"Sultry World Is Found Circling a Distant Star"

[Kristopher]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/17/science/space/17planet.html

 

“This probably is not habitable, but it didn’t miss the habitable zone by that much,” said David Charbonneau of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who led the team that discovered the new planet and will reports its findings on Thursday in the journal Nature.

 

Geoffrey W. Marcy, a planet hunter from the University of California, Berkeley, wrote in an accompanying article in Nature that the new work provided “the most watertight evidence so far for a planet that is something like our own Earth, outside our solar system.”

 

Only 2.7 times the size of Earth and 6.6 times as massive, the new planet takes 38 hours to circle a dim red star, GJ 1214, in the constellation Ophiuchus — about 40 light-years from here. It is one of the lightest and smallest so-called extrasolar planets yet found, part of a growing class that are less than 10 times the mass of the Earth.

 

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=super-earth-exoplanets

 

But a trio of papers published or announced this week shows just how far exoplanet searches have come and how such projects are progressing toward finding an Earth-like planet, possibly even a nearby one. In the December 17 issue of Nature, David Charbonneau of the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and his colleagues present evidence for a nearby so-called super-Earth—a planet bigger than our own but smaller than Uranus and Neptune, the next largest planets by mass and diameter, respectively, in the solar system. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.) And on Monday a pair of studies set to be published in the Astrophysical Journal were unveiled, each claiming the discovery of a different super-Earth orbiting nearby sunlike stars.

[Lawnmower Boy]

Re: "Sultry World Is Found Circling a Distant Star"

 

Given that every time the smart guys refine the instruments to find smaller planets further away from their stars, they find planets, I am feeling very optimistic about finding Earthlike planets.

[Sundog]

Re: "Sultry World Is Found Circling a Distant Star"

 

Quite so. In fact, I think we're getting close to being able to make an educated guess as to the second variable in the Drake Equation.

[megaplayboy]

Re: "Sultry World Is Found Circling a Distant Star"

 

Yeah, assuming we're able to refine our measuring apparatus over the next 40 years, by 2050 we may become aware of several potential "Earth class planets" within, say, a 50-100 light year radius of us. Given that we may be facing environmental catastrophes, resource shortages and serious overpopulation problems at that time, a global "Apollo Program" for interstellar exploration(eventually culminating in manned interstellar missions) may get some momentum, particularly if a realistic time scale for such a project is set(getting a working propulsion system capable of 1-10 percent of lightspeed might take a century or three to bring into being).