Posted on 05/18/2020 5:48:33 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
There may be multitudes of Earth-like planets sprinkled throughout the Milky Way galaxy, but they are not so easy to find. To date, only around a third of the over 4,000 exoplanets found and confirmed are rocky -- and most of those are within a few thousand light-years of Earth... So the announcement of a new rocky exoplanet is always exciting -- but this particular newly discovered rocky exoplanet is even more exciting yet... it's a whopping 24,722.65 light-years away from us -- which could make it the most distant Milky Way exoplanet discovered yet.
It's so distant, it's close to -- and might even be in -- the galactic bulge, the densely populated region in the centre of the galaxy...
Most of the exoplanets we know of have been detected using one of two methods. There's the transit method, which detects planets based in the regular, minuscule dips in starlight when an exoplanet passes in front of it; and there's the wobble method, which detects minuscule wobbling exerted on a star by the gravitational influence of an exoplanet.
But there's a third method, based on the predictions of general relativity: gravitational microlensing. Imagine two stars, one behind the other, and an observer (us) at some distance again. Rays of light from the rear star (the source) are slightly bent by the gravity of the closer star (the lens) as they pass by. This distorts and magnifies that source light -- hence, gravitational microlens...
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencealert.com ...
-PJ
We are alone...
How long is that at Warp 9?
But remember, spaceball 1 can transform into mega maid.
Ok for posts further down. There is God, and the universe is 13,500,000,000 years old. But don’t let the thought dominate your day to day life.
Another take ...
We are seeing light from a place that existed before Adam and Eve. It might not be there now, we don’t know.
Someone needs to lecture science reporters on “earth like”.
No true definition would say it can mean anything much different than where life on this earth as we know it could live, because anything less is not like earth enough to be called “earth like”.
Anything less is click bait using the term “earth like” for objects in space they know, in many ways cannot truly be “earth like” as well as objects they know far to little about to attribute “earth like” to them. The article in fact includes examples of both of those kinds of disqualifiers.
A planet with a lone attribute of being a distance from its sun (a very different sun) that is similar to earth’s distance from our sun, does not qualify it as “earth like”.
We need someone important to stand up and lecture the entire science reporting media on the use and misuse of a term like “earth like”.
Yes earth revolves within a certain mean distance around its sun. It also has a particular sun, and that particular sun contributes to what is this earth and its environment. If our rocky orb revolved around a very different sort of son, even at a similar distance as our earth does, we would not likely find it was “earth like”.
Our earth has its own magnetic field (not all planets do) and that field plays a prominent role in the evolution of things on this earth. A planet orbiting a sun at a similar distance to its sun, as our earth is to our sun, but that planet not having its own magnetic field would make it not “earth like” because how different it would be due to that difference alone.
Our earth has a certain mass and by that a certain gravity. A different gravity would have a different influence on what atmosphere, if any, stayed close to the planet. A planet revolving a distance from its sun similar to the distance earth revolves around our sun, but with very different mass and gravity, will likely have either a more dense (greater gravity) or less dense (less gravity) and more or less atmospheric pressure than earth, and that will not be “earth like”.
I could go on and on, but the point is that our earth has certain (many) attributes that go in to making it EARTH, and a mere one, or two or a few of such attributes will NEVER by themselves make a planet sufficiently “earth like” to be worthy of the title.
I hope you understand I am not ranting at you, just the so called “science writers” and the sloppy scientists who permit the use of sloppy terms to get news of their “discoveries” read.
Good points, all.
However, there seemed to be quite a lot of Class M planets for the Star Trek boys to beam down to and survive on just fine. :)
Star Trek due to limited budgets was constantly finding remarkably earth like planets all over the galaxy.
As long as you weren’t wearing a red shirt.
Pack the camper, Jane; we’re going to another planet.
Thanks!
25,000 light year away
25,000 light years
You take one down, pass it around
24,999 light years away on the wall
In that context, "The Stars are the Styx" by Theodore Sturgeon; "Ringworld" by Larry Niven; others probably can come up with more, I don't read fiction, science or otherwise. A FReeper of years gone by recommended James Hogan's "Inherit the Stars" which I tracked down and read (first fiction I'd read in 20 years at least, apart from a re-read of LOTR before the movies came out); Philip K. Dick (in my teens/twenties I read a couple of his novels, "Our Friends from Frolix Eight" and "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?"; I read some of his short stories standing in Barnes and Noble about 25 years ago, including "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale", the very loose basis for "Total Recall"); seems like I'm forgetting one.
It’s so very lonely,
You’re 2,000 Light Years From Home...
Uh-oh, I hope no one in the thread looks up that one and finds out what album it's on...
"around 3.96 times the mass of Earth""Earth-Like"?? Snort, snort.
"[Its sun is] just 0.12 times the mass of our Sun"
"[The planet's distance from its sun is] around the distance of Venus from the Sun"
"... its year is around 617 [Earth] days"
I see earth type planets nearly everyday on the Hero documentary channel. It shows the starship Enterprise as it enters standard orbit.
Not the Red Shirts.
Certainly that awesome list of links is worthy of a round of hearty applause...{:-)
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