Exoplanets

[4ghz]

Now we need to get someone to build a probe with orion engine. With luck it'd arrive in under 600 years.

 

[Peter1986C]

Then again, wasn't Titan a disappointment too in terms of habitability?

 

[rtwjunkie]

Then again, wasn't Titan a disappointment too in terms of habitability?

I'm not sure. I think Titan and Europa are still both possibilities, and recently a moon of Saturn. We're going to actually have to send multiple probes to land on those moons to know for sure.

 

[Drone]

Titan, Europa, Enceladus and Mars are all harsh. No magnetic field and dead cold. Maybe primitive extremophiles can survive but not human beings.

 

[rtwjunkie]

Titan, Europa, Enceladus and Mars are all harsh. No magnetic field and dead cold. Maybe primitive extremophiles can survive but not human beings.

True, and the magnetic field is key, but Mars more than others can be made habitable to a degree by humans, living and working indoors, and wearing suits outdoors. With appropriate shielding, the radiation can be managed.

 

[Drone]

True, and the magnetic field is key, but Mars more than others can be made habitable to a degree by humans, living and working indoors, and wearing suits outdoors. With appropriate shielding, the radiation can be managed.

Yup but not for a long period of time, because every shielding is wearing out eventually.

Plus weak gravity decreases eyesight and weakens bones and muscles. Nanorobots, bionics, genetic engineering and all that stuff required to make humans stronger and more adaptive. Like Hawking said if humans want to conquer space they'll need it.

 

[rtwjunkie]

Good Stuff, Drone.

 

[PopcornMachine]

I wouldn't expect to find anything similar to us anywhere.

Any life we find is going to be very different.

Just my theory. Thanks for the cool info.

 

[Drone]

I wouldn't expect to find anything similar to us anywhere.

Any life we find is going to be very different.

Just my theory. Thanks for the cool info.

It's hard to say exactly. Universe is really BIG, if it's infinitely big then sooner or later patterns will repeat (cosmic web and even atom configurations). There's a possibility and if that happens it can be that somewhere sometime the other me typing the same thing on some forum. It's not actually my theory lolz but Michio Kaku said something like that. It's logical because Universe can be infinite but number of atom configurations is finite (even though it's a really big number but it's finite).

 

[McSteel]

Marcus Chown gave this a nice mention in one of his books, see here.

 

[Drone]

The newfound coldest brown dwarf, named WISE J085510.83-071442.5, has a chilly temperature between -48 to -13 degrees Celsius. It's the fourth nearest system to the Sun (7.2 ly away from Earth).

WISE J085510.83-071442.5 is estimated to be 3-10 times the mass of Jupiter. With such a low mass, it could be a gas giant similar to Jupiter that was ejected from its star system. But scientists estimate it's probably a brown dwarf rather than a planet since brown dwarfs are known to be fairly common. If so, it's one of the least massive brown dwarfs known.

 

[Drone]

Gemini Planet Imager captures best photo ever of an exoplanet Beta Pictoris b

More cool news:


Astronomers discovered an exoplanet called GU Psc b which is around 2000 times the Earth-Sun distance from its star, a record among exoplanets. Given this distance, it takes approximately 80 000 Earth years for GU Psc b to make a complete orbit around its star!

Knowing the age (only 100 million years old) of its host star (GU Psc, a star 3 times less massive than the Sun and located in the constellation Pisces) scientists were able to determine its mass, which is 9-13 times that of Jupiter. It has a temperature of around 800°C.

 

[Drone]

New planets:

Astronomers announced today that they have discovered a new type of planet - a rocky world weighing 17 times as much as Earth.

The newfound mega-Earth, Kepler-10c, circles a sunlike star once every 45 days. It is located ~ 560 ly from Earth in the constellation Draco. The system also hosts a 3-Earth-mass "lava world," Kepler-10b, in a remarkably fast, 20-hour orbit. Kepler-10c was known to have a diameter of ~ 18000 miles, 2.3 times as large as Earth. The Kepler-10 system is ~ 11 billion years old, it formed less than 3 billion years after the Big Bang.

 

[Drone]

Astronomers led Dr Guillem Anglada-Escude from Queen Mary University of London, UK, have announced the discovery of two exoplanets circling a very old nearby star known as Kapteyn’s star. One of the newly-discovered planets could be ripe for life as it orbits at the right distance to the star to allow liquid water on its surface.

http://www.sci-news.com/astronomy/science-kapteyn-b-c-two-exoplanets-kapteyns-star-01965.html

http://phys.org/news/2014-06-astronomers-ancient-worlds-galaxy-door.html

 

[Drone]

An international team of astronomers report the discovery of a new potentially habitable Super-Earth around the nearby red-dwarf star Gliese 832, 16 ly away. This star is already known to harbour a cold Jupiter-like planet, Gliese 832 b. The new planet is Gliese 832 c.

It has an orbital period of 36 days and a mass 5.4 times that of Earth's. It receives about the same average energy as Earth does from the Sun.

So far, the two planets of Gliese 832 are a scaled-down version of our own Solar System, with an inner potentially Earth-like planet and an outer Jupiter-like giant planet. The giant planet may well have played a similar dynamical role in the Gliese 832 system to that played by Jupiter in our Solar System.

 

[Frick]

I've colonized tons of Glieses in my days.

 

[Drone]

An international team of astronomers has discovered a planet 3000 ly away, orbiting one of two stars in a binary system. They used the technique of gravitational microlensing to find the planet. The planet is not thought to be habitable, but it does orbit in a zone reminiscent of the habitable zone around our sun. These astronomers say their technique can be used to search other binary star systems for potentially habitable planets.

This newly found world - called OGLE-2013-BLG-0341LBb - has twice the mass of Earth. The planet’s host star is much dimmer than the sun.

 

[Drone]

Astronomers have discovered a transiting exoplanet with the longest known year. Kepler-421b circles its star once every 704 days. In comparison, Mars orbits our Sun once every 780 days.

Kepler-421b orbits an orange, type K star that is cooler and dimmer than our Sun. It circles the star at a distance of ~ 110 million miles. As a result, this Uranus-sized planet is chilled to a temperature of -135° Fahrenheit.

The planet's orbit places it beyond the "snow line" - the dividing line between rocky and gas planets. Outside of the snow line, water condenses into ice grains that stick together to build gas giant planets.

The host star, Kepler-421, is located ~ 1000 ly from Earth in the direction of the constellation Lyra.

Source

 

[Drone]

 

[64K]

There are billions of galaxies with billions of stars which probably have planets. imo it's a bit arrogant for humans to think that we are so special that their isn't intelligent life outside of the Earth. The vast distances that separate intelligent life is the obstacle and even if we developed faster than light travel it would still take millions of years to explore every solar system. I'm unclear about the current measurement of the universe being about 14 billion light years in diameter. What if there are galaxies that are 15, 20, 30 billion light years distance and the light from those galaxies hasn't reached Earth yet.

 

[Drone]

^ The diameter of observable Universe is about 92 billion ly. The age of the Universe is about 13.8 billion years because it's expanding.

And yup, we aren't special at all.

 

[Drone]

An ice giant that resembles Uranus has been discovered ~ 25000 ly from Earth.

The planet, labeled OGLE-2008-BLG-092LAb has a mass of ~4 times that of Uranus. It's part of a binary star system in the constellation Sagittarius. The first star in the system, 092LA, is ~2/3 as massive as our Sun, and the second star, 092LB, is ~1/6 as massive. The planet orbits 092LA at 18 AU - almost exactly the same distance as Uranus orbits the Sun.

Astronomers discovered this planetary system due to a phenomenon called gravitational microlensing – when the gravity of a star focuses the light from a more distant star and magnifies it like a lens. Very rarely, the signature of a planet orbiting the lens star appears within that magnified light signal.

In this case, there were two separate microlensing events, one in 2008 that revealed 092LA and suggested the presence of the planet, and one in 2010 that confirmed the presence of the planet and revealed the second star, 092LB.

 

[McSteel]

An ice giant that resembles Uranus

That planet has such an unfortunate name in modern English... I giggled.

(yes, yes I know it's infantile)

 

[Drone]

An international team of astronomers using NASA's Kepler space telescope has discovered a new exoplanet, named HIP 116454b.

HIP 116454b is located in the constellation Pisces, ~ 180 ly from Earth.
It is a super-Earth exoplanet, with a diameter of 32000 km (2.5 times the size of Earth) and a mass of almost 12 times that of Earth.
It circles a K1-type orange dwarf star, HIP 116454, once every 9.1 days at a distance of 13.5 million km.

 

[VulkanBros]

"most Earth-like alien world"

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-30705517