BREAKING NEWS: Earth like planet found near the outside our Solar System

[GTS_300_Coupe]

SOURCE

Potentially Habitable Planet Found


WASHINGTON (AP) -- For the first time astronomers have discovered a planet outside our solar system that is potentially habitable, with Earth-like temperatures, a find researchers described Tuesday as a big step in the search for "life in the universe."

The planet is just the right size, might have water in liquid form, and in galactic terms is relatively nearby at 120 trillion miles away. But the star it closely orbits, known as a "red dwarf," is much smaller, dimmer and cooler than our sun.

There's still a lot that is unknown about the new planet, which could be deemed inhospitable to life once more is known about it. And it's worth noting that scientists' requirements for habitability count Mars in that category: a size relatively similar to Earth's with temperatures that would permit liquid water. However, this is the first outside our solar system that meets those standards.

"It's a significant step on the way to finding possible life in the universe," said University of Geneva astronomer Michel Mayor, one of 11 European scientists on the team that found the planet. "It's a nice discovery. We still have a lot of questions."

The results of the discovery have not been published but have been submitted to the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

Alan Boss, who works at the Carnegie Institution of Washington where a U.S. team of astronomers competed in the hunt for an Earth-like planet, called it "a major milestone in this business."

The planet was discovered by the European Southern Observatory's telescope in La Silla, Chile, which has a special instrument that splits light to find wobbles in different wave lengths. Those wobbles can reveal the existence of other worlds.

What they revealed is a planet circling the red dwarf star, Gliese 581. Red dwarfs are low-energy, tiny stars that give off dim red light and last longer than stars like our sun. Until a few years ago, astronomers didn't consider these stars as possible hosts of planets that might sustain life.

The discovery of the new planet, named 581 c, is sure to fuel studies of planets circling similar dim stars. About 80 percent of the stars near Earth are red dwarfs.

The new planet is about five times heavier than Earth. Its discoverers aren't certain if it is rocky like Earth or if its a frozen ice ball with liquid water on the surface. If it is rocky like Earth, which is what the prevailing theory proposes, it has a diameter about 1 1/2 times bigger than our planet. If it is an iceball, as Mayor suggests, it would be even bigger.

Based on theory, 581 c should have an atmosphere, but what's in that atmosphere is still a mystery and if it's too thick that could make the planet's surface temperature too hot, Mayor said.

However, the research team believes the average temperature to be somewhere between 32 and 104 degrees and that set off celebrations among astronomers.

Until now, all 220 planets astronomers have found outside our solar system have had the "Goldilocks problem." They've been too hot, too cold or just plain too big and gaseous, like uninhabitable Jupiter.

The new planet seems just right - or at least that's what scientists think.

"This could be very important," said NASA astrobiology expert Chris McKay, who was not part of the discovery team. "It doesn't mean there is life, but it means it's an Earth-like planet in terms of potential habitability."

Eventually astronomers will rack up discoveries of dozens, maybe even hundreds of planets considered habitable, the astronomers said. But this one - simply called "c" by its discoverers when they talk among themselves - will go down in cosmic history as No. 1.

Besides having the right temperature, the new planet is probably full of liquid water, hypothesizes Stephane Udry, the discovery team's lead author and another Geneva astronomer. But that is based on theory about how planets form, not on any evidence, he said.

"Liquid water is critical to life as we know it," co-author Xavier Delfosse of Grenoble University in France, said in a statement. "Because of its temperature and relative proximity, this planet will most probably be a very important target of the future space missions dedicated to the search for extraterrestrial life. On the treasure map of the Universe, one would be tempted to mark this planet with an X."

Other astronomers cautioned it's too early to tell whether there is water.

"You need more work to say it's got water or it doesn't have water," said retired NASA astronomer Steve Maran, press officer for the American Astronomical Society. "You wouldn't send a crew there assuming that when you get there, they'll have enough water to get back."

The new planet's star system is a mere 20.5 light years away, making Gliese 581 one of the 100 closest stars to Earth. It's so dim, you can't see it without a telescope, but it's somewhere in the constellation Libra, which is low in the southeastern sky during the midevening in the Northern Hemisphere.

Before you book your extrastellar flight to 581 c, a few caveats about how alien that world probably is: Anyone sitting on the planet would get heavier quickly, and birthdays would add up fast since it orbits its star every 13 days.

Gravity is 1.6 times as strong as Earth's so a 150-pound person would feel like 240 pounds.

But oh, the view. The planet is 14 times closer to the star it orbits. Udry figures the red dwarf star would hang in the sky at a size 20 times larger than our moon. And it's likely, but still not known, that the planet doesn't rotate, so one side would always be sunlit and the other dark.

Distance is another problem. "We don't know how to get to those places in a human lifetime," Maran said.

Two teams of astronomers, one in Europe and one in the United States, have been racing to be the first to find a planet like 581 c outside the solar system.

The European team looked at 100 different stars using a tool called HARPS (High Accuracy Radial Velocity for Planetary Searcher) to find this one planet, said Xavier Bonfils of the Lisbon Observatory, one of the co-discoverers.

Much of the effort to find Earth-like planets has focused on stars like our sun with the challenge being to find a planet the right distance from the star it orbits. About 90 percent of the time, the European telescope focused its search more on sun-like stars, Udry said.

A few weeks before the European discovery earlier this month, a scientific paper in the journal Astrobiology theorized a few days that red dwarf stars were good candidates.

"Now we have the possibility to find many more," Bonfils said.

Now I just LOVE astronomy and this is big news to me. The possibility of life outside earth should be pretty interesting to anybody. out:
After all, it means anything is possible we could even discover new types of elements or lifeforms which could advance our civilisation in so many ways.

Has anybody seen the movie called "SUNSHINE" thats out at the cinemas at the moment?
Its bloody awesome, edge of your seat sci-fi thriller about space exploration and the possibility of our sun dying.

Anyway, anybody here feel the same way? :

[bob 351]

about time

[MITCHAY]

Are the chicks hot though? :

Space is pretty cool topic though.

"but the star it closely orbits, known as a "red dwarf," is much smaller, dimmer and cooler than our sun."

Seems to rule it out on that point already.

[EFDream]

As long as they drive fords......

[kyro_02]

word ^^

also its on cnn: http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/space/0...eut/index.html

[bodes-sh]

maybe the people from vic that are sick if bracksy could go and live there lol, no traffic laws like the ones here

[GTS_300_Coupe]

Originally Posted by MITCHAY

Are the chicks hot though? :

Space is pretty cool topic though.



Seems to rule it out on that point already.

Yeah thats true however they do explain that the surface temperature is estimated to be enough to support life.

[XR8putts]

Slighty off topic, but why do scientists believe that water is the key to all life?!

Yes that is the case on Earth, and I get that.

Is it so hard to comprehend that some alien life form can exhist without some form of oxygen and water?

There could be another planet that has some other natural resource, that all life on said planet needs to survive.

On topic, interesting find - but the biggest problem is getting a probe there, let alone men.

[FPV8U]

Originally Posted by bodes-sh

maybe the people from vic that are sick if bracksy could go and live there lol, no traffic laws like the ones here

The first thing i thought of... :evilking:

Great news though, with all the mistakes we have managed to make on this planet, now we can jump ship and trade in for a new one... Earth II :

In all seriousness, this is also very interisting to me as life outside of earth seems like a real posibility now which would be amazing to discover other lifeforms and learn from them.

[GTS_300_Coupe]

Originally Posted by puts99

Slighty off topic, but why do scientists believe that water is the key to all life?!

Yes that is the case on Earth, and I get that.

Is it so hard to comprehend that some alien life form can exhist without some form of oxygen and water?

There could be another planet that has some other natural resource, that all life on said planet needs to survive.

On topic, interesting find - but the biggest problem is getting a probe there, let alone men.

Well I'm not very good at explaining all this technical stuff but I beleive they mean that water is the foundation of everything when you think about it trees, animals, humans, everything on our planet proves that without water they cannot survive.
There is no evidence to suggest that another element could replace it however there might as well could be something in the universe with properties similar to water. who knows. :

[Outbackjack]

The truth IS out there. Not a flippant comment.

[WOLF]

Originally Posted by Outbackjack

The truth IS out there. Not a flippant comment.

yep the truth is always out there...right next to the lies

[MITCHAY]

Originally Posted by XR8Rob

yep the truth is always out there...right next to the lies

Aint that the truth :

[mrnsx]

its wonderful finding a planet thats like earth *sarcasm*, im sure there not looking as hard for a way to get there lol

[new2ford]

Originally Posted by puts99

Is it so hard to comprehend that some alien life form can exhist without some form of oxygen and water?

I think you'll find examples in any parliament house in Australia.

Great news - does this mean that having f...ed up the first one we get to try again?

[XRchic]

Water is only a requirement for life forms LIKE US. We are carbon based life forms, needing water to maintain our structures, and our energy levels as it is part of the chemical reactions inside us which process energy.

Puts is basically saying that there could be other life forms which exist in entirely different habitats, such as extreme heat or cold, which use energy in an entirely different manner because they are composed of completey different elements to us, or even composed of elements UNKNOWN to us!

Life elsewhere may even not exist in the same state as we do, they could be gaseous or liquid metal based or something, so they would have entirely different ways of absorbing and processing energy.

So that means that any planet could conceivably host life forms, but just that we may find it harder to discover them because we are too caught up in looking for life LIKE US. There could be life forms closer than we realise but since we have no understanding of how they live and exist or their composition, we may not have the means of discovering them. Imagine if they live in a different time scale to us? Perhaps they live an entire lifetime in one of our seconds? Their entire civilisation could be over before we can discover them and that may happen over and over again... or perhaps the opposite... other beings could be living one second to 70 of our years...

There are too many possibilities out there to assume anything really, and that is what I find fascinating. I think we are not capable of knowing all there is to know yet because we are too limited by what we think we know and what we think we need to find.

One day, 1000s of years down the track, who knows what we will be, if we are here at all... but it will be interesting along the way I think!

[GTS_300_Coupe]

Originally Posted by XRchic

Water is only a requirement for life forms LIKE US. We are carbon based life forms, needing water to maintain our structures, and our energy levels as it is part of the chemical reactions inside us which process energy.

Puts is basically saying that there could be other life forms which exist in entirely different habitats, such as extreme heat or cold, which use energy in an entirely different manner because they are composed of completey different elements to us, or even composed of elements UNKNOWN to us!

Life elsewhere may even not exist in the same state as we do, they could be gaseous or liquid metal based or something, so they would have entirely different ways of absorbing and processing energy.

So that means that any planet could conceivably host life forms, but just that we may find it harder to discover them because we are too caught up in looking for life LIKE US. There could be life forms closer than we realise but since we have no understanding of how they live and exist or their composition, we may not have the means of discovering them. Imagine if they live in a different time scale to us? Perhaps they live an entire lifetime in one of our seconds? Their entire civilisation could be over before we can discover them and that may happen over and over again... or perhaps the opposite... other beings could be living one second to 70 of our years...

There are too many possibilities out there to assume anything really, and that is what I find fascinating. I think we are not capable of knowing all there is to know yet because we are too limited by what we think we know and what we think we need to find.

One day, 1000s of years down the track, who knows what we will be, if we are here at all... but it will be interesting along the way I think!

Wow :sm_drool:
That was quite possibly the most constructive reply I've ever read.
Yeah anything is possible, I just wish we could find answers faster.

[wodahs]

Originally Posted by puts99

Slighty off topic, but why do scientists believe that water is the key to all life?!

Yes that is the case on Earth, and I get that.

Is it so hard to comprehend that some alien life form can exhist without some form of oxygen and water?

There could be another planet that has some other natural resource, that all life on said planet needs to survive.

On topic, interesting find - but the biggest problem is getting a probe there, let alone men.

got the answer to this one , need water to make the soup sluge that we all aparently came from

so weve found anouther planet to screw up

[thefargo]

yeah, nice read, but does it have oil?

[opto]

Cool we screw this planet up we got a backup, just have to find a way to get there.

Ford rocket maybe.

[Serial_Fool]

All I'll say is that the earth is going to be mighty overpopulated by the end of this century..... I dont think another planets going to help things. I think they need to invest more $$$ in the ability to get there WITHIN someones lifetime (e.g speed of light).


*RUNS TO THE SHED TO MAKE A ROCKET FROM A EA FALCON*

[sfr rob]

thats great news, I have been looking to get out of this crazy world sometime soon, now just need to build me a ride outta here!

[mrnsx]

the definition of something alive is it simply reproduces.

thats why "virus" strands are considered alive, they dont eat, they dont breathe but they reproduce.

[Serial_Fool]

Or even plants.

[Sourbastard]

Originally Posted by mrnsx

thats why "virus" strands are considered alive, they dont eat, they dont breathe but they reproduce.

Much like super models.

[rodderz]

Originally Posted by thefargo

yeah, nice read, but does it have oil?

lol... I can picture george dubya waging a war on the new planet as the inhabitants have "laser beams of mass destruction that threaten earth", while a fleet of spaceships with pumps and storage tanks make their way there

[XR8putts]

Originally Posted by XRchic

Water is only a requirement for life forms LIKE US. We are carbon based life forms, needing water to maintain our structures, and our energy levels as it is part of the chemical reactions inside us which process energy.

Puts is basically saying that there could be other life forms which exist in entirely different habitats, such as extreme heat or cold, which use energy in an entirely different manner because they are composed of completey different elements to us, or even composed of elements UNKNOWN to us!

Life elsewhere may even not exist in the same state as we do, they could be gaseous or liquid metal based or something, so they would have entirely different ways of absorbing and processing energy.

So that means that any planet could conceivably host life forms, but just that we may find it harder to discover them because we are too caught up in looking for life LIKE US. There could be life forms closer than we realise but since we have no understanding of how they live and exist or their composition, we may not have the means of discovering them.

Thats exactly what I was trying to say, thats freaky! We have exactly the same perspective on the situation. Marry me?

[Danny]

Originally Posted by sourbastard

Much like super models.

HAHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHA
For a grumpy ole p*ick, geez you come out with some GOLD lines ;)

[Ives]

Tsk, now everyone's gonna know about it. I'm planning to move there by 2010. :/

[wodahs]

Originally Posted by Ives

Tsk, now everyone's gonna know about it. I'm planning to move there by 2010. :/

dont forget to tell aust post to redirect the mail : :