Slashdot Mirror
Newfound Planet Has Earth-Like Orbit
Raver32 writes with a link to the Space.com site, and an article discussing an extra-solar planet that looks a lot like ours from a distance. At least, its orbit does. The planet is located about 300 light years away, in the constellation Perseus. It circles its giant red star every 360 days and was discovered by 'looking for wobble', the shift in a star's movement that hints at orbiting planets. "The discovery could help astronomers understand what will happen to our sun's brood of planets when it exhausts its store of hydrogen fuel and its outer envelope begins to swell. When that happens in an estimated 5 billion years, our sun will be so big that it will engulf the inner planets and most likely Earth. But long before that happens, life on our planet will have perished and its seas will have boiled away."
It will be more exciting when they are able to find planets the same size or same mass as ours.
Newfound land.
(it's a province, in Canada, see)
Lets think how we are going to survive global warming and its effects. We would be extinct long before the hydrogen fuel runs out if we dont take immediate steps to stop global warming.
Yes, perhaps interesting from an academic point of view, but why are we really looking at this? You don't even have to RTFA to know that our planet will be uninhabitable a long, long time before our sun gets to this stage. Why do we care?
Actually, I have read that the earth may be pushed out to a farther orbit, so we wouldn't get 'swallowed' by an expanding sun.
The thing is Jupiter or larger in size orbitting a red dwarf.
I see more and more of these new-found planet stories and building a census is great stuff, but all the stories hype up the earthlike part to new levels of strain to get a headline.
Call me when we get liquid water and an atmosphere and maybe we can start writing the "Earth-like" headlines.
So lets look for a second, they want to learn about what will happen to us when the sun expands in 5billion years. I'll tell you what, we'll either be gone, dead, or evolved into something else, considering meaningful developement of humans has taken place in about a millionth of that time, it doens seem likely that this is meaningless.
Sometimes it just winds me up that we have intelligent people focusing their efforts on things of no immediate consequence when there are far more important things to worry about- that's why I'm betting on the extinction future scenario.
so does that mean i can skip work on Monday?
:-(
woohoo!
5 billion years you say?
ffs
I'm a rabbit startled by the headlights of life
A Princeton-led research group has discovered an isolated community of bacteria nearly two miles underground that derives all of its energy from the decay of radioactive rocks rather than from sunlight.
Subterrainian MicrobesThese will survive any surface conditions, until the heat penetrates two miles deep.
I read this weeks ago. Maybe months ago. It's not news.
I must be in the mood because there's a box sitting at home for me with The Lost Tales inside.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
More Red Giant trivia at Wikipedia.
Words can't describe how much I've enjoyed B5 over the years and wished for more.
For just a moment I read the title and thought, "Gee, I'm not even FROM Canada but I'm pretty sure Newfoundland is not a planet."
Who cares? The people of Omicron Persei VIII, rulers of the galaxy, will destroy us in about a thousand years from now.
...this story has nothing to do with Australia. It's the weekend and you've posted a story with no Australian connection. Something's very wrong.
Just because it orbits in 360 days doesn't mean it has an Earth-like orbit.
The Bad Astronomy blog has a clearer explanation of what this means (read: not much) over here: http://www.badastronomy.com/bablog/2007/08/03/new- planet-with-earthlike-orbit-nah/
Earthlike in any other way? Not likely.
The Bad Astronomer had a nice examination of this article earlier today.
I would have put it "Mercury's toast", myself
I
Someday we'll have a scale from planets that bring us Sushi to those that bring us Bean Curd (yuck)...
if we can't get there... I know 300 light years away ... not possible in a human life time...
Every time I read something like this I can't help but wonder why we keep looking farther and farther instead of spending the resources learning how to travel farther/faster/more efficiently...
maybe it's just me but I think being able to get better means of travel is more important than finding things that would take over 300 years to get to traveling at the very fastest possible speed that sciences says would be possible.
maybe we should be spending all of our resources trying to break the "Special Theory of Relativity"
woo-hoo show me superluminal travel
----------
Trying to fix or change something only guarantees and perpetuates it's existence
The Movie: The Reconstituted Remains of the Zeta Rangers Strike Again! (Yet Another Nightmare Production brought to you by the makers of the Vietnam Conflict!) The Time: One Billion Years From Now. The Place: Somewhere off Orion's Shoulder aboard the US Starship Battle Cruiser Dick Cheney heading toward the star with the planet that seems a lot like ours except that it's circling a giant red dwarf sun and there's no life anywhere around: Yet another phony war based on bullshit intelligence brought to you by the resuscitated, formerly deep nitrogen frozen remains of the dumbest bunch of assholes the universe has ever known; Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Bush I, Cheney and GW! The Good News: We are finally out of Iraq!
... oh ...
I like music
... in honour of Newfoundland.
I think this discovery increases the chance that when the Terrestrial Planet Finder satellites go into orbit probably after 2016, we will quickly find a rocky crust planet circling a nearby star (up to 500 light years away) with an atmosphere very much like Earth's. If that is true, then this could be the confirmation that life COULD exist on planets orbiting nearby stars.
If so, only briefly if at all. The zone of habitable rock will get higher and higher in the strata as the above surface temperatures rise since the internally generated heat from radioactive decay cannot radiate to the surface and into space, thus raising temperates below ground in lock step with temperatures above ground.
Letter To Iran
There's a chapter in the Carl Sagan's Cosmos book devoted to this issue.
The flying life forms depicted there are both logical and beautiful.
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
Ah yes Looking on my trusty Star Control II map there is life on this planet. Zeta Persei I (Per or Persei is a star in the constellation Perseus) is the home world of the Druuge!
I loves me some hot green space-babe.
put it in the bit bucket
Even if it is habitable and/or Earth-like (extremely unlikely, even though the orbit is similar the mass of it could be ridiculously different)I doubt we will got there until we have near instantaneous travel and/or it is our last resort. First of all, we can't afford it or at least no one wants to pay for it. We can't afford and don't have the tech for a manned flight to any other planets in our own solar system, much less one 300 light years away. Also, no government will be willing to send someone there in a ship because way before they would get there we would likely create a faster engine. Then we will be hitting ourselves for sending it then. It is a self-perpetuating cycle. Even if we were going the speed of light, we would have to do some experimenting and see if babies can be born in null gee since the crew would have to raise kids on the ship and have them do the same in order to get there with people still alive.
Curiosity is a cruel master. Not quite as bad as ignorance however.
What's in a game?
I for one, welcome all.
.
- aqk
F U
Unless humanity and its derivatives evolve to the point of self-extinction of some insurmountable galactic event wipes out the solar system (e.g. a rogue black hole swallows the entire system) the sun will *never* become a red giant.
People do *not* understand that once a civilization has become an "advanced technological civilization" (as we are), natural technology developments, esp. molecular nanotechnology, enable the dismantlement of the planets (think swarms of nanorobot miners) and the conversion of the solar system into a Matrioshka Brain. During that time period (centuries to a few million years) a materials shortage develops (one needs *all* those atoms when one starts storing zettabytes and yottabytes of data) and the closest available materials are all harvested -- including a significant fraction of the sun! Remove the material from the sun and it goes from being a G class star to an M class star with a significantly longer lifetime (hundreds of billions of years). The most probable situation in an engineered system is to extract and store much of the Sun's hydrogen and add it back to the star gradually producing a relatively constant fusion reactor power source for a several trillion years. During that time period we have presumably figured out how to navigate the solar system to enable close encounters with undeveloped star systems where we can pick up additional hydrogen resources extending the lifetime of our sun (and the surrounding Matrioshka Brain) until the energy resources of the galaxy are exhausted.
Once intelligent life arrives on the scene all natural evolutionary vectors (e.g. natural stellar and galactic evolution) are subject to modification. A far more interesting topic for conversation, IMO,is *why*, if 60-70% of the Earth's in our galaxy are significantly older than ours have they not made the KT-I to KT-II transition (converting their systems into Matrioshka Brains in the process)? Or have they? [1]. Note that this is somewhat different from the classical Fermi Question, "Where are they?", which is really derived from "Why aren't they here?" or "Why haven't we heard from them?" and is instead the more modern variant, "Why don't we see more stars disappearing?" Matrioshka Brains can navigate around the galaxy but they don't go solar system hopping on a whim.
1. "Dark matter" can be explained by the activities of advanced technological civilizations if one sets aside the arguments of theoretical physicists which depend in large part on assumptions of a "natural" universe. I've never observed a theoretical physicist sit down at a table and say, (a) here is a natural (dead) universe and (b) here is a universe developed to its full potential by intelligent civilizations and (c) there must be a phase transition from a dead universe to an engineered universe -- what do our observations tell us about its current state as we look back through its history? Cosmological discussions are inherently incomplete unless they incorporate how intelligence alters the nature of the universe.
It is an extreme stretch to label a "massive" object around an old star light years away a "planet". It could just as well be a Jupiter Brain. The only things which are known about exo-"planets" are their orbital periods and in various cases their mass (for wobble planets) or their radius (for transit planets). We *assume* that such objects are "natural" and therefore must be "planets" but the older the star the less likely it is that any initial planets would have remained in their "natural" state or that they are planets at all. I can accept planets growing in protostar nebulas but any other "massive object" orbiting other stars could be something else entirely. Say a Borg sphere sent to collect essential elements being blown out of a red giant [1].
Much more interesting if these spheres are running around the galaxy are the questions of where and when did they originate? And when will they arrive *here*? [2]
Too many astronomers steeped in the traditions of a natural (dead) universe and Occam's razor fall into the anthropocentric swamps based on assumptions that nothing we observe can possibly have been engineered.
1. Old stars have significantly higher fractions of heavier elements (say from carbon through iron) and it is not unreasonable for advanced technological civilizations to send mining expeditions to such stars to harvest these resources (because manufacturing them in solar system sized particle accelerators is likely to be very expensive from an energy standpoint).
2. Fortunately our solar system, due to the youth of the sun, is relatively low on the list of essential resource rich targets.
There is a region in Jupiter's atmosphere with reasonable temperatures and pressures (room temperature, 10 atm), and gravity there is not too different from Earth either. There may well be life in those regions, and flying/floating is all it would and could do.
What you're thinking about is what you'd get if you took a rocky planet like Earth, maintained an earth-like atmosphere, and just increased its mass to match Jupiter's; such planets simply are not going to exist.
At that depth, have the Sun's rays been completely occluded by the outer layers of the atmosphere?
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager