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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."
Somehow I doubt they're interested in studying this so they can come up with survival strategies for when our Sun goes all Red Giant on us. I think everyone is pretty much in agreement that when the time comes, a Bruce Willis and nuclear weapons based solution will present itself.
This sort of discovery is really more useful in a "science for science's sake" sort of way. Plus, as we continue to improve our abilities to spot distant planets, we improve our chances of finding an Earth-like planet that may harbor life, particularly hot green space-babe life. Such a discovery would certainly propel space exploration back into "top priority" status.
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.
In an unexpected turn of events, scientists have discovered that the universe is round and we were actually LOOKING AT OURSELVES through the massive telescope!!!
Intelligent people (and all people, really) like to work on things they're passionate about. There are plenty of very intelligent people who are passionate about solving the many issues that plague our civilization, and they are working very hard to do so. These particular intelligent people are passionate about finding new planets.
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.
That will be the next great "bad physics" movie: The sun has run out of hydrogen! We must drive a giant drill into the center of the SUN to explode twelve hydrogen bombs or America will be destroyed!
Just because it orbits in 360 days doesn't mean it has an Earth-like orbit.
Earthlike in any other way? Not likely.
The Bad Astronomer had a nice examination of this article earlier today.
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.
But it probably won't matter much because the sun as a red giant will be far hotter and far more luminous so the orbital distance increase won't be enough to compensate.
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