Possible first earth-like plan­et "super- Earth" found out­side our So­lar Sys­tem

Here is a picture of how it might look like.

Originally posted by yeti101
rai76, time is relative it wouldnt be faster or slower on that planet not to the biology if it exists there

also there is no day/night cycle on this planet. Permanent day on 1 side - night on the other. It does not rotate.

Maybe Im mistaken but since its not rotating and it revolves around its sun every 13 days, wouldnt it have some kind of weird 13 day long period of night and day as the light shifted over the surface from its revolution around its sun.

Originally posted by yeti101
please its insulting .

Considering how many problems NASA has getting equipment to work and how wrong astronomers are many times with their calculations of NEOs .. and considering how far away this thing is .... I stand by my opinion .. it wouldn't surprise me at all if they had help finding it.




[edit on 4/25/2007 by FlyersFan]

Maybe Im mistaken but since its not rotating and it revolves around its sun every 13 days, wouldnt it have some kind of weird 13 day long period of night and day as the light shifted over the surface from its revolution around its sun.

according to the experts no. The sun would stay in the same position in the sky all year round (13 days) . Its tidally locked to the star (like our moon is to earth- we dont see the dark side at all) and its not on a tilt like the earth



[edit on 25-4-2007 by yeti101]

Here you find some more info on Red dwarfs stars theory published in 2001.

If you want to find extraterrestrial intelligence, you're going to have to look in the right place. In our Galaxy alone there are more than 100 billion stars, so you might expect to find a profusion of alien abodes. But which suns do you point your telescope at? Bright, yellow stars like our own Sun have always seemed the obvious place to start. In the past few years, though, researchers have begun to wonder if they've been neglecting a whole class of likely targets: red dwarfs.

Smaller, cooler, and fainter than the Sun, red dwarfs give out just a feeble red glow. More than a dozen of these puny stars reside within as many light-years of Earth, yet they're so faint that not a single one is visible to the unaided eye. It was always thought that any planet orbiting a red dwarf would be an extremely unlikely place to find life. But it now looks as though these dim red suns could harbour most of the Galaxy's life-bearing worlds.

This is great news for anyone hoping to find hospitable planets outside the Solar System. While stars like the Sun are relatively rare, four out of five stars in our Galaxy are red dwarfs. "We all want to find habitable planets out there," says Laurance Doyle, an astronomer at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. "The fact that we can now rule in 80 per cent of the stars is a positive note for almost everybody."

For decades, the arguments against finding life around red dwarfs have seemed secure. These stars owe their dimness to a misfortune of birth--when they formed they only acquired between 8 and 60 per cent as much mass as the Sun. As a result, their cores are cool and the nuclear reactions take place at a slow rate, providing little energy. The nearest red dwarf--Proxima Centauri, which is 4 light-years from Earth--emits less visible light in a century than the Sun does in a week.

please visit the link for the rest of the interesting article

www.kencroswell.com...

A planet with no day night cycle, if it were to have life, could make for an interesting dual-ecosystem planet. Maybe even a thrid ecosystem around the twilight limb.

Anyhow, I know that many observatories will be trying to get spectroscopic data on this object, if they can find a way to detect it directly, rather than by wobble interferometry.

The spectral data would be a good indication of its makeup.

This is great news I hope they start looking at all of the Red Dwarf systems. I wonder what the chance are of planets in the Centauri system.

yeah this latest report from SETI says red dwarfs are still on the table. www.seti.org...

right now we dont know enough to rule them out. But i prefer G type stars like our sun

wonder what the chance are of planets in the Centauri system.

im afraid theyre not good compared to other binary systems. The best chance for binary stars is when they are really close together and the planets orbit around both aka tatooine in star wars. Or if the stars are far apart and the planets orbit 1 star. Alpha centauri A & B are in the mid range distance apart- the worst conditions for binary systems. 3 times less of a chance of having planets as the other binary types of systems.


ive not given up hope yet- binary systems like alpha centauri are hard to study & detect planets compared to single stars, but eventually we will find out.

[edit on 25-4-2007 by yeti101]

sweet news indeed.

My doing drake's equation again for fun a week or so ago seems a lot less 'crazy' now

seriously though. finding this one with our staggering but in cosmic terms severely limited tools definitely makes a vibrant living universe a lot less far fetched for some naysayers about life elsewhere.

[edit on 25/4/2007 by David2012]

PS.
Reminds me, anyone seen that show on Discovery where scientists worked out some very "strange" but habitable worlds and logical alien life? (i mean designed with sense by biologists based on the simulated environment)
It had one with a planet which always faced the same way to the sun. But in simulations yielded a habitable planet.
After letting the simulation run for a while they got a habitable belt where the transition zone was between dayside and nightside.

Some really strange wildlife too. but according to the show scientifically valid.
e.g. giant whale like creatures that "swim" in the air, the world had a more dense atmosphere I think.
I can't guarantee the validity of the show of course, but it's Discovery Channel I guess you have to decide if/when you watch it
Anyway was an interesting show might be worth looking for.

[edit on 25/4/2007 by David2012]

[edit on 25/4/2007 by David2012]

They used a spectrograph named HARPS (High Accuracy Radial Velocity for Planetary Searcher). HARPS the ESO facility for the measurement of radial velocities with the highest accuracy currently available. It is fibre-fed by the Cassegrain focus of the 3.6m telescope in La Silla.

Here you find some info about HARPS



[edit on 25/4/2007 by rai76]

David2012,

I'm really interested in seeing that show. Any clue as to what the name may be?

-

Anyways, this is a very nice discovery but in essence it's only the stepping stone to greater discoveries to come. They may or may not be focused on this system though.

All this talk about the ecology has inspired me to create a tune with the group, we may as well get cranking on "The Dark Side of Gilese 581B".

Keep this thread alive!

Originally posted by Donoso

Anyways, this is a very nice discovery but in essence it's only the stepping stone to greater discoveries to come. They may or may not be focused on this system though.

Well I think they will now be focussed on that! This will be the first of many they will find.

There are 200 billion stars in our galaxy alone and many astronomers believe most of these stars have planets. The fact that almost as soon as we have built a telescope capable of detecting small, earth-like worlds, one turns up right on our cosmic doorstep, shows that statistically, there are probably billions of earths out there. We've never found one 'so' close to being like the Earth until now.

That's true. The likelihood that those scientists got 'lucky' and picked the right red dwarf is low. If their data is super triple confirmed by other teams (likely to happen soon, I imagine) then there probably are countless such 'Goldilocks planets.'

[edit on 25-4-2007 by Ectoterrestrial]

Well hopefully soon with the release of the ZPE to power crafts to other solar systems we would be able to visit some of these planets that would be great!! Imagine finding homo erectus type beings there...we can manipulate their DNA to create homo sapiens like US!!!! lol then they will call us their GODS!!. Then we can document it all and call it a bible!!!...I'm gona astro travel to this new super-earth!!...

[edit on 25/4/07 by free_spirit_earth]

[edit on 25/4/07 by free_spirit_earth]

Originally posted by yeti101
according to the experts no. The sun would stay in the same position in the sky all year round (13 days) . Its tidally locked to the star (like our moon is to earth- we dont see the dark side at all) and its not on a tilt like the earth
[edit on 25-4-2007 by yeti101]

That makes me think that it rotates. It would have to shine on other parts of the planet - that doesn't make any sense. I think the moon is a bad example to be using in this sense.

Originally posted by pepsi78
Big discovery, but 20 light years is still far away, it would take a probe hudreds of years to get there, it would take an object betwen 80 and 100

True, of course, assuming the speed of light is a barrier.

Wow... This is really exciting.

I can't wait to hear more about this.

...and maybe find out a little more about the other planets orbiting the same star.

20 + light years away. So we are looking back in time right? So its older than the image we see?

Life on such a planet would have to be a re-emergence of Life.

There could have been an entire history of Life under a normal Yellow Sun, which evolved and perished. Or, would it have been a super hot Mercury style planet in those times? Does that imply that some time in the far distant future, Mercury would become habitable?

Originally posted by yeti101
also there is no day/night cycle on this planet. Permanent day on 1 side - night on the other. It does not rotate.

Please don't say things like this. No one has any proof at all that this planet is tidally locked. Who knows what's on this planet? Their star is a lot smaller and weaker than ours gravitationally. Perhaps its proposed 13-day orbit is far enough to escape the tidal locking. No one has a CLUE what the facts are for this planet for sure. let's go over some of the information we're looking at right now:

- 1.6 times Earth's gravity
- 50% larger diameter than earth
- 13 day orbit
- 0-40*C temperature average

ALL GUESSES. None of this is verified true. In fact, I'd be willing to bet most of the figures they're coming up with are not only inaccurate, but completely wrong altogether. You're putting a lot of confidence in a small team of Europeans spying at an object 120 trillion miles away. No one even knows if this planet truly exists! No one has ever seen it. The data they are using to base their hypothesis on could all be explained by a phenomenon we don't understand. There may not be a single planet surrounding that star for all we know.

No one has seen anything and no one knows anything for sure. Please, let's not forget that.

[edit on 25-4-2007 by ChocoTaco369]