NASA Announces a Single Star Is Home to At Least 7 Earthlike Planets

[Orange Joe]

Who I quoted said "the sun". Not the other stars. Confusion abounds!

?

I said the sun had 7 planets. He just named the planets?


Yes I said sun as people still know what I'm talking about.

[Yvaelle]

Who Knows.. In 500 years we may have a real "Miss Universe" contest.

Dude obviously the Andorian wins by a mile

Dem Antennaes! ^.^

I am almost certain that @Yvaelle is an Ancient disguising himself as a Shadow Priest lead on a game forum to ascertain the intelligence of the average gamer and report back to the hub.

There are others in other forums... they are trying to figure out if we are worthy of their technology, and that we won't destroy ourselves should we gain access to it... or something...

Eep! I've revealed my alien bias!

[Powerogue]

Even if the Galactic Federation takes over I'll still take this over the alternatives.

[May90]

I've always disliked this terminology: "habitable zone", "Earthlike planets", etc... We hardly know anything about those planets, aside from their location, their mass and some of their dominant elements - which is hardly enough to even remotely guess what kind of conditions exist there, let alone whether there is extraterrestrial life - we don't even know what kind of life is possible theoretically, it doesn't have to be anything like ourselves.

Exoplanets aren't as simple as "exostars", you can't know the external and internal structure of them with incredible certainty just by looking at their proper motion, luminosity and spectrum. At this point, we can roughly guess such things as whether they have atmosphere, whether any material there is in a liquid state, how large gravitational force on the surface is - but "rocky surface", let alone water oceans... just no, this is a matter of, at least, a couple of decades of technological and methodological evolution.

[Orange Joe]

I've always disliked this terminology: "habitable zone", "Earthlike planets", etc... We hardly know anything about those planets, aside from their location, their mass and some of their dominant elements - which is hardly enough to even remotely guess what kind of conditions exist there, let alone whether there is extraterrestrial life - we don't even know what kind of life is possible theoretically, it doesn't have to be anything like ourselves.

Exoplanets aren't as simple as "exostars", you can't know the external and internal structure of them with incredible certainty just by looking at their proper motion, luminosity and spectrum. At this point, we can roughly guess such things as whether they have atmosphere, whether any material there is in a liquid state, how large gravitational force on the surface is - but "rocky surface", let alone water oceans... just no, this is a matter of, at least, a couple of decades of technological and methodological evolution.

Thats all those terms denote.

Habitable zone = far/close enough to the sun to have liquid water.
earth like = rocky planet in habitable zone.

[Hammerfest]

I wouldn't believe much of anything NASA claims.

I also distinctly remember this same story coming out in the 80s. They're like pro-wrestling... they recycle their storylines every few of decades.

[Deleted]

Courtesy of google I believe.


- - - Updated - - -

Who Knows.. In 500 years we may have a real "Miss Universe" contest.

Did the one on the right just say "Ak ak, ack akak ak"?

Kinky!

[Flarelaine]

Yep. It remains deeply irresponsible that they continue to do so as well, even when the papers they cite are far less optimistic than they are.

Still prefer them to the various anti-vaccine or Grabovoy number hoaxes.

[Ryme]

The insane distance of space is pretty mind blowing. From what I've read, the fastest theoretical probe-type craft (no human crew) we might be able to do now with either huge solar sails or laser propulsion is .1 to .2 the speed of light. And neither of those are proven techs. The other issue is slowing down the probes once they get there so they don't just zip by. But even at those unproven speeds, and those craft are probably 15 years from being launch-ready, you're talking around 200-400 years of travel to get there. So this is a generational thing for our great-great-great-grandkids to hopefully see results from if nothing goes wrong along the way.

Yeah, just did some maths, even if we were able to build a ship that could ambitiously go at 0.6 time the speed of light, the trip would take 82 years from our perspective and nearly 66 from the crews.

Time to build that relativistic spaceship and prep a crew for a generational voyage they won't be able/want to return from!

Still, very exciting news.

[Skroe]

I've always disliked this terminology: "habitable zone", "Earthlike planets", etc... We hardly know anything about those planets, aside from their location, their mass and some of their dominant elements - which is hardly enough to even remotely guess what kind of conditions exist there, let alone whether there is extraterrestrial life - we don't even know what kind of life is possible theoretically, it doesn't have to be anything like ourselves.

Exoplanets aren't as simple as "exostars", you can't know the external and internal structure of them with incredible certainty just by looking at their proper motion, luminosity and spectrum. At this point, we can roughly guess such things as whether they have atmosphere, whether any material there is in a liquid state, how large gravitational force on the surface is - but "rocky surface", let alone water oceans... just no, this is a matter of, at least, a couple of decades of technological and methodological evolution.

Earth is a reference point because we know life exists here, but it is far from ideal.

First, Mars is in a better and more long term sustainable point insofar as the habitable zone is conconered. Mars was more habitable than earth 4 billion years ago. Today, it is closer to the center of the habitable zone than Earth is. 1 billion years from now, when the Sun's luminosity increases by 10% and Earth's oceans boil away , turning it into Venus 2.0, Mars will still be well within the habitable zone. What did in Mars was it's low mass, which lead to the premature termination of its internal dynamo. Without that magnetic field the solar wind blew away it's atmosphere. Without n atmosphere, pressure is too low and liquid water rapidly sublimates.

Secondly, recent studies of Super-Earths have put our planet at the extreme upper end of the mass range for habitability. If Earth were much more massive, plate tectonics could not occur due to pressure in the crust. Slightly more massive than that, and Earth would be a water world, or mini-Neptune.

An ideal habitable planet is probably slightly smaller than Earth in terms of radius and mass, slightly further away from the sun. Earth life could probably not survive there, but indigenous life could in principle, and it would be more stable over the long term.

It's worth remember, that in the 10 billion year life time of our Sun, Earth will be habitable to complex life for only about 700 million of it (the 500 million that's passed and the 200 million ahead), or about 7%. All life will be about 4.8 billion, or 48% of the Sun's life, but keep in mind, the first 3.3 billion years were dominated by extremely simple life and the last 800 million years (starting 200 million years from now) will be similarly dominated by such life.

The attraction of Trappist-1 is that, as a red-dwarf, there is trillions of years of stability. Furthermore due to the fact that the planets are so close and gravitationally interacting (like Jupiter's moons), their internal dynamos could keep functioning long after more isolated planets (like Earth's) would have cooled and terminated.

That's the great part about this discovery. Under the "only sunlike stars can be life bearing", that means that we're looking for G-Type stars within a narrow ~700 million year band (out of a total 10 billion) where the right sized planet in the right place is showing a biosignature. There may be a few tens of thousands out of the 100-400 billion stars in the Galaxy that fit that description, and in order to find any of them, they'd have to be within a few thousand light years of us, in a direction that isn't facing towards the core of the galaxy (the zone of avoidance, which is difficult to image).

But now with red dwarf stars, we can open the "potentially life-bearing" list to include any red dwarf in the galaxy, which is the most numerous type of star. And because of their long term stabilty it will not matter if the red dwarf is 10 billion years old or 500 million years old in the case of Trappist-1. It increases the list of potentially habitable worlds considerable.

[Caaethil]

That article in the OP really seems to misconstrue the reality of this. There are seven Earth-sized planets. Only three are located in the habitable zone (possibly all, but unconfirmed).

The below, therefore, is categorically false:

"What has always been harder to spot are Earthlike planets — relatively small ones with a rocky surface, orbiting their sun at the not-too-close, not-too-far distance that would allow liquid water to exist. Today, however, that changed in a big way, as NASA announced that a single star relatively close to Earth is home to no fewer than seven Earthlike planets. If you're looking for extraterrestrial life, there may be no place better."

We only know three to be in the "not-too-close, not-too-far distance". It's very possible that more or all of them are, but we don't know that right now.

[Deleted]

That Gorn is fake. Real ones have claws and scaly skin.

[Yvaelle]

I wonder if there is fancy name or equation for the moment when sending out manned ships to other solar systems makes sense. Like a moment when we can say that our engines or other solutions are advanced enough so that we won't invent ship capable of arriving to the destination before we sent the first ship on it's way.

Yea it's called FTL - Faster Than Light. Anything sub-light is going to go slow as a turtle compared to anything that comes the day after we find a way around physically propelling mass to the point where it requires literally infinite energy to propel ~0 mass.

The hard part then, is figuring out if we're 4 years from FTL (in which case we should wait before sending out our generation ship to Proxima Centauri, our closest star) - or if we're 700,000 years from FTL (in which case at our current fastest ship, we should still just wait for FTL before sending out a ship to Trappist-1 (a.k.a. Corellia).

The plus side of FTL though is that potentially if we sent off a generation ship for 700k years to Trappist-1, and then 4 years from now we invent FTL - we could probably just pull up alongside them in 4 years, and evacuate the ship or retrofit it, or something

[Tradewind]

Good info here. As for Mars, I wonder how far off you think we are from either restarting the electromagnetic dynamo, or generating our own through artificial means. That Mars lacks a magnetosphere is actually a big problem that we will have to work around, if we want to settle it. It is one of the things I am actively tracking also... artificial magnetosphere tech (for spacecraft, but also for Planet Wide support).

Theoretically one could re-liquefy part of the core using electromagnetic induction, but how to accomplish it...no idea, drill down a few thousand kilometers to start with I guess lol. Sustaining it after you've restarted it though is another problem. The seismic situation on Mars (much like Venus) would progressively kill the dynamo over time if left to its own devices after being re-initiated.

Shoot some asteroids at it too might help. If theories about Mars having a partially molten core are accurate, increasing the planet's rotation could also help generate a strong enough geodynamo to produce a meaningful magnetosphere. Almost the opposite effect of what happened on Venus, when possibly a large asteroid/comet impacted the surface and caused its rotation to all but stall.

Option 3 would assume that the natural breeder fission reaction in the core has expended the entirety of its nuclear fuel. When a planet forms it begins as molten, as it solidifies over time the lighter elements and such settle on the outer layers, while denser elements sink into the core. The densest of which, such as Uranium forms a natural fission reactor at the very center of the core. The energy provided by this fission generator is what drives the heat needed for the molten core and the convection current to generate a magnetosphere. If that were the case, one could supply the core with new fissionable materials...a lot of it.

[Tradewind]

Yeah, the issue is that it would slow down... but the given time is in million of years, so maybe that would not really be a problem, you would hope that by then there would be better tech. (or we are extinct).

I was environing wrapping a giant superconductor around the planet, and make it act as a magnetosphere.

[IMG]https://thesciencegeek01.files.wordpress.com/2016/05/mars-planet-wide-ring.png?w=529[IMG]

Sort of like this:
[IMG]https://thesciencegeek01.files.wordpress.com/2016/04/mag-field-in-loop.gif[IMG]

It would take a lot of amps (1 billion amps, for an earth sized planet):

power (in watts) = current squared (in amps) x resistance (in ohms); though with a superconductor, maybe the resistance would be low enough to be doable.

I'd be worried about the eddy induction caused by that setup and the bulk elements inside the planet getting heated to the point of complete fracture. A billion amps is a shit load of power lol, Joule-Lenz law is P=I^2*R...power of heating = current squared times the resistance, it'd be turning the planet into a giant induction furnace D:

Probably work great for cracking asteroids in half for mining.

[Zantos]

The point of asking you if you can quantify the probability was to make you aware of how silly it was for you to talk about probability and likelihoods. Also, the thing you're missing in your argument about the diversity of life on Earth is that all life on Earth is fundamentally similar.

Its not silly at all. The only silly thing is dismissing them and acting like they are not a real thing.

It doesn't matter how fundamentally similar we are. There is only 1 sentient life form on this planet. This planet was unable to produce 2. We may need to agree to disagree at this point. I just do not forsee Nasa finding anything going off of data collected from humans when this planet couldn't even produce a second race similar to us.

They are searching for a needle in a haystack that may not even exist. That needle being a planet similar enough to ours that they can detect life in a similar fashion as ours on a planet lightyears away. Its just not going to happen. That is why I don't care about these announcements. I see them and just think "ok. And?" I want to hear about Actual Life in any form they manage to discover. Not theoretical best case scenario planets that may not even be the best for producing life.

[Deleted]

Read it in the paper this morning. Pretty neat.

[Garnier Fructis]

Its not silly at all. The only silly thing is dismissing them and acting like they are not a real thing.

The idea you're proposing isn't silly, what's silly is making probabilistic statements even after I got you to admit that you can't quantify the probabilities. And I'm not dismissing it; I'm questioning that we can do anything useful with it.

It doesn't matter how fundamentally similar we are. There is only 1 sentient life form on this planet. This planet was unable to produce 2. We may need to agree to disagree at this point. I just do not forsee Nasa finding anything going off of data collected from humans when this planet couldn't even produce a second race similar to us.

Why did we suddenly raise the bar to sentience? You were just a while ago appealing to the great diversity of life on Earth and we seem to have dropped that argument like a hot potato to now appeal to the great lack of diversity with respect to one seemingly arbitrary characteristic.

They are searching for a needle in a haystack that may not even exist. That needle being a planet similar enough to ours that they can detect life in a similar fashion as ours on a planet lightyears away. Its just not going to happen. That is why I don't care about these announcements. I see them and just think "ok. And?" I want to hear about Actual Life in any form they manage to discover. Not theoretical best case scenario planets that may not even be the best for producing life.

Whereby 'in a fashion similar to ours' we don't mean similar to humans, but similar to all life on Earth by dint of our mutual biological origins.

[belfpala]

That is why I don't care about these announcements. I see them and just think "ok. And?" I want to hear about Actual Life in any form they manage to discover. Not theoretical best case scenario planets that may not even be the best for producing life.

Do you have the same mentality about other things? For example, would you also say, "I don't care about incremental steps in the study of fusion, I want to see a a finished fusion reactor that can power a city or larger."?

Just curious. Life would be kind of boring that way.

[Skroe]

Its not silly at all. The only silly thing is dismissing them and acting like they are not a real thing.

It doesn't matter how fundamentally similar we are. There is only 1 sentient life form on this planet. This planet was unable to produce 2. We may need to agree to disagree at this point. I just do not forsee Nasa finding anything going off of data collected from humans when this planet couldn't even produce a second race similar to us.

They are searching for a needle in a haystack that may not even exist. That needle being a planet similar enough to ours that they can detect life in a similar fashion as ours on a planet lightyears away. Its just not going to happen. That is why I don't care about these announcements. I see them and just think "ok. And?" I want to hear about Actual Life in any form they manage to discover. Not theoretical best case scenario planets that may not even be the best for producing life.

This planet has produced more than one sentient life form in the human context though. Neanderthals were sentient. Homo heidelbergensis was sentient. Both buried their dead (the latter is disputable, but stronger evidenced over the last few years). Burying dead, in the context of their wider culture indicates the ability to think abstractly and tell the difference between "alive" and "dead". It isn't know if Homo Erectus buried their dead, but homo erectus wore clothes, used tools and was capable of ingenuity, also indicating sentience.

What we have that our predecessors don't is accumulated knowledge. Why that is the case is still unknown, but the reason is cultural and/ or environmental, not biological as human beings walked the earth for as long as 180,000 years before civilization truly took off. Do we have innate biological advantages over the other sentient forms of life Earth has produced? Undoubtedly. But that alone was not enough.

Furthermore, your statement is anti-scientific. It's just like the search for water on Mars in a sense. If they find life on Mars, or detect chloraphyl on a distant planet, it will be the most momentous discovery in human history, bar none. It is essential that something so important be carefully proven over time and stand as the culmination of a body of evidence. If for example, tomorrow NASA announced to the world they discovered Chloraphyl, and probably plant life, around a star 100 light years away, it would be very far from conclusive in and of itself without a wealth of scientific evidence about the qualities of that star that make the finding likely. Furthermore it would have to be confirmed, such as independent teams building independent space observatories and checking the planet's composition to make sure it isn't a false positive. A false positive for such an important discovery would be a catastrophe.

Announcements like this are one step along the way to the planet that the "biosignature" announcement arrives from. NASA has hunted water on Mars across that planet for 30 years... and they had a good idea where to look for it, but they adopted a very methodical approach. Watching water-ice sublimating came only at the end of it. And even still, orbital observations of water flows are still disputed (though probable), and one of the next Mars landers will likely go to a "damp soil" region.