We're on our way already: Astroboffins find 5 potentially habitable Tatooine-like planets from Kepler 'scope scans
- Reference: 1618553052
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2021/04/16/habitable_planets/
- Source link:
"Life is far most likely to evolve on planets located within their system's habitable zone, just like Earth,” said Nikolaos Georgakarakos, first author of a paper on the planets, and a research associate at New York University Abu Dhabi.
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“Here we investigate whether a habitable zone exists within nine known systems with two or more stars orbited by giant planets. We show for the first time that Kepler-34, -35, -64, -413 and especially Kepler-38 are suitable for hosting Earth-like worlds with oceans."
"We believe that our method can be used as a diagnostic tool to quickly assess whether a system is likely to host a habitable planet. Then [astronomers] can point our telescopes towards the best candidate systems,” he told The Register .
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Binary stars are common; it’s estimated more than half of the stellar systems in space are made up of twin suns. The chance of these systems hosting exoplanets that may be habitable, however, is believed to be lower than ones with lone stars, like our own Solar System. Only giant exoplanets – at least the size of Neptune – have been found around these configurations with multiple suns so far, and they’re typically bad news for life.
The gravitational interactions between the numerous stars and the giant planets are more likely to provide an unstable environment for smaller, rocky planets – that could be potentially habitable – to survive. Giant planets could kick them away to the distant corners of the system away from their host stars’ habitable zones.
Brit uni's AI algorithm clocks 50 exoplanets hidden in Kepler space 'scope archives [3]READ MORE
But star systems Kepler-34, -35, -38, -64 and -413 seem to buck the trend, according to a study [4]published in the Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences Journal. These far-flung systems, located between 2,764 and 5,933 light-years from Earth in the constellations Lyra and Cygnus, could bathe their exoplanets with enough sunshine and warmth that liquid water could exist on their planetary surfaces, despite them being neighbors with turbulent giant bodies.
"We've known for a while that binary star systems without giant planets have the potential to harbor habitable worlds,” Ian Dobbs-Dixon, co-author on the paper and an associate professor of physics at New York University Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, said in a statement. “What we have shown here is that in a large fraction of those systems Earth-like planets can remain habitable even in the presence of giant planets."
The team predicted the size of each system’s habitable zone by looking at the stars’ mass, luminosity, and energy, as well as their accompanying giant planets’ orbits. The larger the zone, the more likely it could support life on smaller exoplanets.
But before you get too excited about the idea of a habitable Tatooine-like planet, a world that orbits twin stars in the fictional Star Wars universe, the team’s results are purely speculative at the moment. It depends on whether there are real Earth-like planets that do lie in these system’s habitable zones; none have been found yet so far because they’re more difficult to detect.
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“Our best candidate for hosting a world that is potentially habitable is the binary system Kepler-38, approximately 3970 light years from Earth, and known to contain a Neptune-sized planet," Georgakarakos added. "Our study confirms that even binary star systems with giant planets are hot targets in the search for Earth 2.0. Watch out Tatooine, we are coming!" ®
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[3] https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/26/british_ai_planets/
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All I can say is ....
That's not a planet!!! Er, I mean moon!
3970 light years away, eh?
Best pack my towel and stick my thumb out, then. I think I've got a handful of Altarian dollars around somewhere.
---> it's a coat, but it's got a towel in the pocket.
Yay! Podracing!
Life, but not as we know it?
"Life is far most likely to evolve on planets located within their system's habitable zone, just like Earth,”
Life similair to that on Earth is likely to evolve on a place like Earth! Who'd have thunk it? In the meantime, we have to be a bit humble about what we actually know and especially what we don't about life.
For example one reasonable-seeming assumption is availability of liquid water as a medium bringing molecules together that can form organic compounds. Does this have to be water or could it be anything else? And are we assuming a liquid medium because that allows chemical reactions at the timescale on which life on Earth happens? Could a solid or semi-solid sludge hold life where the chemical reactions that make up life move so slowly that a simple 'creature' has a lifespan of millions of years with a 'metabolism' too slow for us to even detect? Or could a high-temperature plasma hold lifeforms that go through thousands of generations in a few instants?
Re: Life, but not as we know it?
Carbon is pretty weird and unique as an element and there are constraints on timing for complex chemical structures which mean you don't get them, even briefly, at very high temperatures.
But yes: we're looking for planets which might host the kind of life we know how to look for, because that is all we know how to look for. If we could work out other signatures for different sorts of life we'd likely be looking for those as well.
The article title is REALLY misleading!
They haven't 'found 5 potentially habitable Tatooine-like planets': they've found that there are sets of orbits in these 5 binary systems where, perhaps, some number (which could be more than 5, or less (fewer?)) of potentially-habitable planets could live. There's no evidence at all that such planets do exist in these orbits, or that they don't. All they're really doing (which is very interesting) is showing that circumbinary orbits exist which might be in the habitable zone, which is not at all obvious since the annual variation in stellar flux would be pretty large. So that's really interesting given that most star systems are binaries, but it's not finding 5 potentially-habitable planets.
I realise the article text says this, but, really, misleading headline is misleading.
As I was reading this article the image of Luke Skywalker standing looking at the twin suns of Tatooine setting in the evening came to mind, as did the haunting music that accompanied that scene.