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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.
How about: Bashful, Doc, Dopey, Happy, Sleepy, Sneezy and Grumpy?
These were found using the transit method, which measures a star's reduction in it's brightness as something passes in front of it.
They know that these sorts of occurrences are not things like sunspots because they can follow up using measurements of the wobbling of the star due to the gravity the planets exert on it.
Combine the two and you have a reasonable inference that there are planets orbiting this star.
If these are not planets, given the above two types of evidence correlating with each other, what else could they be?
This is a red M class Dwarf star. The lack of radiation is the more immediate concern rather the excess of it. Red M class dwarf stars emit most of their radiation as infra-red, and barely emit any ultraviolet. If ultraviolet radiation is indeed a requirement for life, then this will be a problem. Total sterilization is unlikely, since the amount of energy hitting the planets will likely be similar to what the Earth is already getting.
Also, wrt tidal locking, the main concern would be that one side of the surface will be boiling while the other side will be freezing (one side gets all the sun, the other side gets none), which IS a concern wrt. life. Earthquakes are not a direct effect of tidal lock. That would be geological activity.
Of course, all of this is conjecture. We need to study these kinds of planets a bit more to know for sure. Hence, their importance.
Your guide to distant worlds:
http://i.imgur.com/6jp4DVK.png
Mars first. No need to run before you can crawl.
Though so far our record is to crawl to the moon, feel proud, then crawl back down our hole and declare the rest of the universe isn't that good anyway.
Flawed! I don't know what "consentual" means, but surely don't rely on ASKING when determining if an alien is old enough. The alien I fucked SWORE to me it was 22, then I find out it's planet circles its sun every 90 MINUTES!
One thing you're forgetting is that these stars have very low gravity, so when they throw flares they get a lot further out into space than they do on the sun. Typically the incident radiation will be low for the reasons you described, but when a planet orbits through a flare it gets zapped really hard. Meanwhile, orbiting the sun, we are so unaffected by flares that when we saw one, we thought it was the Russians jamming our radar.
People who get excited about aliens living on planets orbiting dwarf stars are kidding themselves. These stars are a dime a dozen and make up more than 90% of all stars, their light is more strongly affected by planetary transits, and they tend not to gobble up their innermost planets when forming. It's no wonder we find exoplanets around them all the time. But there is nobody interesting living on any of them. You can really only trust type F and G stars with life. Larger stars explode so fast their planets haven't even had time to solidify, and smaller stars have to be hugged so closely that the planet is affected by the star's fickle weather patterns.