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Another Potentially Habitable Planet Discovered (1 Viewer)

Kevrunner

Footballguy
Another planet discovered, I think this is the most interesting one yet, only 22 lights years away. There has gotta be millions and millions of potentially life supporting planets in the universe if there are being discovered so easily now.

Planet Discovery

A potentially habitable alien planet — one that scientists say is the best candidate yet to harbor water, and possibly even life, on its surface — has been found around a nearby star.

The planet is located in the habitable zone of its host star, which is a narrow circumstellar region where temperatures are neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water to exist on the planet's surface.

"It's the holy grail of exoplanet research to find a planet around a star orbiting at the right distance so it's not too close where it would lose all its water and boil away, and not too far where it would all freeze," Steven Vogt, an astronomer at the University of California at Santa Cruz, told Space.com. "It's right smack in the habitable zone — there's no question or discussion about it. It's not on the edge, it's right in there."

Vogt is one of the authors of the new study, which was led by Guillem Anglada-Escudé and Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution for Science, a private, nonprofit research organization based in Washington.

"This planet is the new best candidate to support liquid water and, perhaps, life as we know it," Anglada-Escudé said in a statement.

The researchers estimate that the planet, called GJ 667Cc, is at least 4.5 times as massive as Earth, which makes it a so-called super-Earth. It takes roughly 28 days to make one orbital lap around its parent star, which is located a mere 22 light-years away from Earth, in the constellation Scorpius (the Scorpion). "This is basically our next-door neighbor," Vogt said. "It's very nearby. There are only about 100 stars closer to us than this one."

Interestingly enough, the host star, GJ 667C, is a member of a triple-star system. GJ 667C is an M-class dwarf star that is about a third of the mass of the sun, and while it is faint, it can be seen by ground-based telescopes, Vogt said. "The planet is around one star in a triple-star system," Vogt explained. "The other stars are pretty far away, but they would look pretty nice in the sky." The discovery of a planet around GJ 667C came as a surprise to the astronomers, because the entire star system has a different chemical makeup than our sun. The system has much lower abundances of heavy elements (elements heavier than hydrogen and helium), such as iron, carbon and silicon.

"It's pretty deficient in metals," Vogt said. "These are the materials out of which planets form — the grains of stuff that coalesce to eventually make up planets — so we shouldn't have really expected this star to be a likely case for harboring planets."

The fortuitous discovery could mean that potentially habitable alien worlds could exist in a greater variety of environments than was previously thought possible, the researchers said.

"Statistics tell us we shouldn't have found something this quickly this soon unless there's a lot of them out there," Vogt said. "This tells us there must be an awful lot of these planets out there. It was almost too easy to find, and it happened too quickly." The detailed findings of the study will be published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Another super-Earth that orbits much closer to GJ 667C was previously detected in 2010, but the finding was never published, Vogt added. This planet, called GJ 667Cb, takes 7.2 days to circle the star, but its location makes it far too hot to sustain liquid water on its surface. "It's basically glowing cinders, or a well-lit charcoal," Vogt said. "We know about a lot of these, but they're thousands of degrees and not places where you could live." The newly detected GJ 667Cc planet is a much more intriguing candidate, he said. "When a planet gets bigger than about 10 times the size of the Earth, there's a runaway process that happens, where it begins to eat up all the gas and ice in the disk that it's forming out of and swells quickly into something like Uranus, Jupiter or Saturn," Vogt explained. "When you have a surface and the right temperature, if there's water around, there's a good chance that it could be in liquid form. This planet is right in that sweet spot in the habitable zone, so we've got the right temperature and the right mass range."

Preliminary observations also suggest that more planets could exist in this system, including a gas giant planet and another super-Earth that takes about 75 days to circle the star. More research will be needed to confirm these planetary candidates, as well as to glean additional details about the potentially habitable super-Earth, the scientists said.

To make their discovery, the researchers used public data from the European Southern Observatory combined with observations from the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii and the new Carnegie Planet Finder Spectrograph at the Magellan II Telescope in Chile. Follow-up analyses were also made using a planet-hunting technique that measures the small dips, or wobbles, in a star's motion caused by the gravitational tug of a planet.

"With the advent of a new generation of instruments, researchers will be able to survey many M dwarf stars for similar planets and eventually look for spectroscopic signatures of life in one of these worlds," Anglada-Escudé said in a statement. Anglada-Escudé was with the Carnegie Institution for Science when he conducted the research, but has since moved on to the University of Gottingen in Germany.

With the GJ 667C system being relatively nearby, it also opens exciting possibilities for probing potentially habitable alien worlds in the future, Vogt said, which can't easily be done with the planets that are being found by NASA's prolific Kepler spacecraft. "The planets coming out of Kepler are typically thousands of light-years away and we could never send a space probe out there," Vogt said. "We've been explicitly focusing on very nearby stars, because with today's technology, we could send a robotic probe out there, and within a few hundred years, it could be sending back picture postcards."

 
Better hope theyre not hostile and more advanced than we are. Theyre close enough to have seen the recent increase in light and radio activity on this planet.

 
Meh, I agree that there must be countless bodies, that are approximately the right distance from their sun to possibly have water on them. I love these stories, it used to be about once a year we would hear about the possible presence of water, therefore the possibility of life, discovered somewhere; this was, I believed , to to get more funding for NASA but now it is almost monthly that there is some story along these lines. Iron nodules, sand-scapes that could be caused by water, life that might not need water or oxygen to survive, salt, and a myriad of other "clues" that only purpose is to justify continued research (i.e. money); all these stories just end up going away. I would be happy as the next guy to seem some actual discoveries going on but in my lifetime science has gone from proof to speculation. Is this really the closest planet now that could possibly harbor life, or water, at 22 light years; I thought Mars was this. I love this quote: '"This planet is the new best candidate to support liquid water and, perhaps, life as we know it," Anglada-Escudé said in a statement.'; they don't even know what it is comprised of. Well good luck to them.

 
Meh, I agree that there must be countless bodies, that are approximately the right distance from their sun to possibly have water on them. I love these stories, it used to be about once a year we would hear about the possible presence of water, therefore the possibility of life, discovered somewhere; this was, I believed , to to get more funding for NASA but now it is almost monthly that there is some story along these lines. Iron nodules, sand-scapes that could be caused by water, life that might not need water or oxygen to survive, salt, and a myriad of other "clues" that only purpose is to justify continued research (i.e. money); all these stories just end up going away. I would be happy as the next guy to seem some actual discoveries going on but in my lifetime science has gone from proof to speculation. Is this really the closest planet now that could possibly harbor life, or water, at 22 light years; I thought Mars was this. I love this quote: '"This planet is the new best candidate to support liquid water and, perhaps, life as we know it," Anglada-Escudé said in a statement.'; they don't even know what it is comprised of. Well good luck to them.
These are actual discoveries. This is adding to our knowledge and as our devices and methods continue to improve you are going to get an ever increasing volume of them.
 
Meh, I agree that there must be countless bodies, that are approximately the right distance from their sun to possibly have water on them. I love these stories, it used to be about once a year we would hear about the possible presence of water, therefore the possibility of life, discovered somewhere; this was, I believed , to to get more funding for NASA but now it is almost monthly that there is some story along these lines. Iron nodules, sand-scapes that could be caused by water, life that might not need water or oxygen to survive, salt, and a myriad of other "clues" that only purpose is to justify continued research (i.e. money); all these stories just end up going away. I would be happy as the next guy to seem some actual discoveries going on but in my lifetime science has gone from proof to speculation. Is this really the closest planet now that could possibly harbor life, or water, at 22 light years; I thought Mars was this. I love this quote: '"This planet is the new best candidate to support liquid water and, perhaps, life as we know it," Anglada-Escudé said in a statement.'; they don't even know what it is comprised of. Well good luck to them.
These are actual discoveries. This is adding to our knowledge and as our devices and methods continue to improve you are going to get an ever increasing volume of them.
I just like discoveries to be actual discoveries; not like "here's a unknown box, maybe it is filled with gold".
 
Meh, I agree that there must be countless bodies, that are approximately the right distance from their sun to possibly have water on them. I love these stories, it used to be about once a year we would hear about the possible presence of water, therefore the possibility of life, discovered somewhere; this was, I believed , to to get more funding for NASA but now it is almost monthly that there is some story along these lines. Iron nodules, sand-scapes that could be caused by water, life that might not need water or oxygen to survive, salt, and a myriad of other "clues" that only purpose is to justify continued research (i.e. money); all these stories just end up going away. I would be happy as the next guy to seem some actual discoveries going on but in my lifetime science has gone from proof to speculation. Is this really the closest planet now that could possibly harbor life, or water, at 22 light years; I thought Mars was this. I love this quote: '"This planet is the new best candidate to support liquid water and, perhaps, life as we know it," Anglada-Escudé said in a statement.'; they don't even know what it is comprised of. Well good luck to them.
These are actual discoveries. This is adding to our knowledge and as our devices and methods continue to improve you are going to get an ever increasing volume of them.
I just like discoveries to be actual discoveries; not like "here's a unknown box, maybe it is filled with gold".
Until we can figure out a way to go faster that's about all we can do. Voyager is just now approaching the edge of our solar system and it's been gone for over 30 years.
 
Meh, I agree that there must be countless bodies, that are approximately the right distance from their sun to possibly have water on them. I love these stories, it used to be about once a year we would hear about the possible presence of water, therefore the possibility of life, discovered somewhere; this was, I believed , to to get more funding for NASA but now it is almost monthly that there is some story along these lines. Iron nodules, sand-scapes that could be caused by water, life that might not need water or oxygen to survive, salt, and a myriad of other "clues" that only purpose is to justify continued research (i.e. money); all these stories just end up going away. I would be happy as the next guy to seem some actual discoveries going on but in my lifetime science has gone from proof to speculation. Is this really the closest planet now that could possibly harbor life, or water, at 22 light years; I thought Mars was this. I love this quote: '"This planet is the new best candidate to support liquid water and, perhaps, life as we know it," Anglada-Escudé said in a statement.'; they don't even know what it is comprised of. Well good luck to them.
These are actual discoveries. This is adding to our knowledge and as our devices and methods continue to improve you are going to get an ever increasing volume of them.
I just like discoveries to be actual discoveries; not like "here's a unknown box, maybe it is filled with gold".
Until we can figure out a way to go faster that's about all we can do. Voyager is just now approaching the edge of our solar system and it's been gone for over 30 years.
It's not about ways to go faster. There's no upper speed limit (other than approaching C). It's about having enough fuel to accelerate to around halfway there and then accelerate in the other direction (deccelerate) for the 2nd half of the trip.
 
Meh, I agree that there must be countless bodies, that are approximately the right distance from their sun to possibly have water on them. I love these stories, it used to be about once a year we would hear about the possible presence of water, therefore the possibility of life, discovered somewhere; this was, I believed , to to get more funding for NASA but now it is almost monthly that there is some story along these lines. Iron nodules, sand-scapes that could be caused by water, life that might not need water or oxygen to survive, salt, and a myriad of other "clues" that only purpose is to justify continued research (i.e. money); all these stories just end up going away. I would be happy as the next guy to seem some actual discoveries going on but in my lifetime science has gone from proof to speculation. Is this really the closest planet now that could possibly harbor life, or water, at 22 light years; I thought Mars was this. I love this quote: '"This planet is the new best candidate to support liquid water and, perhaps, life as we know it," Anglada-Escudé said in a statement.'; they don't even know what it is comprised of. Well good luck to them.
These are actual discoveries. This is adding to our knowledge and as our devices and methods continue to improve you are going to get an ever increasing volume of them.
I just like discoveries to be actual discoveries; not like "here's a unknown box, maybe it is filled with gold".
Until we can figure out a way to go faster that's about all we can do. Voyager is just now approaching the edge of our solar system and it's been gone for over 30 years.
It's not about ways to go faster. There's no upper speed limit (other than approaching C). It's about having enough fuel to accelerate to around halfway there and then accelerate in the other direction (deccelerate) for the 2nd half of the trip.
Well really it isn't about a fuel per se. I mean like rocket fuel. It is about energy. And it is also about exceeding light speed by a significant amount. At dead light speed a trip that takes 22 years is pretty much a non-starter for anything except emergency evacuation of this planet.
 
Better hope theyre not hostile and more advanced than we are. Theyre close enough to have seen the recent increase in light and radio activity on this planet.
Now that we spotted their planet, they'll probably show up here around December.
 
Better hope theyre not hostile and more advanced than we are. Theyre close enough to have seen the recent increase in light and radio activity on this planet.
Now that we spotted their planet, they'll probably show up here around December.
If science fiction has taught me anything it's that they will in some way underestimate us allowing the last survivors to overthrow them and at the same time steal their technology.
 
Better hope theyre not hostile and more advanced than we are. Theyre close enough to have seen the recent increase in light and radio activity on this planet.
Now that we spotted their planet, they'll probably show up here around December.
If science fiction has taught me anything it's that they will in some way underestimate us allowing the last survivors to overthrow them and at the same time steal their technology.
That's what we did at Roswell. :thumbup:
 
Better hope theyre not hostile and more advanced than we are. Theyre close enough to have seen the recent increase in light and radio activity on this planet.
Now that we spotted their planet, they'll probably show up here around December.
If science fiction has taught me anything it's that they will in some way underestimate us allowing the last survivors to overthrow them and at the same time steal their technology.
But why do they always leave out the part where we use their technology to over-take their planet?
 
Better hope theyre not hostile and more advanced than we are. Theyre close enough to have seen the recent increase in light and radio activity on this planet.
Now that we spotted their planet, they'll probably show up here around December.
If science fiction has taught me anything it's that they will in some way underestimate us allowing the last survivors to overthrow them and at the same time steal their technology.
But why do they always leave out the part where we use their technology to over-take their planet?
That's in the sequel.
 
Better hope theyre not hostile and more advanced than we are. Theyre close enough to have seen the recent increase in light and radio activity on this planet.
Now that we spotted their planet, they'll probably show up here around December.
If science fiction has taught me anything it's that they will in some way underestimate us allowing the last survivors to overthrow them and at the same time steal their technology.
That's what we did at Roswell. :thumbup:
First rule of Roswell is you don't talk about Roswell. Watch for the helicopters.
 
http://www.fromquarkstoquasars.com/eight-new-planets-found-goldilocks-zone/

Astronomers announced today that they have found eight new planets in the Goldilocks zone of their stars, orbiting at a distance where liquid water can exist on the planet’s surface. This doubles the number of small planets (less than twice the diameter of Earth) believed to be in the habitable zone of their parent stars. Among these eight, the team identified two that are the most similar to Earth of any known exoplanets to date.

“Most of these planets have a good chance of being rocky, like Earth,” says lead author Guillermo Torres of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA).

These findings were announced today in a press conference at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society. The two most Earth-like planets of the group are Kepler-438b and Kepler-442b. Both orbit red dwarf stars that are smaller and cooler than our Sun. Kepler-438b circles its star every 35 days, while Kepler-442b completes one orbit every 112 days.

With a diameter just 12 percent bigger than Earth, Kepler-438b has a 70-percent chance of being rocky, according to the team’s calculations. Kepler-442b is about one-third larger than Earth, but still has a 60-percent chance of being rocky. To be in the habitable zone, an exoplanet must receive about as much sunlight as Earth. Too much, and any water would boil away as steam. Too little, and water will freeze solid.

“For our calculations we chose to adopt the broadest possible limits that can plausibly lead to suitable conditions for life,” says Torres.

Kepler-438b receives about 40 percent more light than Earth. (In comparison, Venus gets twice as much solar radiation as Earth.) As a result, the team calculates it has a 70 percent likelihood of being in the habitable zone of its star. Kepler-442b get about two-thirds as much light as Earth. The scientists give it a 97 percent chance of being in the habitable zone.

“We don’t know for sure whether any of the planets in our sample are truly habitable,” explains second author David Kipping of the CfA. “All we can say is that they’re promising candidates.”

Prior to this, the two most Earth-like planets known were Kepler-186f, which is 1.1 times the size of Earth and receives 32 percent as much light, and Kepler-62f, which is 1.4 times the size of Earth and gets 41 percent as much light.

The team studied planetary candidates first identified by NASA’s Kepler mission. All of the planets were too small to confirm by measuring their masses. Instead, the team validated them by using a computer program called BLENDER to determine that they are statistically likely to be planets. BLENDER was developed by Torres and colleague Francois Fressin, and runs on the Pleaides supercomputer at NASA Ames. This is the same method that has been used previously to validate some of Kepler’s most iconic finds, including the first two Earth-size planets around a Sun-like star and the first exoplanet smaller than Mercury.

After the BLENDER analysis, the team spent another year gathering follow-up observations in the form of high-resolution spectroscopy, adaptive optics imaging, and speckle interferometry to thoroughly characterize the systems.

Those follow-up observations also revealed that four of the newly validated planets are in multiple-star systems. However, the companion stars are distant and don’t significantly influence the planets.

As with many Kepler discoveries, the newly found planets are distant enough to make additional observations challenging. Kepler-438b is located 470 light-years from Earth while the more distant Kepler-442b is 1,100 light-years away.

 

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