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Scientists Discover Three Potentially Habitable Planets (mit.edu)
Scientists have discovered three Earth-sized planets that look ideally suited to search for signs of life beyond our solar system. A team of astronomers from MIT and the University of Liege detected three planets orbiting an ultracool dwarf star -- just 40 light years from Earth using a prototype telescope called TRAPPIST which is capable of looking at 60 nearby ultracool stars. NPR reports: The closest planet to the star orbits in about one and a half Earth days. From the planet's surface, the star would look like a reddish ball fixed to one spot in the sky. Scientists don't yet know the mass of the planets or what they're made of. Astronomers have discovered more than a thousand planets outside our solar system, but it's still rare to find ones that look promising in terms of habitability."These planets are Earth-sized, they are temperate -- we can't rule out the fact that they are habitable -- and they are well-suited for atmospheric studies," says Julien de Wit, a researcher at MIT.
The earth needs a protective shell, before illegal aliens come from these worlds to take our jobs.
Financing? Not a problem. Just make the aliens pay for it.
Well.. I better get going now! Should not take too long. What 170k years? That's not bad. We can use one of those new 1700 generations ships!
Perhaps not entirely true.
If these were originally hot neptunes, then the death of the parent star would have blown most of the atmosphere off allright, but would leave enough behind to be interesting.
Definately a study candidate. This class of planet is predicted, but has not (to my knowledge) been confirmed to exist yet.
There is also the potential for orbital migration after the star loses its cool and blows its top like that-- Objects that are analogous to our kuiper belt objects having thier orbits disturbed by the nova, then falling in on oblique angles, and getting captured at lower orbits.
If we have learned anything at all from the population of extrasolar planets detected so far, it is that systems like ours are the minority, so theories based on how our system evolved need questioning. In many systems observed to date, very large planets have transmigrated closer to the star they orbit, for instance.
These objects need not be giant balls of glass, just because their star went nova.
Lead researcher updates the original report stating, "After a technician realized they forgot to use the zoom button, an easy mistake considering the vast number of pretty lights and switches, an appalling discovery was made. The supposed planet has been re-identified". A short pause and a look of horror crosses the researcher's face, "That's no planet, it's a space station!"
The entire research team agreed that they all had a bad feeling about the turn of events.
Brown dwarf, not white. They're not stellar remnants (white dwarfs), they're minimal stars. So minimal, in fact, that unlike red dwarfs they don't even burn 1H, they only burn deuterium.
That said, last I read there's one problem with dwarfs and life: at least with red dwarfs, the habitable zone is so close to the star that the radiation levels at the surface would be hazardous. Which would mean that LAWKI would need to be underground or underwater. Not a huge imposition, but still of relevance.
"I know you have questions." "That would be why I just asked them."
Uhmm, before the nova both of those candidate classes would have not been habitable.
Hot neptunes would have crushing pressure and denaturating temperatures.
Kuiper belt analogs would have been balls of ice.
Life would have a chance to start AFTER the nova. Dont expect anything more complex than germs.
Indeed, it's impossible with current technology to know. And the IAU explicitly rules out extrasolar planets as being planets in their definition of a planet. Which is made all the more humorous by the fact that they have an extrasolar planets working group ;)
Bonus points for inconsistency that "dwarf planets" aren't planets but "dwarf stars" are stars.
The IAU is such a joke.
"I know you have questions." "That would be why I just asked them."
I'm sure there have been plenty, but the first one that I thought of is the B5 episode The Long Dark.
There are lots of possibilities, yes.
Then again, there are lots of possibilities everywhere. Including far more accessible locations in our own solar system ;) For example, we have Enceladus literally jetting out the contents of its ocean into space, just waiting to be collected - an ocean that models show is caused by rock serpentinization, meaning that it's being fed with minerals and hydrogen gas.
I'm personally most curious about Titan (mainly for LNAWKI, though possibly LAWKI in the subsurface water layer). The complexity of the organic chemistry is amazing, and the "missing ethylene and acetylene / probably missing hydrogen / excess methane" problem is very interesting to say the least. Unless you have an idea of some sort of inorganic catalyst that could catalyze the decomposition of longer chain hydrocarbons with hydrogen at cryogenic temperatures! The fact that they've now shown that Ligeia Mare is almost pure methane, rather than accumulated ethane and longer-chain hydrocarbons like they assumed, just makes it all the more interesting. The ethane is going somewhere. (the boring answer would of course be "into the moon", but that still raises questions)
If I was on a hunt for life, I'd start at Saturn. My dream mission would be:
1) RTG-powered ion tug hauls a RTG-powered Titan aerial explorer and its attached ascent stage to Titan.
2) Tug drops the explorer and attached ascent stage and stays in orbit, moving through Titan's exosphere, where it scoops gases for return (I've done the math, the thrust from the ion engine is well greater than the drag; also, most ion engines are very propellant-flexible).
3) During the months while the tug is refilling, the explorer explores Titan (leaving its ascent stage behind on the surface) and collects samples from all over the moon - flying until its flight batteries are exhausted, landing (VTOL), collecting samples and transmitting data while the flight batteries recharge, then taking off again. The tug acts as its data relay.
4) When both the explorer and tug are ready, the explorer returns to its ascent stage and re-ascends, then ditches the spent ascent stage. The tug takes care of maneuvering for re-docking so that the explorer (with its samples, minus any unneeded mass that it left behind) doesn't have to have an OMS.
5) Re-docked, the tug makes a flyby of Enceladus with a carbon aerogel collector open. Additional optional collection flybies include the various rings (aerogel) and Saturn's exosphere (scoop). The scoop acts as a shield during flybies, the same way antennas are often used.
6) The craft returns to Earth orbit. In addition to the collected samples, any gas from Titan's exosphere left in the tanks is itself a sample return.
Yeah, that'd be a flagship mission and would require a couple tech demonstrators beforehand to advance the TRL. But... hopefully some day.
"I know you have questions." "That would be why I just asked them."