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Newfound Planet Has Earth-Like Orbit

Posted by Zonk on from the hooray-for-earth dept.

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."

4 of 126 comments (clear)

  1. More Exciting by ChromaticDragon · · Score: 2, Interesting

    It will be more exciting when they are able to find planets the same size or same mass as ours.

    1. Re:More Exciting by CastrTroy · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I'm with the other guy. While mass doesn't directly affect forming of life, I would wonder how intelligent beings would exist on a planet the size of jupiter. They certainly wouldn't be able to be as mobile as the life on earth, unless they had much better ways of getting energy. Even ignoring the fact that the would have to have really strong muscles and bones so that they could move (assuming they had muscles and bones), they would still need a lot of extra energy to move around on such a large planet. Also, for them to do any kind of space travel, escaping from such a large gravity would prove very difficult. Even if they were very intelligent, would they have any thought of flying? Since the gravity would be so strong, I would doubt that there would be any flying animals, or even leaves floating through the air to get the inspiration from.

      --

      Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
  2. Re:To The Stars, Then. by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 2, Interesting

    If you want to get all depressive, everything suggests that energy is conserved and entropy increases, which means all power sources will eventually fail because there's no more potential.

    Don't worry - that's only a problem in this universe, and theory suggests we should be able to signal among the multiverses with gravity. Throw in a little teleportation technology, and voila.

    --
    My God, it's Full of Source!
    OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
  3. Final confirmation of Earth-like planet? by MtViewGuy · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.