Planet outside solar system is habitable

Planet outside solar system is habitable

bigpondnews.com

A planet 20 light years away is the first outside the solar system to be officially declared habitable by European scientists.

The 'exoplanet' Gliese 581d has conditions that could support Earth-like life, including possible watery oceans and rainfall, they say.

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I think this is amazing news, although i guess it was only a matter of time and im sure there will be many more found in the coming months and years.


[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/3e0c1e06c85a.jpg[/atsimg]

Next step.........warp drive


Perhaps now SETI can actually target these planets and focus more time on planets that are deemed 'life-supporting' especially with recent reports of SETI losing more funding and having to shut down some of their arrays.

Apart from that though what good is knowing these planets are there without being able to travel there....yet

ABC News

For budding travellers, though, Gliese 581d would "still be a pretty strange place to visit", CNRS said.

"The denser air and thick clouds would keep the surface in a perpetual murky red twilight, and its large mass means surface gravity would be around double that on Earth."

Getting to the planet would still require a sci-fi breakthrough in travel for earthlings.

A spaceship travelling close to light speed would take more than 20 years to get there, while our present rocket technology would take 300,000 years.

More than 500 exoplanets orbiting other stars have been recorded since 1995, detected mostly by a tiny wobble in stellar light.

They are named after their star and listed alphabetically in order of discovery.

[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/927c87511261.jpg[/atsimg]
(A model shows the possible surface temperatures of planet Gliese 581d, located around 20 light years from Earth.)

reply to post by Havick007


We are not only an accident.
Life is everywhere!
S&F.

reply to post by Havick007

the carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere would almost certainly not be breathable by humans

That's as far as we get with disclosure then, always the same old #, just a different day, keep it from the people until a time where your hand is forced. Jeesh anyone else getting tired of this baloney!

they dont even know what it really going on in our local moons, hogwash.

reply to post by franspeakfree


Yeah it's still a step in the right direction though and in regard to the CO2 atmosphere perhaps it's younger than Earth abd plant life is beggining to evolve that would be interesting and yes i say that because plants absorb CO2, thats another step towards oxygen

reply to post by Arken


Yes I agree. We are just a small part of the life that exists throughout the Universe i believe. I have many threads on this.

I find it Fascinating that there is life out there in the Universe everywhere its so overwhelming...!!!!

Can't wait until they can finally prove it...( I already strongly believe it to be true though that life is ubiquitous)

reply to post by Havick007


Yes this planet has been known about for 2-3 years now i think one of the Astronomers a while back was the one who quoted the very controversial statement of

" There is 100% chance of life on this planet"

Astronomer Quoted this in 2010 This News is a years old but i love when we get to bring it back into discussion this is my favourite topic

Odds of Life on Newfound Earth-Size Planet '100 Percent', Astronomer Says.


Now the Article refers to 581G but your article refers to 581D so i'm mixing things up. I remember reading one article talking about the potential for more than one of the planets in the Gliese 581 System to be habitable.

And i also had another Article that talked about them arguing how many planets were orbiting the star and at what distance. etc....

reply to post by CobraCommander


Yes i somewhat agree. But we can guesstimate that life is there its nice to dwell on i guess.

I can't wait until we can send a probed there or image it in a few decades with some real high power telescopes....

Until then though yes its Hogwash

reply to post by CobraCommander


So are you saying they are lying?

They spend more money on searching worlds we probably will never see or walk on in this lifetime than many more important things.

Scientist's with money to burn, although at least we are discovering more about the universe. It was obvious that there would be Earth like planets out there but at least research like this can actually confirm it.

As I keep on saying what is more frightening there is no other life out in the universe at all and we are it! Or there is loads of life out there - excellent news

Imagine if the US forgot about trillion dollar wars and put up a trillion dollar space telescope at a moon base instead. Humans, so much potential but never lift a finger to it.

Just another update i should have added to the OP but the news ones are messy to edit -

Science Daily

ScienceDaily (May 16, 2011) — The planetary system around the red dwarf Gliese 581, one of the closest stars to the Sun in the galaxy, has been the subject of several studies aiming to detect the first potentially habitable exoplanet. Two candidates have already been discarded, but a third planet, Gliese 581d, can be considered the first confirmed exoplanet that could support Earth-like life. This is the conclusion of a team of scientists from the Institut Pierre Simon Laplace (CNRS, UPMC, ENS Paris, Ecole Polytechnique) in Paris, France, whose study is published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Great news!

reply to post by Havick007


There are probably Earth like moons with life on them right here, but we can't talk about those. Exo-planet study is pure propaganda.

Space exploration moderately intrigues me, however to an extent it is taken too far. 20 thousands light years away would take how many centuries to get to? More than any human could live by far obviously. This planet discovered will never be inhabited by humans from Earth. Funding for space should be directed for monitoring closer to home for asteroid detection, observation etc.
In my opinion it is a waste of time and money to discover planets that "may be inhabitable" trillions and trillions of miles away. Our only benefit is to think "oh that's cool, an interesting discovery!" But other than that, what else is to be done about it. Anyone going to volunteer to go and colonize it? Lol, It's impossible.

Upon re-reading the article, it's actually a misleading title. They claim it would not be possible for humans to breathe properly on it. Move along scientists, you are wasting your time with this one.

reply to post by Havick007


This might be the 2nd though to be habitable planet in that system quite intriguing if you ask me see above i replied to your thread in a post above.

Gliese-581-G
Odds of Life on Newfound Earth-Size Planet '100 Percent', Astronomer Says.

Gliese-581-D
New Planet Found in Goldilocks Zone

reply to post by Isildur1


Correction 20 Light Years away not 20 thousand. Still really far though 120 trillion millions

1 Light Year = 6 trillion miles.

I'm curious why so pessimistic about Planet Exploration doesn't this intrigue you; i myself find it fascinating and one of the many unknown mysteries of the Universe.

And in my opinion the most important discovery of anything Ever.
To find life and other habitable planets in the Universe....

Also maybe we will have break through in Physics and/or Quantum Physics and be able to travel to said planet in FTL(Faster-Than-Light) travel form perhaps in a few decades or centuries.

We want to got to a stellar system probably first (And close-by) that has a habitable planet and/or the closest one.(Triple-Star system Alpha Centauri)
Alpha Centauri

Well I could use a nice break do you think I could find board and lodgings?

I know that this planet in the goldilocks zone and all very close only being 20 lightyears away which is a very very small amount of space. I however feel between here and there are some other possibilities which will be considered when the time arises.

Now my question being how long until it is confirmed by accident, by chance, deliberately or because of necessity that human life has traveled further than is currently being admitted? That human life manages a number of stations and outposts both in orbits and on planetary soil?

How many non-terrestrial employees did Gary McKinnon find on the manifests? were those only formally members of the USA not to mention other countries. I don't believe we have got as far as 20 light years away 'yet' or at least in a mission accomplished outpost up and running sense. Although I believe we have life seeded elsewhere life that possibly is unaware of it's Earthly human origins and looks towards this 'blue marble' in space in awe and wonder pondering the very same thing about Earth.

this is good news
Now we have another planet to destroy.

Hopefully by the time we can visit we aren't so viral.

That's really cool and stuff.

Lets just say for the hell of it that we can somehow on god's green earth attain light speed which is 670,616,700 mph (that's over half way to a billion mph if you weren't sure) or 186,282 miles per second. Well even then, at that mind numbing speed it would still take 20 years to get there.

The average speed of a space shuttle is around 19,000 mph....so basically we'd have to go 35,296 times faster to get there...in 20 years!

I hope there is some sort of bend in the space/time continuum or maybe some kind of worm hole because other wise that is inconceivable.

Interesting stuff, however I wouldn't say it was confirmed habbitable. They say posibly water, if there isn't then surely it's isn't habitable? Also the CO2 is a hell of a problem. I do agree though, that this is a good find and as someone suggested, the planet could still be developing.