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3 Habitable-Zone Super-Earths Found Orbiting Nearby Star
astroengine writes "Gliese 667C is a well-studied star lying only 22 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Scorpius, but it appears to have been hiding a pretty significant secret. The star has at least six exoplanets in orbit, three of which orbit within the star's "habitable zone" — the region surrounding a star that's not too hot and not too cold for liquid water to exist on their surfaces. Astronomers already knew that Gliese 667C had three worlds in orbit, one in the star's habitable zone, but the finding of three more exoplanets, two of which are also in the habitable zone is a huge discovery. Finding one small planet in a star's habitable zone is exciting, but finding three is historic. 'The number of potentially habitable planets in our galaxy is much greater if we can expect to find several of them around each low-mass star — instead of looking at ten stars to look for a single potentially habitable planet, we now know we can look at just one star and find several of them,' said Rory Barnes, of the University of Washington, co-author of the study, in an ESO press release Tuesday (June 25)."
I'd like to get more information about these worlds before I die. Also, I'd like to know if I would really get my own planet if I went "Full Mormon" so I can prepare accordingly.
Everything is relative. 22 light years, ludicrously far away in every day terms, is a hop skip and a jump in astronomical terms.
Maybe not today. But 22 light years is pretty close in galactit terms. Even at half the speed of light you can get there in less than a lifetime. Technology tends to advance forward you know. 150 years ago the thought of getting from N.Y to London in 8 hours was the stuff of fantasy. Today its an everyday thing.
Why so? In context of just how freakin' big a galaxy or the entire universe is, 22 light years is pretty damned close. The Milky-way alone is > 100,000 light years across.
Not even 25 years ago the prevailing belief was that there wouldn't be that many stars with planets, and now we're finding them pretty much constantly.
One of the terms of Drake's equation is how many stars have planets, and that proportion has been steadily climbing.
So if we're finding this many planets in an astronomically-relative 'nearby', then throughout the rest of the galaxy we have to assume there's just vast amounts of them. Start factoring in the sheer number of galaxies, and even if we'll never meet them, it seems probable that somewhere else would likely have evolved life by now.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I think I will be avoiding the peacekeepers thanks.
It would take a leap in some branch of technology, true. (Perhaps several.)
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
But 22 light years is pretty close in galactit terms.
You made a huge boob in your post.
There are many exoplanet claims with both the transit method and the Doppler method. What I'd like to see is use them in the same systems to see whether they yield the same results. Right now, these are only predictions, not discoveries, and they are hard to verify.
One problem that has not be determined is how do planets deal with the inherent variability with Red Dwarf stars. There are many, many more red dwarfs than other types of stars and their expected life expectancy is longer the estimated end of the universe. But their small nature makes their energy output more variable than a star like our sun.
Does the long life, and greater number of Red Dwarfs significantly boost the drake equation? Does the variable energy output reduce the drake equation?
Unfortunately, we will all probably be long dead before we find out.
150 years ago the thought of getting from N.Y to London in 8 hours was the stuff of fantasy. Today its an everyday thing.
Yeah, but 11 years ago getting from NY to London in less than 4 hours was an everyday thing (if pricier than other flights). Now it's unheard of. The only planes in service that have the speed and range don't regularly make that kind of trip and they don't take passengers. Modern enthusiasm for advances in technology seems to be limited mostly to whatever the latest smartphone is. Also, the people clamouring for those more advanced smartphones also typically have no clue whatsoever about the actual tech specs of them and are typically just being led around by the nose by marketing. Some of us are very pessimistic about the future of real technological development, at least in the short term.
There's plenty of data both pro and con about sending a probe to explore and the timeline necessary. Has anyone ever thought about seeing if perhaps another race has sent a probe at us? And if so, how would we spot it?
Here's to hot beer, cold women, and Glaswegian kisses for all.
I think in the context of the Fermi Paradox finding lots of habitable planets is _bad_ news because it invites the question "so where the hell is all the intelligent life on all these habitable planets" the aswers to that question indicate a term in the drake equation is close to zero, hopefully it isn't the term that indicates the length of time a technological civilization exists....
The problem is, we don't even have space shuttles any more. We're technologically regressing as far as air and space go. Still, if we ever manage to get our act together well enough to actually build something like a generation ship, 22 light years away is pretty close, relatively speaking.
But 22 light years is pretty close in galactit terms.
You made a huge boob in your post.
A Freudian nipple-slip, I suspect.
Bullshit, you didn't even get your numbers right with that hyperbole. Orders of magnitude are tough, but not entirely unworkable.
Mars is 22 light MINUTES away, and we can get there reasonable well if we had a mind to.
If you can get up to a decent fraction of the speed of light, energetically very expensive I'll grant you, a ship could get to one of these worlds in 100 years or so. That's a long time, but it's not so long as to be considered infinite or unworkable. If you take the point of view that's it pointless to consider how far our grasp can extend, of course we'll never get there.
Technology has always advanced in fits and starts. That enthusiasm for a particular field has waned and our achievements in it have regressed does not mean it will not begin advancing again.
Right now it doesn't matter if it were 1.5 light seconds away. We can't get there. It may as well be in another universe. By the time we can conveniently travel that far, the whole concept of distance will be meaningless. For the sake of argument, yes, 22 light years is closer than 13 billion, but for now, in practical terms, the distance is infinite. If you already bought your ticket, I would suggest you ask for a refund.
22 years means you can send a message and get a response in your lifetime.
The Fermi Paradoxon is no paradoxon.
The most evil sin all over the universe is: man made self replicating machines.
No sane race ever will do that: crafting self replicating machines and letting them lose on the universe.
In the time spans we are talking about: all things you could imagine will go wrong with "replicators". You don't need to read SF to grasp that. At Fermis times no one really thought that out. So his idea is sticking Round as "paradoxon".
Would YOU with all the SFs you have seen support a "self replicating" machine being send to another star system? Just to multiply there and go on?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I'm not sure what difference this makes to the actual habitability of the planets, but all of these are tidally locked. That is, the same part of the planet is always facing the star (and thus baked) while the same part faces empty space (and thus freezes). A thick atmosphere might transport heat and make things more uniform, but none of these are what one would naively think of as "habitable". In fact, all planets in the "habitable" zone of such small stars are going to be tidally locked. Wikipedia actually has a nice summary of the problem of tidal locking in small stars.
On the other hand, they might have very interesting moons.
The solar system called "Sol" also has three planets in the habitable zone. Besides Earth a second one, Mars, was likely once habitable. Venus for some reason got a veyr dense very CO2 heavy atmosphere. With less CO2 it likely would harbor life.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
That's true if you think the government's "space program" is the measure of human progress. That's what you get for pinning your hopes and dreams to a bureaucracy funded by money stolen from people at gun-point.
The private space industry, on the other hand, is growing and succeeding at quite an optimistic rate, relative to what most people though was possible 10-15 years ago.
I think in the context of the Fermi Paradox finding lots of habitable planets is _bad_ news because it invites the question "so where the hell is all the intelligent life on all these habitable planets"
Obviously you're unaware of Oliver's Solution to the Fermi Paradox: They discovered reality tv. Then civilization collapsed.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
There are no humans on the Moon because there's nothing to do on the Moon. There are only so many kilos of regloith you can ferry back and rounds of low gravity golf you can play before there's no point spending the billions to go back. If and when someone thinks up a useful reason to go back to the moon (e.g., a way station for missions to further afield) then I'm sure we'll be back.
If the Moon were an Earth-like world, I'm sure there would be a McDonalds serving Moon Burgers up there by now.
We're finding enough potentially habitable exoplanets that it's worth sending messages to them. Some might have a civilization. It's time for SETI to start transmitting.
This is quite possible. Arecebo could communicate with a similar installation across the galaxy.
Um, yes, the industrial revolution is certainly waning. But we've experienced the digital revolution (computers) and the information revolution (the Internet) since then. The Renaissance before that and the agriculture revolution, and that thing where they invented tools from rocks were all similar "big changes" that are still having ramification but have more or less played themselves out. The rate of revolutions has increased so much that many don't see the difference between the digital one and the information one. All of them more or less depend on the technology of the one before it.
The change from horse'n'buggy to automobiles took a decade. Think of the cell phone today compared to the one in 2003. Everyone is walking around with a amazingly fast, ultra-connected computer in their pocket. Honestly, the biggest hold-up is the culture shock. Nobody is really using those computers as much as they could, and the guy that suggested "hey, how about we actually use these cameras that we carry around" gets labeled as a "glasshole".
So yeah, just sit there complaining that the industrial revolution is waning while you instantaneously communicate with a distributed crowd spread out across the world on a whim.
Modern enthusiasm for advances in technology seems to be limited mostly to whatever the latest smartphone is. Also, the people clamouring for those more advanced smartphones also typically have no clue whatsoever about the actual tech specs of them and are typically just being led around by the nose by marketing.
Or, alternately, modern enthusiasm for technology is directed towards products that can be profitably mass-produced and are within the financial means of the average middle-class consumer. The Concorde was both expensive and money-losing, and the side effects (sonic boom) were more than most people wanted to deal with. (Although I sometimes wish we could use the same logic to ban Bluetooth headsets.)
Unfortunately there are lots of technologies like this, where the know-how and manufacturing capability exists, but the economics and other practical aspects make it unsustainable. I don't think it reflects negatively on modern consumers that they aren't willing to support huge, expensive projects like this, or the International Space Station, etc., simply because technology enthusiasts think they look cool. Having been on intercontinental flights in both directions in the last year, I would love if I could cut the flight times in half. But neither my budget nor my employer's budget would allow me to take the Concorde if it were still in flight, so I don't know why I should be excited about that idea, any more than I'm excited by the availability of fully-reclining seats.
No sane race ever will do that
So, homo sapiens will be the first.
But we as a species are still quite capable of it. Concorde was basically a passenger jet with military spec engines; expensive as hell and incredibly noisy, never exactly a great commercial idea. Basically just another penis-waving contest for the British and French governments. Both the engines and the technology to make the vehicles are still available (and massively improved), it's just there's less appetite for intra-governmental penis waving than there was a few decades ago.
Technology continues to march onwards, and I'm sure supersonic passenger flights will return as soon as the technology reaches a point where it is commercially viable. Just because people prefer to spend their money on pocket-sized super-computers (by the standards of the date when Concorde first flew) than marginally faster trans-Atlantic travel, doesn't mean the world is entering a technological dark age. Quite the reverse, in my opinion.
Yeah, but 11 years ago getting from NY to London in less than 4 hours was an everyday thing (if pricier than other flights). Now it's unheard of.
Yes but it was sort of like the pony express shutting down their rush service because the telegraph arrived, maybe that sucks if you wanted to send a package but for the 95% that wanted to send a letter the telegraph was faster and better. Not every aspect of every old service is going to be preserved by the new ones, there will always be some regressions in the overall picture. Even though we're making incremental improvements I doubt we'll see any revolutionary changes in things like jet propulsion, internal combustion, gas turbines and whatnot - it's just minor tweaks to squeeze more efficiency out of it.
The overwhelming number of changes I expect is for things to get smaller, smarter and for more and more things to go electronically rather than physically and applying brute force. Maybe you get another 5 mph on the interstate but the main difference is an AI that drives itself. My dream of "real technological development" would be things like having nanobots to destroy bacteria, viruses, toxins, cancer cells, cure genetic diseases and prevent aging on the cell level. In the future maybe we all have personal assistants like only the rich have today, only they're robotic. It couldn't be done today because to have servants somebody would have to be the servants, but we could all have a robot the way we all have cell phones.
I'm not going to bash the system we have today, I can go down to the grocery store and buy a finished meal, pop it in the microwave and put the dishes in the dishwasher but it certainly could be taken to the next level where I just tell a robot I'd like spaghetti bolognese today and it'd shop, cook like a professional chef, serve and clear the tables when I'm done. Having a washing machine and a dryer is also rather relaxed, but again being able to throw dirty clothes in the bin and have them sorted, washed, dried, ironed if applicable and put back in the closest by themselves would be even better. Roombas and electronic lawn mowers are just a shadow of what robot housekeepers and gardeners could be. In short, even if I don't see flying cars on the horizon I see plenty things that could make life in 2013 seem rather primitive compared to 100 years from now.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Passengers on a manned flight at 1g acceleration/deceleration would experience it as only 6.2 years according to this.
100 years of travel for 22 light years away.
That's 50 years of acceleration and 50 years of deceleration to travel 22 light years.
So you have to accelerate for 50 years and travel 11 light years in the process.
What's the calculated acceleration?
22 light years is 208,200,000,000,000 km.
Average speed to get there in 100 years is 208,200,000,000,000 km divided by 3,153,600,000 seconds, that's 66019.8 km/s. You need to reach that speed in 25 years of acceleration. That's 0.08 m/square second. Easily achievable, provided you don't have to carry half of Earth's mass in fuel. I think even ionic drives can get that sort of acceleration.
Ideally, considering an acceleration of 1g (constant, disregards time spend in orbit or maneuvering around, etc) you could reach 283,940 km/s in exactly 11 months (335 days).
Now all we have to do is come up with a perfectly working Bussard reactor... (http://www.ibiblio.org/lunar/school/InterStellar/Explorer_Class/Bussard_Fusion_systems.HTML)
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
how would we know if these were uninhabited or not? coming will be systems that can analyze the atmosphere of these planets and look for signs of free oxygen, products of life, and products of civilization. it's an awesome time to be alive!
Dude, I never said it was practical, or that we'd be doing it.
This is an article about astronomers discovering new planets. In their parlance, they are 'nearby'.
Nobody is saying "close enough to get there", they're saying "holy crap, on a galactic scale, that's pretty damned close".
The insurmountableness of the distance isn't what's the point, because nobody is yet talking about surmounting it. The cool part is that they've found it, 3 of them in fact, a 'mere' 22 light years away, all of which could be in the zone where liquid water could exist.
The universe must simply be teeming with planets which have the potential to have life as we know it (or at least chemically similar enough that we can postulate its existence).
We may not get there, but at this moment light from Sol which left in 1991 is reaching these planets.
That, my friend, is some heavy shit.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
There are a lot of potential answers. Many of them are negative, but some of them are only "sort of" negative. E.g.:
1) The population is plugged into the local analog of the cloud, and doesn't want to put up with the low latency required by interstellar travel.
2) Artificial environments are so much nicer than natural planets, that nobody is interested in them.
3) TV is already one of the more effective suppressers of birth-rate. The internet is a close second. So populations just stop growing. People have more interesting things to do than taking care of kids.
4) An authoritarian government doesn't want to allow colonies to escape to breed rebels. And it's effective. (N.B.: This could be a welfare state, a plutocratic state, or any of various other varieties, and perhaps different planets have different choices.)
5) Perhaps many races can't live in low gravity, or can't stand the stresses of liftoff.
There are, of course, lots of more negative answers, like resource depletion, gray goo, etc. But we don't need to presume that the answer is always the same, or even that we know all the potential reasons yet. I've heard one argument from economics that because of intrest it's impossible for any interstellar colony to ever pay off the costs of founding it. Maybe. Or maybe that's just another hurdle that makes things more difficult. Many species may have a fear of heights or of falling that makes space flight unendurable.
Note that each of these answers only reduces the proportion of races that will engage in interstellar flight....or at least will impinge on us after doing so. And there are many other answers.
Here's another one: We may be among the first generation of planets with enough heavy metals to produce a form of civilization that can lead to space flight.
That said, do note that "super earths" are not a good place to develop spaceflight. The Earth itself is heavier than optimum, but this much gravity may be needed to hold onto viable development conditions. And how important was the moon? Some arguments have held that not only the existence of the moon, but the way that it was captured is crucial. (Note that it stabilizes the Earth's axial tilt.)
So, while I find the Fermi Paradox troubling, I don't find it insoluble.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
if you accelerate constantly a 1g for 11 light years and then decelerate at 1g fo 11 light years it takes 9 years to get there in your rest frame. in earth frame time this is much longer so you cant just come back in 18 earth years, but you can come back in 18 of your own.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.