First Earthlike Exoplanet Found

[Don Corleone]

That is really neat, but being 13 times closer to it's radiatant star is bound to make for some radioactive environments. Not to mention, if there is sentient life there, evolving under 2g means they could kick our ass!

[spmetla]

Great find, I needed some good news to drown out the bad in the world. I'm all for the generation ship, drones as well. We need to bombard those Gliesians with radios, lights, and drones right away so when we eventually meet we can win the we saw you first argument. Now if only we could reach anywhere near the speed of light...

Heck if we send a ship now, by the time it reaches there I wouldn't doubt our having technology that could get there in a single lifetime. Our future spaceclowns will probably think the inbred offspring on the generation ship as the victims of a bunch of suckers as they whizz by us, probably mooning us as well.

[Gregoshi]

I was skeptical of the article at first because it seemed to be lacking the usual stuff you see in scientific articles - discovering scientists and their universities for example. Then there was nothing about this at my usual astronomy websites, nor at the SETI webpage - and one of their scientists is quoted in the article. Even a Google search yielded little. I did find a similar article at space.com though, so I'm happy it is true.

As for the travel time to the new planet, I think we should fire off a shipment of Twinkies right away as a peace offering to whoever or whatever is there. At least they will be fresh no matter how long the journey takes. Knowing our luck though, when we get there, the planet will be inhabited by giant mutant sentient Twinkies bent on revenge.

Joking aside, if we manage to even detect circumstantial evidence of life, it could spur interest and money to begin serious development of interstellar vehicles.

[Samurai Waki]

There is no possible way humans could ever travel at light speed. But if we ever figured out how exactley we could move space around the ship at light speeds it would be a completely different story... ahh. Science Fiction. The Fiction Part Worries me though.

[Csargo]

Teleportation.

[naut]

Teleportation.

Teleportation?

[doc_bean]

That is really neat, but being 13 times closer to it's radiatant star is bound to make for some radioactive environments. Not to mention, if there is sentient life there, evolving under 2g means they could kick our ass!

It would depend on the radiation the star sends out (don't know much about that) and the amount of radiation that atmosphere can block. Due to it's higher gravitational pull it would have a thicker atmosphere than earth (I assume) and perhaps that could mean it coudl block out more radiation ?

However, this planet in itself might not be so important, but the following conclusion is:

The real importance is not so much the discovery of this planet itself, but the fact that it shows that Earth-like planets are probably extremely common in the Universe.

There are 200 billion stars in our galaxy alone and many astronomers believe most of these stars have planets.

The fact that almost as soon as we have built a telescope capable of detecting small, earth-like worlds, one turns up right on our cosmic doorstep, shows that statistically, there are probably billions of earths out there.

Even if only 10 billion stars are in a 'good' segment of the galaxy of the galaxy, if only one in ten of those have planets, if only one in ten of those have earth like planets and if only one in ten of those are capable of sustaining life (for whatever other reason the others can't) we're still looking at 10 million possible earths...

[edyzmedieval]

I can see my alien relatives!!! Yeeey! Haven't seen them since the Earth was born!

[Ja'chyra]

The Earth-like planet that could be covered in oceans and may support life

Seems to be a whole load of assumptions and no real evidence of what they are claiming.

There is no possible way humans could ever travel at light speed

and may be covered with large amounts of water - necessary for life to evolve -

I like how we base our assumptions on our limited knowledge and say that it must be so.

[KukriKhan]

That is really neat, but being 13 times closer to it's radiatant star is bound to make for some radioactive environments. Not to mention, if there is sentient life there, evolving under 2g means they could kick our ass!

There's a thought. After taking 4 generations to get there (and just imagine the nature of the politics on-board that ship, across 100+ years), our traveling descendants find it hard to even move around on Nova Terra's gravity.

Then, turning the ship around to travel back to Sena Terra with our new-found friends, 200 years have passed, and out of that ship emerges Superman, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound...

The mind boggles.

[Samurai Waki]

If the Gravity is higher, wouldn't that just mean the likelihood of evolution would mean all the creatures would be pretty squatty and rotund compared to Earth Creatures?

[Agent Miles]

Actually, the “Goldilock’s Zone” is a rather outdated idea. If the Earth orbited in the giant star Betelgeuse’s GZ, then our seasons would be 60 years long. Venus and Mars were originally in the Sun’s GZ. Also, since we started looking for life out there, we’ve found organisms down here near undersea geysers that would melt lead and below the Antarctic snows, even in the radioactive furnaces of nuclear power plants. Life may be all over the universe. Life is necessary for intelligence to arise, however, intelligence is not necessary for life. There have been perhaps a trillion species on Earth. Only a handful could make a campfire.
As for going there, it’s actually quite practical. An orbital laser, powered by the sun, can propel a “light sail” spaceship with the pressure of light rays. Accelerating gradually for about a year, the ship would reach 10% of the speed of light (c). Thus in two centuries, we could travel to this new world.

If we slowly colonized even just one other star every thousand years, and these colonies did as well, then we could populate the entire galaxy in a few thousand centuries. There are no uninhabitable regions. People in Dyson rings could live anywhere there is light from a star and space rubble to build with.

Similarly, since no one else has colonized our star system, this means that there is no intelligent life in the galaxy that is at least a half a million years ahead of us (or they would be here). There are also no lesser civilizations in our immediate region either, for the same reason.

[Rameusb5]

My greatest regret has been being born in a time where we are aware of the scope of the universe, but unable to explore it.

Heck, we haven't even made a manned expedition to the nearest planets yet!


BTW, space exploration should be mankind's primary endeavor. We already know the sun is going to burn out and when it does, Earth will become uninhabitable. Why wait till the last minute to find somewhere else to go?

We've only got a few billion years left!

[Vladimir]

As for going there, it’s actually quite practical. An orbital laser, powered by the sun, can propel a “light sail” spaceship with the pressure of light rays. Accelerating gradually for about a year, the ship would reach 10% of the speed of light (c). Thus in two centuries, we could travel to this new world.

With the growth of technology I can just imagine those poor saps on a sail ship getting passed up by the next big advancement in propulsion. After 100 years drifting in space all they could do is press their noses against the window and think: “WTF!”

Found a planet several light years away, getting pounded with radiation, with unknown resources and hazards? Why is the answer always "send the drones, send the drones, they'll scope it out for us"? So predictable. It's not like we wear red shirts.

Just worry about keeping the Queen happy. I hear ya'll are a dying breed.

[King Henry V]

Good news, though it will probably not amount to much in our lifetimes, or even in our children's lifetimes. However, it is nice to think that for once we don't have to be the poor losers who get crushed by the highly developed aliens, something which I have believed all along (I mean, someone has to be first).

[Rameusb5]

LOL... my thoughts exactly. Early space travel will surly be frustrating as hell.

I'm not sure of the practicality of it, but there was a type of spacecraft proposed called a "Ramjet" that collected fuel (hydrogen) from space as it travelled. Thus, it had infinite fuel and therefor could constantly accelerate.

So, if one set the accelleration rate (thrust) at 9.8 meters per second squared (1 G), you would have "simulated" gravity on your ship, with "up" being the direction of travel. You would proceed in this manner until you reached the halfway point, at which time you'd turn the ship around and start DECELERATING at 1G until you arrived at your destination.

You could actually go pretty fast doing that. If my calculations are correct (and I'm guessing they aren't), you could get halfway there (10 lightyears) in 105 years. So it would take about 2 centuries at 1G.

If you up it to 1.5 G, it would only take a total of about 170 years.

2G's... 150 years.

I doubt you could go beyond 2 G's without REALLY screwing up people's physiology...

Edit - On the halfway point of your journet (fastest V), you'd be travelling 1352106000 meters per second! That's 4,867,581,600 km/hr! (That's 4.8 trillion kph!)

[Ironside]

That is really neat, but being 13 times closer to it's radiatant star is bound to make for some radioactive environments. Not to mention, if there is sentient life there, evolving under 2g means they could kick our ass!

It also emitts way lower levels of UV-radiation so I'm not sure exactly what kind of radiation they're talking about.
To put it differently, even without an ozone layer, it would be very hard to get sun-tan on Gliese 581 c.

[Don Corleone]

I understand it's got a lot lower levels of upper band electromagnetic radiation. But my point is that the intensity of energy experienced by a target receiving waves of said EMR decays with the square of the distance between them. So, if it's 13 times closer, it receives 169 times the energy, assuming a similar source. Your point is that UV and other upper band EMR will be lower intensity at the source is valid, but is it enough to counteract that scaling factor? There's going to be some gamma emission from Gilese 581. Would you want to be 6.2 million miles away from it when you could be 93 million miles away?

[Ironside]

I understand it's got a lot lower levels of upper band electromagnetic radiation. But my point is that the intensity of energy experienced by a target receiving waves of said EMR decays with the square of the distance between them. So, if it's 13 times closer, it receives 169 times the energy, assuming a similar source. Your point is that UV and other upper band EMR will be lower intensity at the source is valid, but is it enough to counteract that scaling factor? There's going to be some gamma emission from Gilese 581. Would you want to be 6.2 million miles away from it when you could be 93 million miles away?

The scaling factor = 169, the reduction of 100nm UV-radiation is = 473 million (I checked more than once to make sure the formula was correct, that felt like alot), unless I misunderstood Planks radiation law somehow.
Sun was 5800K, while the red star was 3300K.
So unless there's some gamma radiation thing happening in the sun that isn't black-body emittance there isn't any radiation to talk about.

The place will be very dark though, the middle of the day will be like twillight here on earth.

Edit: Hmm just remebered something. The strongest radiation should come from the center of the star, so I would need to have temperatures on the center to get a basis for value of the gamma radiation, who in turn should get partially absorbed by going through the star. Complications, complications...

[Samurai Waki]

Well You also have to take into account that the Gilese Sun isn't very big. Which means its probably ridiculously dense at the core, meaning higher gravitational pull, and a small likelihood that Gamma Radiation could easily escape and bombard the planet. Plus, if it even has a viable atmosphere, then Gamma Radiation shouldn't be a problem anyways.

[Martok]

Sweet! At first I thought the article was a prank, but I'm very pleased that it's not. I don't care that I'll be long dead by the time we're able to trave outside of our own solar system -- I'm still excited anyway.

[Mooks]

I volunteer to be the first one to mate with our new alien buddies.