Super-Earths Discovered Orbiting Nearby, Sun-Like Star

likuidkewl writes "Two super-earths, 5 and 7.5 times the size of our home, were found to be orbiting 61 Virginis a mere 28 light years away. 'These detections indicate that low-mass planets are quite common around nearby stars. The discovery of potentially habitable nearby worlds may be just a few years away,' said Steven Vogt, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UCSC. Among hundreds of our nearest stellar neighbors, 61 Vir stands out as being the most nearly similar to the Sun in terms of age, mass, and other essential properties."

Comments

dissapointing

[jocabergs]

High gravity + Close to its star = big fat, sweaty alien women.

  I'll get excited when we find a planet about 93 million miles away from its star, the proper solar light properties for blue skin and near earth gravity. I've always had a thing for blue skinned alien girls.

Re:Yes, nearby

[CrimsonAvenger]

The problem here is that 1G sustained means your ship will be liveable by humans for those 7 years with no problem. 0.01G is not liveable at all; humans can't survive long-term in microgravity.

And of course it would be impossible to spin the ship, right?

Any ship big enough for a 100 year trip will be more than big enough to spin so that the rim of the ship experiences enough gravity to keep the crew healthy.

Not only that, 100 years is too long; no one will live that long (assuming you launch them when they're 20-25).

I take it you've never heard of the "generation ship" concept?

Humans can't live their entire lives (including their all-important formative years) in a small spacecraft with little social interaction.

And who ever suggested a small spacecraft? If I were designing it, it'd be 20 km long and 5-6 Km in diameter. With a crew of about 100,000.

A generation ship, however, could solve this problem (kids could very conceivably be raised on a giant ship with lakes and forests and a whole functioning mini-society), but as you said, this would require some incredible engineering. Lifting that much material into orbit really needs a space elevator, for starters.

So you DO know about generation ships! Great!

Hint: you don't build a generation ship from Earth. You start with an asteroid, and stock pretty much everything except the lifeforms aboard from other sources than Earth.

Note also that "incredible engineering" really means "expensive". It doesn't necessarily mean "difficult".

And this still doesn't address the gravity problem; those lakes and forests aren't going to work without artificial gravity.

Spin it. If it's six km in diameter, you have to spin it at 0.55 rpm to get 1G on the rim. And note that you have 360 km^2 worth of rim on the ship I described above. With a deck every 100 meters, we're talking a couple hundred thousand hectares at > 0.9G.

Alas, the likelihood of humanity building a generation ship is miniscule.

What passes for government here on Earth can't look far enough ahead. If we KNEW there was an alien species living there, and that they would be willing to give us the secret of FTL if only we sent someone there to collect, we'd still never get one built...

But the only real difficulty with doing so is the drive - the lifesystem, the physical structure, that sort of thing is almost trivial in comparison.