A new planet, a new earth
By Michael J.W. Stickings
This could be a huge discovery:
Here's the comparison:
This could be a huge discovery:
A rocky planet not much larger than Earth has been detected orbiting a star close to our own neighborhood in the Milky Way, and the European astronomers who found it say it lies within the star's "habitable zone," where life could exist -- possibly in oceans of water.
The object is the smallest of all the 200 or more so-called "exoplanets" whose discovery around far-off stars in the past dozen years has sparked a burst of excitement worldwide among astronomers and astrobiologists...
The lead author of the discovery report, Stephane Udry of the Geneva Observatory in Switzerland, said the planet's sun is named Gliese 581, one of the galaxy's extremely common "red dwarfs." It lies in the constellation Libra, the Scales, about 20.5 light years away from Earth -- a relatively close neighbor compared to other "exoplanets" that have been detected thousands of light years away.
Udry's group estimated the planet's average temperature at between 32 and 104 degrees Fahrenheit. It orbits Gliese 581 every 13 days only about 6.5 million miles out, which is 14 times closer to its sun than Earth is from ours. But the planet is well within the star's "habitable zone" because Gliese 581 is much smaller and colder than our sun.
Here's the comparison:
posted by Michael J.W. Stickings at
1:11 AM
1 Comments:
I never thought it unlikely that planets warm enough for liquid water and with enough gravity and magnetic field strength to retain atmosphere would exist in abundance but I think it's a bit of a human conceit to think that life tends to evolve toward intelligent, technologically adept creatures like us, much less creatures who look like us.
Too bad it's so far away that we can't hope to use it as a refuge when we destroy this planet.
By
Capt. Fogg, at 8:36 AM
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