Super Earth!
Posted by Greg at 12:21, 17 Dec 2009Yes, our own little third rock from the Sun is pretty super, but I'm talking about something else: astronomers have detected a transiting exoplanet 'just' 40 light years from us, whose density suggests that it is largely made up of water:
The alien world known as GJ 1214b orbits a red dwarf star one-fifth the size of our own sun, 40 light-years away in the constellation Ophiuchus, the astronomers reported in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature.
"Astronomically speaking, this is on our block," David Charbonneau of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, lead author of the study, told reporters this week. "This is a next-door neighbor. For perspective, our own TV signals have already passed beyond the distance of this star."
The downside? The planet's surface hits around 200 degrees C, leading Charbonneau to speculate that the newly-discovered planet was probably too hot to host life as we know it (Jim)...though "it didn't miss it by very much."
Centauri Dreams has more on the story.
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Comments
17 December 2009
11 weeks 12 hours
"too hot to host life"
I always laughed as a kid when I heard statements about life on other planets; I thought it was incredibly conceited of adults to assume all life would mirror our own experience
the 'as we know it' condition helps somewhat, except that most people don't think about it, or know what it means
is it possible there's an entity somewhere that we'd consider a lifeform that doesn't have what we'd call a physical body? or has a body based on different matter than on Earth?
would we have considered the lifeforms around black smokers to be life as we know it before we actually found them?
the bacteria that live in rocks?
in truth, we have no way of knowing what might constitute life in an alien environment
Z
1 May 2004
13 hours 39 min
Hmm.. I wonder what the inhabitants would make of humans parking in the stratosphere and having a Turkish bath! Maybe aliens are coming here for some kind of therapy (possibly involving cow parts)!