Slashdot Mirror
Thrilling Discovery of Seven Earth-Sized Planets Orbiting Nearby Star (theguardian.com)
At a press conference on Wednesday, NASA scientists announced that they have spotted seven Earth-sized planets orbiting closely around a small, ultra-cool star. The star is 39 light years away. From a report on The Guardian: It is the first time that so many Earth-sized planets have been found in orbit around the same star, an unexpected haul that suggests the Milky Way may be teeming with worlds that, in size and firmness underfoot at least, resemble our own rocky home. The planets closely circle a dwarf star named Trappist-1, which at 39 light years away makes the system a prime candidate to search for signs of life. Only marginally larger than Jupiter, the star shines with a feeble light about 2,000 times fainter than our sun. "The star is so small and cold that the seven planets are temperate, which means that they could have some liquid water and maybe life, by extension, on the surface," said Michael Gillon, an astrophysicist at the University of Liege in Belgium. [...] While the planets have Earth-like dimensions, their sizes ranging from 25 percent smaller to 10 percent larger, they could not be more different in other features. Most striking is how compact the planet's orbits are. Mercury, the innermost planet in the solar system, is six times farther from the sun than the outermost seventh planet is from Trappist-1.
I'll decide that thank-you-very-much.
They aren't observing planets. They are just assuming the gravitational effects they are seeing is due to the presence of planets.
I am not saying it was aliens... but these were alien worlds.
The blast of sterilizing radiation at that distance, combined with being tidally locked and probably wracked with catastrophic earthquakes at that distance would make life on these planets an unlikely impossibility.
I saw the announcement, but what makes this special? There were already hundreds of known exoplanets, many of them earth size, rocky and in the habitable zone. What is different about these planets?
How about: Bashful, Doc, Dopey, Happy, Sleepy, Sneezy and Grumpy?
Why would I not want to visit other planets that are the most likely so far to contain life?
Simple - it's a Trappist!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Anyone note how similar this system is to the solar system in Firefly?
This must be where we eventually go to form the Alliance.
There cannot be LIFE without GOD, and GOD didn't know about these planets till a few days ago.
As the star is named Trappist-1, the scientists were joking about naming them after Belgian beers.
Why would a star's size and temperature invalidate the inverse square law? The ratio of illumination is (0.06/0.011)^2 = 30 between planet #1 and planet #7, so to first order we would expect a ratio of 30 between surface temperatures in kelvin. On the other hand, the ratio where water is liquid is merely 373/273 = 1.37.
Where were the People of Color in the interview?
Similarly, why were the transgendered not represented? Maybe they got lost looking for a suitable bathroom.
This sounds like the Fleet of Worlds of Larry Niven's Pierson's Puppeteers.
Remember, as the Trappist name indicates the whole system is dedicated to Belgian beer.
An unlikely impossibility is equivalent to a likely possibility, not to be confused with an infinite improbability.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
a small, ultra-cool star.
What you talkin' 'bout, NASA?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
This is undoubtedly fake news. NASA is hyping up some undecipherable scientific mubo jumbo just to try to prevent themselves from getting their budget cut. It is one of the most wasteful and useless departments in the entire government, spending more time working on the hoax of global warming than you know exploring space like their supposed to. In reality this HUNDRED BILLION DOLLAR department has done squat in almost half a century axcept push discredited liberal theories about co2. It is well past time to shut down NASA.
What is '1 times fainter'??
Garbage terminology taken from idiot marketing droids.
No seriously, we should set up a very large synthetic aperture array of telescopes on the far side of the moon to look at these and similar promising exoplanets in high resolution and spectroscopically etc.
Yes. I know the far side of the moon isn't always dark, but half the time it is, and is shaded from Earth's light and our EM emissions etc.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
The President doesn't want to hear about the possible presence of more aliens!
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
A planet that loses it's atmosphere, yeah, that's bad news for life. However we don't "know" that all brown dwarf stars are prone to X-class flares, just that they "seem more susceptible" to them.
As for tidal locking being an unsolvable problem for life, I reject this entirely. There will be a temperate zone between the daylight and dark sides of the planet with a many kilometers-wide habitable zone. Also you have the possibilities of underground, ocean, or moon-dwelling life. Really, is that so hard?
Suggesting that tidal locking is a deal-breaker for life is a total failure of imagination.
Pluto is a planet. I don't buy the #FakeAstronomy.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
That's where God keeps Earth's backups.
I wonder how far back the oldest goes?
Table-ized A.I.
Oh.. A double negative !! That means we can move there tomorrow!! But seriously. would a solar prominence toast our every bit when the planets are that close to the sun?
I don't see how it is improbable that they could not harbor life.
Quote of the day! I had to apply Boolean algebra to deduce your actual meaning.
Seems like it probably wasn't much of a challenge, besides being lucky enough to look in the right place. Planets that close to the star will generate a comparatively strong signal, especially if they used Doppler shifts rather than transits to detect them. And with orbits varying from 1.5 to 20 days it doesn't take long to get many periods worth of signal to be confident in your detection.
Recognizing that they had seven overlapping signals rather than random noise was probably the most difficult part, and that probably wasn't too difficult with modern technology.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Finding that many Earth-sized rocky bodies orbiting a star just 39 lightyears away, with the possibility that some of them may be able to have liquid water on their surface doesn't excite you? Did you have your sense of wonder and curiosity surgically removed?
Nah, he handed it over to the Alt-Right when he decided cynicism and putting down others made him sound more informed than he really is. We see a lot of that on this site and the red one. (only half joking--this probably doesn't apply to the actual grandparent of this post, but does to many, if not most, habitual posters of a similarly cynical bent)
It's a sad commentary about the state of affairs on this world that access to the original article, based on research on paid for with public money, is no free. It's truly appalling.
Wasn't he the victim of sexual abuse? I don't follow him, so I don't know exactly what he said, but that's the sort of circumstance that a reasonable person makes allowances for.
Something like 30% of victims become pedophiles themselves. So while this goes some way toward explaining his toxicity (only some-way mind you, since plenty of victims choose not to become vile, despicable people, unlike Milo), it certainly does not warrant "making allowances for."
Where are you imagining earthquakes from? If the planets are tidally locked, then their sun would no longer be having any substantial effect on their crusts. Much like the moon doesn't suffer quakes due to being tidally locked with the Earth, unlike the Earth whose crust is constantly being flexed by the gravity of the moon and sun. In fact, being tidally locked likely *reduces* the tectonic activity, since there's no longer any tidal "massaging" of the crust.
As for the x-ray blasts - I admit that's bad news for anything on the sunny side of the planet. A complete non-issue for anything on the dark side planet though - a few thousand miles of rock makes for extremely effective x-ray shielding. Unless of course those X-ray bursts are accompanied by coronal mass ejections - over time those would tend to strip away the atmospheres of any planet without a strong enough magnetosphere (a complete unknown at this point)
On the exciting side, since they detected these planets by observing their transit across the face of the star, there's the potential for us to analyze the changes in the star's light as it passes through their hypothetical atmospheres, letting us determine if they exist, and if so what they're primarily made from.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
EOM
Strong XUV irradiation of the Earth-sized exoplanets orbiting the ultracool dwarf TRAPPIST-1
https://arxiv.org/abs/1605.015...
Government cannot make man richer, but it can make him poorer. - Ludwig von Mises
Well, you were responding to:
--fyngyrz
anon due to mod points
I've been working on putting structure to MIT's OCW courses and filling in the blanks where there's missing courses. If we all tried to just go through what is available out there now and focussed on propulsion, life support systems, systems engineering, etc, I think we could get ourselves off the planet and mining asteroids to build craft that could get to this system without having our work belong to any organizations that could keep it to themselves. I know that's quite collectivist for a capitalist, but I believe that math/basic science shouldn't be patentable, and the only way to do this is to race against those who intend to patent everything. I put my thoughts up on Hive13's wiki and moved them to http://hackereducation.wordpre... I am not a professor and I only had 2 years as a college software system architect, so my understanding of curriculum development may need help, but it doesn't matter if the idea grows into something better. We have a way to use sunlight to fuse glass https://www.youtube.com/watch?... and probably could use these: http://www.growbiointensive.or... guys' ideas to grow food. No idea since I'm a physics/cs guy and not a biologist or doctor. I just wish we'd stop waiting for the government to do everything for us and use the damned hand rectangles that contain all of human knowledge to learn ourselves and then go do it!
i am so very tired....
When we can travel at light speed I might care about this type of stuff, until then I want more pressing news.
Just more useless busy-think as science goes down the rabbit hole of irrelevance. The scientific-industrial-complex makes sure this stuff is constantly in the news in order to justify expensive programs to the government and public.
E Proelio Veritas.
Awesome. That's sooner than we'll know if there's life on Mars
So when NASA tells us that invisible planets light years away are real we all clap, but when it tells us that climate change right here is happening some how it's all a big con?
And all the Moo players say 'Oh wow... why didn't I start in that system? Have to colonise that one first.'
Ever since Harambe left office, Chris Matthews has been looking for a new thrill.: "I Felt This Thrill Going Up My Leg".
Low mass stars (and this one is very low mass) are dim, so the habitable zone is very close, so tidal effects of the star on the planet are large*, so under normal circumstances the planet will tidally lock to the star, which is not friendly to life. (Although I wouldn't go so far as to say life is impossible on a tidally locked world.)
If the planet has a large enough moon, it will lock to the moon instead, and avoid the star tidal lock (at least for a while.) So I imagine a planet and moon locked to each other and in close orbit around the star. In this case, what will happen to the planet/moon orbit as it gets perturbed by the stellar tides? Will it remain stable, or has the moon only bought me temporary reprieve from stellar tidal lock?
* Back of envelope tidal calculation:
Luminosity of star L proportional to mass of star M to 4th power (roughly)
Goldilocks orbital radius R proportional to sqrt(L), i.e. R propto M^2
Tidal strength T propto M/R^3 (it is derivative of M/R^2), so T propto M/M^6 = 1/M^5. (It is the 1/R^3 which allows a moon to out-tide the star, despite being very much less massive.)
News says this star is 2000 times fainter than the sun, so about 0.15 solar masses
So tidal effects of star on habitable planets is about 13,000 times greater than tidal effect of sun on earth.
The tidal effect of the sun on the earth are small but noticeable - it causes the difference between spring and neap tides.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
Seven planets - check.
Exceptionally compact solar system - check.
Exceptionally small star - check.
Try to check if the sixth planet is a gas giant with five moons. Or try to determine if the second planet is purple!
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
nobody is going there from this planet anytime during the next couple of generations, at least. Unless something unexpected happens..
Tidal locking would be GREAT for developing life. Having a constant source of light/warmth is wonderful for a lot of types of life. Sure, there wouldn't be a photosynthetic life developing on the dark side of the planet, but could you imagine the abundance of life that might grow on the light side of the planet? Imagine a planet with a constant, never ending spring or summer. Of course the actual orbit would likely alter the temperature seasonally, but 24/7 (relatively speaking) light would be fantastic for life.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Caprica, or the Xindi's homeworlds?
SCIREV.NET - fanfics,reviews & more
Being so close to their star, wouldn't radiation be a huge issue?
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.