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."

Comments

Re:More Exciting

[CastrTroy]

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.