Habitable Exoplanet?

[Screamer7]

And the hunt for Earth like planets heat up again.:thumbup:

[url]http://www.universetoday.com/98379/astronomers-find-tantalizing-hints-of-a-potentially-habitable-exoplanet/[/URL]

 

[Quick_Nick]

43ly. I guess any potential life on the heavy possibly-gas-giant hasn't used radio communication in the last few decades. Darn. They just can't make it easy.

 

[Izack]

And the hunt for Earth like planets heat up again.:thumbup:

Or it cools down, depending on how you look at it.

 

[n72.75]

http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/aliens.php#id--Apes_or_Angels

 

[Rtyh-12]

This is obviously a really cool find (any exoplanet is, really) but we have to remember that we have no idea what it actually is like. Just look at the Moon: it's in the Goldilocks zone, yet it's not exactly a lush tropical paradise.

Sure, I know - the conditions on the Moon are vastly different. Low gravity is a decisive factor in the Moon's lack of air and water, and gravity isn't quite a rare resource on most exoplanets we can detect. However, it still means that just because a planet is in the Goldilocks zone, it's not necessarily habitable.

That being said, we really are getting closer and closer to a lush tropical paradise! if I were to take a wild guess, I'd say the first habitable exoplanet will be discovered in less than 20 years. I'm almost surely off by a long shot though. We'll only know when we find one.

 

[Izack]

That being said, we really are getting closer and closer to a lush tropical paradise! if I were to take a wild guess, I'd say the first habitable exoplanet will be discovered in less than 20 years. I'm almost surely off by a long shot though. We'll only know when we find one.

You might be off by a long shot, but that might be because one will be discovered next week. Or one was already discovered, and reanalyses of the data will show it to be a potential lush tropical paradise. These are exciting times.

 

[Screamer7]

Or it cools down, depending on how you look at it.

Yes, I get a bit morbid with all that hot jupiters rotating at a crazy speed around it's parent star.:yes:

 

[Rtyh-12]

You might be off by a long shot, but that might be because one will be discovered next week. Or one was already discovered, and reanalyses of the data will show it to be a potential lush tropical paradise. These are exciting times.

When I said I was likely off by a long shot, I meant in either direction. I can't wait

 

[boogabooga]

Tau Ceti Has Planets, Including, Perhaps, an Earth-Like World

http://news.yahoo.com/tau-ceti-planets-including-perhaps-earth-world-184700732.html
http://news.yahoo.com/potentially-habitable-planet-detected-around-nearby-star-050641876.html

Well, maybe. It seems they took extraordinary means with the signal processing.
I was always taught to be skeptical of poor signal to noise results, and that signal to noise improves as the square root of the sample size, so you have to sample a lot more if you want to find anything meaningful. I wonder what kind of statistical magic is being worked to pull out this result?

 

[Linguofreak]

A caveat here:

That a planet *can* support life does not necessarily mean that it does. Even with oceans of liquid water a planet could be completely dead. And that it does support life doesn't necessarily mean that it's habitable. It could lack any photosynthetic organisms and be teeming with anaerobes. It could have plants and oxygen and be a lush tropical paradise, but with hydrogen cyanide being a compound critical to the local biology and present in the atmosphere in concentrations fatal to humans.

 

[boogabooga]

No kidding. Nobody said that they thought it was a human paradise (not in the actual article anyway). Gravity alone would be fatal after a few hours I suppose. But we are not even close to there yet.

If anything the caveat is that this planet may be a signal processing anomaly.

 

[T.Neo]

That a planet *can* support life does not necessarily mean that it does. Even with oceans of liquid water a planet could be completely dead. And that it does support life doesn't necessarily mean that it's habitable. It could lack any photosynthetic organisms and be teeming with anaerobes. It could have plants and oxygen and be a lush tropical paradise, but with hydrogen cyanide being a compound critical to the local biology and present in the atmosphere in concentrations fatal to humans.

All possible, though the likelihood of such scenarios depends on a variety of factors. The precedence of barren planets depends on the rate of abiogenesis, and a total absence of photosynthesis is a bit hard to explain considering the advantages, energy-wise, it can provide. Then again, Earth hasn't had photoautotrophs for all of its history, and even for a good period of time that they've been present, the oxygen levels in the atmosphere have been insufficient for human survival.

Another possibility may be that a planet has generally the same atmospheric chemical makeup as our atmosphere, but at greatly differing pressures or percentages, thus leading to unacceptable hypoxia/hyperoxia/hypercapnia or gas narcosis in humans.