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dart board;; science bs
rule #1: be kind
If 48 light years sounds realtively close, well it is, relatively. For comparison, It's taken voyager 1 49 years to reach 1 light day away from earth. Traveling at a constant rate, it will reach 48 light years in in the year 860,457. Meanwhile, the universe is estimated to be 93 BILLION light-years wide.
I'm going. Bye everyone. I'll miss you
That is freaking awesome!
Shouldn't the atmosphere be, you know, around the planet. And not 48 light-years away.
Alt: "How the atmosphere got 48 ly from the planet I'll never know." - Groucho
amaze amaze amaze
Very cool discovery. But just to temper any overly excited reactions...
Whether the atmosphere could support life remains unknown.
Also LHS 1140 b is tidally locked to its red dwarf Star, which means one side of it is constantly facing the star and the other side is always saving away from the star. So the ~~fat~~ far side will be very, very cold. While the doesn't rule out the possibilities of life or a breathable atmosphere, it does complicate all that.
Being tidally locked could make evolution less dynamic than earth, but it also means there's a Goldilocks zone in there that's always around the right temperature and things could just migrate a little to the east or west to stay within that area. What I find a bit odd is that they would know the approximate gravity of the planet by now, but there's no mention of that in the article. Makes me assume it's bad. Probably too dense for anything but simple life forms.
We need a nice orange dwarf star planet within 15 percent of our own gravity and a good molten core, a moon or two, and a bunch of big ass blocker planets to keep most large asteroids from hitting it and a low enough amount of radioactive crap on it.
Reminds me of an excerpt from Kurt Vonnegut's The Sirens Of Titan: https://www.flickr.com/photos/romasita/2766136797
True, but up till now we didn't even know if a tidally locked planet around a red dwarf could even hold an atmosphere (since red dwarfs tend to have much more powerful x-ray flares, and planets sit much closer to them than our G-type sun). So the fact that this one does have lightweight Helium in the atmosphere would seem to significantly increase the odds that there's life elsewhere, since red dwarfs are super common and if there's 1 that can hold an atmosphere, odds are that there are many, many others.
But a habitable ring around the twilight portion sounds very cool and world build-y.
I'm pretty sure there was a Vin Diesel movie with that premise.
Aren't there issues with constant and unsurvivable wind as atmosphere is heated on the sunward side and cold atmo from the leeward rushes in underneath?
It'd be an interesting environment. What if the atmosphere was thin so the winds were fast, but not strong? Lots of variables to consider, and I'm sure if life could start, it'd find a niche to live in.
It's not unsurvivable if the organisms there have evolved to survive it.
So the fat side will be very, very cold
Well, that's why it has all that blubber! To keep it warm.
Damnit autocorrect!
But your reply genuinely made me chuckle.
I had a fantastic mental image of a blubbery planet, so we both got a good chuckle from this
ExxonMobil announced plans to destroy the planet a few minutes later
Researchers are not yet able to determine what the atmosphere is made of.
Cherubim and his team determined that helium is escaping from the exoplanet’s upper atmosphere.
So don't hold your breath waiting to find out if there's any sign of life.
but do hold your breath if you somehow end up there
But is i anything like Earth? That's what I want to know.
It’s a rocky planet, in habitable zone with an atmosphere. So yes it like Earth in those ways.
All else is still to be learned.