant to any water-dwelling critters.
However, the larger problem -- that I didn't see any of the articles explicitly raise -- it that there's likely a Venus-like greenhouse with the temperature much hotter than the 0-40C based on the equilibrium temperature of a rocky body at that distance from the primary. We can hope not, but we'd need a reason why not.
Based on our system, anything Venus-size or larger has a thick atmosphere, except Earth, and Earth is an anomaly because it got whacked by something massive (Mars mass) late in its formation, blowing most of the volatiles -- and the material that makes up the Moon -- off the planet altogether. (However, such late-stage super-impacts may be not all that unusual; it could explain some other oddities of our system, such as Uranus's tilt.)
-- Alastair
It may not make sense, but if you can travel at light speed (and survive it), or close enough to it, then "instantaneous" travel from your own perspective is close enough to being true. The guy running the blog at the following link worked out that, at constant-g acceleration, you can get there in 3.65 years your time. Of course, you're going basically the speed of light, so you'll miss it if you blink. Plugging in half the distance into his formula and multiplying the result by 2 gives you the ship-time it takes if you accelerated there for half the journey and the decelerated for the other half. Comes out to 6.04 years. Give or take a bit (we were really only given one significant digit -- 20 light years away). Okay, now use his equation with a = c. You'll come out with...a very small number. http://www.sunclipse.org/?p=54
(Obligatory Futurama Quote)
From the Futurama episode Love and Rocket:
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
Two words: inertial dampers.
l
Two other words: Relativity, and Acceleration.
I've read[1] that if we accelerate consistently at 1G we'll reach 0.77 C in 1 year. However, as we continue to accelerate closer to C, we get more and more relativistic and things get screwy... screwy to the point that I'll estimate it would take about 6 years (that's 6 rocket years, not earth observer years) to get there, with 1G accel and 1G deccel. So, human travel would be extremely feasible.
While a probe could accelerate much harder, I figure it would still take 50 years or so to get results from a probe to confirm it's worth sending people.
1. http://www2.corepower.com:8080/~relfaq/rocket.htm
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
I would be willing to bet that humans could live in 2.5 G. The human body is incredibly resilient, especially when it has grown up in a new environment. There are people living everywhere from sea level to several miles up, and in environments ranging from yearly average temperatures of over 30C to under 0C.
This does raise an interesting point, however. A great deal of money and research time has been spent studying how human and animal physiology react to low- or micro-gravity, but I am not aware of any long-term studies of higher G's, such as raising monkeys in a giant centrifuge or somesuch. Sure, this would take a lot of money, but hopefully less than for sending things to space, and it is vital knowledge for space exploration (long-term acceleration or living on these planets are the two key reasons).
The discovery of this planet provides some hope for those of us who hope the human race will escape Earth before we destroy it, or those who hope for Earth-similar life. And we can only expect the discovery of these planets to accelerate in the future, as out technology makes it easier to find them.
Although the moon is smaller than the earth, it is farther away.
Well, sure it's not ideal, but since I was the first to call 'dibs', then you're sure gonna be disappointed when I get my shiny new as-habitable-as-Nevada planet.
No.
The best theoretical ion drive I've read about has an Isp of 10,000 seconds. That translates into an exhaust velocity of 100 kps (rounding up a bit).
Speed of light: A touch less than 300,000 kps.
Plugged into the rocket equation:
Mf+Mp / Mp = e^{300000/100) = 2.72 ^ 3000
Well, the Windows calculator tells me that's 5.0899334329769958439246007097416e+1303
That's the ratio of ("fuel" and payload) to payload.
Um, even if I screwed up somewhere, and I'm off by a factor of a million, that ain't good.
We don't have a people shortage, or even a crazy people shortage. Skip the probe and send volunteers. Promise enough funds to support their families for life and you will get cheap volunteers from third world nations that are throwing babies into rivers due to overpopulation. You can't lose.
So if you value the Earth and want to see it become a sustainable habitat, I cannot think of a better project to encourage than interstellar colonization.
Errrr, we have liquid water on earth at this temperature. More importantly, what is the air (if any) pressure. That will affect whether you have liquid water at 40C or not.
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The problem isn't acceleration G forces. It's energy density. Even a "beamed core" antimatter annihilation system, to go 0.4 c with 100 mT of payload, would require about a thousand mT of antimatter. 10:1 antimatter/payload ratio. That's not even slightly realistic, even in the long term, and we're talking about only 0.4c.
About the most we could realistically hope for is somewhere between 0.01c to 0.1c. Antimatter-induced microfusion, dusty fission fragment rockets, thermal rockets, nuclear saltwater rockets, various kinds of sails, etc, seem to be the most realistic options. But probably not during our lifetimes.
Present day. Present time.
As far as I see, the article only claims a chance for life to be on this planet. I don't see anything in there that talks about there being humans on this planet.
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What about people that gain weight going from ~ 120lbs to say, 260. As its done over time, the body adapts and they are still able to walk around and live normally (although it does have adverse health effects) I think it is possible for people to adapt, but it will not be comfortable, especially for the first generation, and they will probably live a lot shorter. If this doesn't work however, It may however be possible to genetically engineer humans to live on high-G environments, increasing muscle mass, and bone density and thickness, as well as cardiovascular improvements.
I am aware of one experiment of putting someone in a high-G centerfuge and subjecting him to 1.5G's. The experiment was terminated early, due to the participant having a mild heart attack. Keep in mind, the participant wasn't given time to acclimate to the new environment gradually, and the experiment was short in duration, lasting only about a week, as it was designed more towards seeing if a high-G environment could help astronauts overcome loss of muscle mass and bone decalcification faster than normal after returning to earth, rather than colonization of a high-G environment.
All misspellings and grammatical errors in the above post are intentional and part of my artistic expression.
Raise your hand if you feel you were born about 100 years too early.
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
Would it be worth pointing a radio telescope at this thing?
I wanted to mod you up but couldn't resist asking a question.
What about space dust? INAA (I'm not an astro-physicist)but I don't think that the main problem is a lack of speed. Eventually we will work out how to go faster and faster. For me the problem is those little bits of rock and grit in the way. Even at 0.75C travelling in the not-quite empty vastness of space would be like standing in front of a machine gun going full-on.
Travelling forward in time at a rate of 1 second per second.
From Pubmed:
ORL J Otorhinolaryngol Relat Spec. 1995 Jul-Aug;57(4):189-93.
Effect of prolonged hypergravity on the vestibular system: a behavioural study.Sondag HN, de Jong HA, Oosterveld WJ.
Vestibular Department ENT, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Golden hamsters were exposed to conditions of 2.5 times normal gravity (hypergravity, HG) for 4 months. During this period, tests were carried out to study equilibrium maintenance, swimming behaviour and open-field behaviour of these HG hamsters and of control hamsters living in a normal-gravity environment. The tests proved to be useful devices for detecting differences in perceptive-motor behaviour between HG hamsters and control hamsters. The HG hamsters had more difficulties in balancing on tubes and orientation during swimming. In the open-field study, the HG hamsters showed less locomotor activity than control hamsters. However, no differences were observed between the groups in washing, rearing and number of times having defaecation. These findings indicate that the daily transition from 2.5 to 1 g was not experienced as stressful by the hamsters, although performance on several perceptive-motor tasks was decreased, especially during the first weeks.
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Arthur C Clark addressed this issue in Songs of Distant Earth, actually. I was impressed. His solution? Put a big chunk of ice in front of the spacecraft and let it ablate away as the craft encounters bits of space debris; in fact, the plot involves the need to obtain another ice shield.