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Earth-Like Planet That Could Sustain Life Found
astroengine writes "An exoplanet, 20 to 50 percent the mass of Earth, has been discovered 20 light-years away and it appears to have all the ingredients conducive to sustaining life. It has enough gravitational clout to hold onto an atmosphere and it orbits well within the 'Goldilocks Zone' of its parent star. However, it would be a very different place to Earth; it is tidally locked to its star, creating one perpetual day on the world. Interestingly, this may also boost the life-giving qualities of the exoplanet, creating stable temperatures in its atmosphere."
As an electrical engineer, I feel I have a fairly firm grasp on how people figure out a lot of these seemingly extremely complex things.
Magic.
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The summary is incorrect. The exoplanet has "a mass three times larger than Earth's", not 20% to 50%
My math might be a little off, but if we accelerated at g half-way there and decelerated at g for the rest of the way, it would only take a ship about 6.04 years to get there. But thanks to Einstein ruining all our space travel fun with relativity, we of us left on Earth would think the journey took 21.86 years. So there and back would seem like 43.7 years to us.
Venus and Mars are also rocky "Earthlike" planets orbiting roughly in the habzone ("goldilocks" zone).
I'd like to see truly terrestrial planets as much as (more than, probably) the next guy, but I think the reportage here is a bit hyped. Especially given a ~3x mass, that gives it roughly 1.44x the surface gravity (and higher likelihood of a Venus-like atmosphere).
-- Alastair
genetically modify humans to live in a wider variety of environments
That would never make it through the intergalactic genetic engineering subcommittee. Their chest-pumping and rhetoric would stop it before it hit the hull floor.
(Posted from the year 2089, see you guys soon! The future is great, but the space-beer is a little watered down.) Yankees win in 66, America is nuked by Eskimos in 70, and 89 is to be the year of the Linux holodeck neural interface.
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I actually work quite closely with 2 of the authors of the paper that reports these results. Any questions? I'll try to respond to posts between now and 2 October.
This just goes to show you the difference in difficulty between finding a Jupiter-sized planet and an Earth-sized planet.
This is where I stopped reading:
That's a very appropriate point to stop. To paraphrase Clarke: "When a senior scientist tells you something is impossible, they are likely to be wrong. When a senior scientist tells you something is certain, they are likely to be wrong. When a senior scientist tells you something may be possible, they are probably correct."
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20 light years is *about* 1.25 million AU. Voyager is 113 AU from the sun, in under 4 years it will be 125 AU from the sun. If we pretended Voyager 1 was heading the in right direction it would be 1/10000 of the way there. Or if we imagined that the planet was 10 meters away, Voyager has travelled 1mm of the way there. About 350000 AD, it would arrive!
So here I am, reading on Slashdot about two teams of astronomers with probably over 100 years of education between them, more doctorates than you can shake a sick at, who are publishing a paper in the Astrophysical Journal about this new discovery, and I find this post by tomhudson essentially calling them idiots.
Only on Slashdot.
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