first habitable exoplanet found

Post Reply New Topic

http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/news/4321 ... 20fa74%2C0

I don't know how they'd know it's habitable, I mean, if the temperatures are tolerable to be outside in shorts or not which is my qualifications of being habitable.

liquid water seen through a spectroscope or whatever is probably the case. If they see any green, that would be the first evidence of extraterrestrial life found.

Even though it might have one side always facing the sun and one away from it, the side facing the sun isn't as hot as our sahara and the dark side isn't as cold as antarctica, earth is more extreme.

I guess you'd want to wear swim trunks, but you'd have to be a really strong swimmer to stay afloat in 2x earth's gravity.

No, because gravity pulls the water and you with an equal force. You would weigh twice as much, but so would the water, and therefore you would have twice the buoyancy. It would be exactly the same.

Oh, yeah. I overlooked that...

maybe a nice place to visit.... but would anybody want to live there? there would have to be technology to compensate for the doubled gravitational burden on comparitively frail human bodies.

We have no way of getting there.

ruveyn

That's the first time I've seen that called the "Goldilocks Zone". Most of the time I've seen the term "Habitable Zone". Anyway... This is a good write-up of what the qualifications for a habitable zone planet are:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitable_zone

(And lookee there, they even use the term Goldilocks Zone in the Wikipedia write-up. Go figure... I'm behind the times again.)

It basically constrains planetary mass, total flux of sunlight on the planet's surface, and other stellar-scale parameters. It's not to say the planet itself is actually habitable. Here's the perfect example: Venus is either just inside or just outside our star's habitable zone (depending on your definition). But it's far from habitable! You can have a planet dead smack in the middle of the HZ, but if it never had an atmosphere to begin with, it's just a big rock. Saying a planet is inside the habitable zone just says there's a chance it might support life.

About seein green, it would be really really hard to get spectra of an exoplanet. They're extremely dim, and they sit next to a star which is comparatively very very bright. But MasterJedi, you hit the nail on the head: If anyone ever collected spectra from an extraterrestrial planet or moon that had a verifiable chlorophyll signature, that would be some serious news.

ok, i should have said "it might be a nice place to visit if only we could travel there." i wonder if humanity will ever become a truly spacefaring race?

It may be possible that our bodies could adapt quite well. Bones get more dense when they are under load stress and muscles are spurred to compensate as well.

This planet might be on the cool side, perhaps similar to the British Isles or Scandinavia.

HOWEVER, this requires that the world be a "Class M" world - so much like Earth that only the surface geography might be arranged differently. The size, atmosphere composition and pressure, and hydrographic percentage of the world must be taken into account. Volcanism is also an important factor, as are the effects of one or more moons on the oceans' tides. Since we know none of these factors, we can only assume that conditions might be hospitable for human life.

The following is from an article by Thomas H. Maugh II - April 22, 2009



(Commentary omitted from article)



(Omitted text referring to another system)



(Omitted blah-blah text to end of article)

Some of the characteristics of Gliese 581 are:

Spectral type: M3 (A small red dwarf)
Luminosity Class: V (Main Sequence)
Temperature 3,480 ± 48 degrees Kelvin
Distance: 20.3 ± 0.3 light-years (6.2 ± 0.1 parsecs)
Absolute magnitude (MV): 11.6
Mass: ~0.31?
Radius: ~0.29?
Age 7 to 11 × 109[9] years

Gliese 581 has a very low UV index, meaning that it might not support photosynthesis, thus no chlorophyll-based plant life may exist on Gliese 581d no matter how hospitable it may be to human life. Plant-based foods might have to be imported to support any human colonies.

It is 300 light years distant. We are not going there.

We would have to evolve into very long-life beings to even dream of undertaking such journeys. And forget relativistic time dilations. Even if we went at half the speed of light (highly unlikely) it would make little difference in apparent time elapsed.

Give up on this Star Trek nonsense. It is good fiction and totally unrealistic scientifically.

ruveyn

Ruveyn, for now you are very right. There really is no realistic way to conceive of humans commuting such distances, not for a while at least. The discovery of 'extra-terrestrial' life is obviously one goal of these searches, probably scientists are hoping that any aliens they make contact with will share their travel secrets.

Gliese 581 is, in fact, a mere twenty lightyears away. Using current technology, one would have to construct a generation ship; but even using current technology, it is possible to seed humanity around another star. Using a drive capable of achieving a significant fraction of c, say a light-pressure drive or an Orion craft, it might well be possible to reach Gliese 581 within a single lifespan of those onboard (thanks to the wonders of time dilation). No need for Star Trek FTL craft for such a (relatively) short trip...

We still are not going there. The fast vehicle achieved thus far has been 60,000 mph.

Compare that to the speed of light. Even at a tenth of light speed it would take 200 years to get there and the time dilation would be negligible. We need two things to do star travel:

1. A brand new kind of physics.
2. A life space of ten thousand yeard.

ruveyn

Unless I'm mistaken, moving close to the speed of light would blue-shift the visible light into gamma rays. We'll need better shielding.