Nearby Solar System Looks Like Home

sciencehabit writes "Gliese 581 is a red dwarf star just 21 light-years from Earth that boasts a number of planets. Now astronomers are reporting another feature that earthlings would find familiar: a ring of dust far from the star which resembles the Edgeworth-Kuiper belt, a zone of objects, each much smaller than Earth, that lies beyond Neptune's orbit and includes Pluto. The newfound debris disk is about as large as the Edgeworth-Kuiper belt, even though Gliese 581 is small and all of its known planets lie closer to their sun than Earth does to ours. The scientists speculate that the little red star harbors a more remote planet whose gravity stirs up the belt's small objects, causing them to collide and spew the dust that Herschel has discerned."

Comments

Spoiler:

[Kotoku]

The summary is the whole article. Also, not that much like us.

Re:Spoiler:

[flyneye]

More like a home construction site. However due to union rules there are enough breaks and halts in construction, waiting for the proper permits and inspections that it should be habitable in several thousand aeons.

Re:Spoiler:

[Dunbal]

Habitable zone != habitable. Go spend a weekend on Venus and then you'll understand.

Frost Line and Hot Jupiters

[Anonymous Coward]

The scientists speculate that the little red star harbors a more remote planet whose gravity stirs up the belt's small objects, causing them to collide and spew the dust that Herschel has discerned.

This seems plausible if the frost line hypothesis is correct. In that case you would always expect to have gas giants stirring up matter on the edge of a solar system. The problem is that many gas giants have been found very close to stars and inside the frost line (the Hot Jupiters). Until there is a good explanation for the Hot Jupiters, I don't think we can just blindly expect to find gas giants beyond the frost lines stirring up asteroids.

Re:Less Speculation, Please

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't see speculation anywhere in the scientific method.

You don't? Perhaps you should reflect on the meaning of the word "hypothesis."

Re:It's too bad we've wrecked this planet before

[SteveFoerster]

"...however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire"

Demolished for intergalactic superhighway bypas

[Barryke]

You completely disregard the possibility of planets being demolished for an intergalactic superhighway bypas.

Despite all the complaining...

[Covalent]

...this is a statistically important discovery. This is a nearby solar system that is remarkably similar to our own. Find a few more like these (and we're well on our way in that department) and you'll have compelling evidence that solar systems like ours are very common. And this, in turn, suggests that habitable worlds are common.

This would leave the Fermi paradox without one of its better possible explanations: that habitable worlds are exceedingly rare.

It also means that human colonies in other solar systems may be more plausible than it currently seems.

Re:Despite all the complaining...

[AlecC]

I agree. When I considered the Drake Equation, I always used to put a much lower value than most on the term expressing the probability of planets in a solar system. I was wrong: it looks as if planets are plentiful, and therefore habitable planets more plentiful than I had thought,

The best replacement I have to solve the Fermi paradox is the possibility that the step from prokaryotic to eukaryotic life is very hard, as some biologist suggest,