GU: Earth-like planet could harbour life

[grytpype]

Here's a little good news for you:

Earth-like planet could harbour life
http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/science/story/0,12996,1293976,00.html

Tim Radford, science editor
Tuesday August 31, 2004
The Guardian

European scientists have found a planet circling a distant star that could be home to life.

The planet, the first detected so far that is enough like Earth for life to develop, orbits a star called mu Arae in the southern constellation Altar. The planet - astronomers call such things exoplanets - is only 14 times the mass of Earth and, like Earth, could be composed of rock and support an atmosphere.

-more-

[7th_Sephiroth]

1. problem

it has a 7 day orbit around its star wich means that its gotta be REALLY close to the sun

[clown]

5. is it...

possible that the star is much weaker than our sun and thus could support life at that distance (the article said 9.5 days, which is a little better i suppose)

[7th_Sephiroth]

10. no, because you can see it from here, they say

it would have to be an intense sun

[DRoseDARs]

11. Here's a googled link on Mu Arae

http://www.solstation.com/stars2/mu-arae.htm

The Star

Mu Arae is a yellow-orange dwarf star of spectral and luminosity type G3 V-IV. The star has about 108 percent of Sol's mass (exoplanets.org) or 1.10 +/- 0.05 (Nuno et al, forthcoming, in pdf or ps); it may have 1.32 times the diameter of Sol (Nuno et al, forthcoming, in pdf or ps)-- versus an earlier estimate of a similar diameter (102 percent) as Sol (Johnson and Wright, 1983, page 689) with around 1.7 times its luminosity. Its relative brightness compared to Sol suggests that the star is more highly evolved and probably older than Sol's 4.6 billion years, as the accumulation of helium ash in its core is moving the star out of the main sequence into subgiant status. The star may be 1.9 times as enriched than Sol with elements heavier than hydrogen ("metallicity"), based on its abundance of iron (exoplanets.org). Useful catalogue numbers and designations for the star include: Mu Ara, HR 6585, Gl 691, Hip 86796, HD 160691, CD-51 11094, CP(D)-51 10535, SAO 244981, FK5 662, and LTT 7053.



An orbital period of only 7-10 days puts a planet VERY close to a Sol-like star. Mercury has a period of 88 days and it absolute HELL. So no, most Earth-like life would be exceedingly unlikely, but I refuse to discount the possiblity of any other forms of life.

[alittlelark]

2. Perhaps the PNAC elite will 'fall-back' to this planet

once they have completed the task of killing this one.

[TaleWgnDg]

3. hot damn! let's send . . .

George (as in Bush)!! Could this appease his inner *need* to explore Mars?

[opihimoimoi]

4. The Management from the Real Estate Commission for this Sector will not

give us the neccessary Permits... we Humans are too lame....

[lapfog_1]

9. Of course

When we get rid of these useless twits, lets not forget to
include ALL of the telephone sanitation engineers.

[foo_bar]

6. 14 earths sounds big

isn't that more gravity than us earthlike creatures are accustomed?

[DannyRed]

7. Ummm....

yes.

A lot.

[TheWraith]

8. Our homeworld is unusually dense.

Thanks to the large nickel-iron core of our homeworld, it has considerably more gravity than other planets of similar size might. However, when they say 14x times the size of earth, they're probably assuming a correspondence between mass and volume, so in all likelyhood yes, there would be much too high a G-force for us.

Or in other words, yes, we'd be people jelly.

[JSJ]

12. so could ours (harbor life that is)...

...if we get the gd war mongers and land developers out of power.

[Moderator]

13. Duplicate

From August 26

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=102&topic_id=778464