A potentially habitable planet found

[donkeyhoty]

Yeah, so here's the article http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070424/ap_ ... ble_planet

[McQ]

It is habitable (visited last summer) and the weather is very pleasant, but their Thai food stinks, and you can't find a decent Hoagie anywhere!

However, the sunsets are amazing. I guess now that the rest of the world knows about it, I have to find somewhere else to get away from it all.


 :wink:

[SteveS]

=But oh, the view. The planet is 14 times closer to the star it orbits. Udry figures the red dwarf star would hang in the sky at a size 20 times larger than our moon. And it's likely, but still not known, that the planet doesn't rotate, so one side would always be sunlit and the other dark.

I'd have to have one hard heart to not be stirred by a paragraph like this.  Don't they call the phenomenon of having one side always face the orbital partner "tide locked"?

Distance is another problem. "We don't know how to get to those places in a human lifetime," Maran said.

Still, whenever I read an article like this, I can't help but want to go there and see it myself.

This find seems really big to me - if there are potentially habitable planets around even some of the dwarf stars - wouldn't that make a much "richer" soup for life to occur in (i.e. aren't dwarf stars common)?  Plus, I think dwarf stars burn for much longer than other types of stars, so life would have plenty of time to evolve?

[Whitney]

The planet was discovered by the European Southern Observatory's telescope in La Silla, Chile, which has a special instrument that splits light to find wobbles in different wave lengths. Those wobbles can reveal the existence of other worlds.

How can they know if it has water (yet not know if it is frozen or liquid) based on feedbacks from wave lengths?

I'm not familiar with this process or the accuracy of such a process.  I don't doubt there are other potentially life sustaining planets other than in our solar system.  I'm just a bit skeptical of the process used to make these findings.  Basically, I can see how they could use wave lengths to detect a distant planet, I just don't see how they could be utilized to determine properties of that planet in any way that is remotely accurate.  Anyway, it would be cool if we could add another potentially habital planet to the list of what we have detected in the relatively small amount of universe we can detect.

[donkeyhoty]

How can they know if it has water (yet not know if it is frozen or liquid) based on feedbacks from wave lengths?

They didn't really say it had water, just that it probably had water based on "what we know".

They're basically going on what the temperature range should/could be based on the star size and proximity, and planet size, and computer models that they've come up with.  And so, with that predicted temp. range IF the planet does have water it would be liquid.  More study by different scientists will, obviously, reveal more.  In other articles about the discovery there are more details like the temperature estimates could be way off based on type of atmosphere, and it might not even be a rocky planet.  So, it's basically wait and see.

[Eclecticsaturn]

this discovery is exciting. i hope they find life on it  (or any planet for that matter) in my lifetime