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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.
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.
No problem...
"It's 235,100,000,000,000 miles to Planet X, we got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark... and we're wearing sunglasses."
"Hit 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!
Well if you are going to do that .. you could call the ship "Red Dwarf" for luck. Just be careful of any cats you bring on as pets.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
When Red Dwarf is considered obscure on a site targeting nerds is when I really have to question how many nerds are actually here anymore.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
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.
There are nerds of many types. Space/SciFi, computer hardware, computer software, robotics.. etc. You don't have to be an expert in every field to be a nerd.
Besides my Fortan 90 class that I took in 1998 and very basic HTML that I learned from my Geocities webpage, I have very limited coding knowledge. Doesn't make me less of a nerd, just means I don't consume as much Mt. Dew or Doritos.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."