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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!"
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.