Habitable planet found around nearby star

[Turborama]

Source: PTI

Melbourne, December 20, 2012 -

Scientists using an intra-galactic speed gun have detected five new planets, relatively close to Earth, and one of them is orbiting a star’s habitable zone, where conditions are suitable for life.

It would take only 12 years to reach the planets when travelling at the speed of light. Scientists analysing about 6,000 measurements of the star Tau Ceti’s velocity, believe that slight inconsistencies in its speed and direction are being caused by the gravitational pull of other celestial bodies, The Australian reported.

“We believe the star is going very slightly backwards and forwards and shows the evidence for doing that at five different periods,” said Professor Chris Tinney of the University of New South Wales. “We think five different planets are going around that star tugging on it making it move backwards and forwards,” Tinney said.

An international team of researchers from Australia, Chile, the United Kingdom and the United States believe one of the five planets orbiting Tau Ceti is within the star’s habitable zone, where conditions are suitable for life.

Read more: http://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/Australia/Habitable-planet-found-around-nearby-star/Article1-976806.aspx?

[Fearless]

1. Planetary size matters too though

Frequently they're gas giants it seems.

[Posteritatis]

3. These ones are 3-5 Earth masses

So probably a surface gravity somewhere around or under two Gs.

[Fearless]

5. Could be interesting then!

[tclambert]

16. So the people there would be short, fast, and tough.

All that helps cope with occasionally falling down. In 2 Gs humans get hurt pretty bad when they stumble on a crack in the sidewalk.

But it's unlikely there are people. Tau Ceti has only about 1/3 the proportion of heavy elements as our Sun. That makes rocky planets unlikely. Plus it apparently has much more debris (asteroids, comets, dust) orbiting it, making Chicxulub-like impacts more frequent. Not sure if that makes intelligent life more or less likely. I would think less.

[SWTORFanatic]

25. Put me in a 2g environment for a couple months then send me back here

I'll be doing pullups

with one arm

:p

[eppur_se_muova]

44. Which one is Valeria ? nt

[paleotn]

10. It does....

The reason why so many gas giants have been discovered, particularly those close to their stars, is those are much easier to find vs. little rocky worlds like our own. Tau Ceti is quite similar to our star, which makes finding planets there very, very interesting, but much work is left to do.

[Sherman A1]

2. Cool!

Thanks for posting!

[rucky]

4. And this just one day before 12/21

[deutsey]

6. I'm going to start saving up for my ticket now

[NoMoreWarNow]

11. me too!

[hobbit709]

7. That's not quite what it says.

[Android3.14]

8. Habitable? That's a reach.

Just because it is in the zone where water can exist in all three states doesn't mean there is water. What's wrong with the word "Possible" at the beginning of the headline? Oh wait. I forgot that accuracy means shite these days.

[tama]

14. Accurately

the suffix -able signifies potentiality and possibility, not actuality and certainty. Headlines aim for brevity of expression, not tautology.

[marble falls]

18. You HAVE to be a headline writer. If you are, it makes me glad to know there's still some ......

newspapermen working somewhere.

[Android3.14]

22. Actually, I am the headline writer

Proud member of the Maine Press Association and owner of my own newspaper.
Most people using English know that the suffix "-able" means "capable of".
tama's usage is incorrect.
Consider the word "acceptable". If something is acceptable, then it is capable of being accepted, not having the potential to be accepted.

[tama]

38. Philosophy of potentiality/dynamis

goes way back. I'm not convinced your English language distinction is philosophically meaningful.

[Android3.14]

40. Philosophy? This isn't a question of philosophy. It is a simple definition.

Did I just walk onto the set of The Yellow Submarine? Jeremy? Is that you?

If something is affordable, then I am able to afford it. It's not a potential. It is a characteristic.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines the suffix "-able" like this "Forming adjectives denoting the capacity for or capability of being subjected to or (in some compounds) performing the action denoted or implied by the first element of the compound."

The headline was misleading.

Something I find even more annoying than crappy reporting is the arrogant internalized belief of some moderately educated people that any statement they make, even when it is a bonehead statement, is accurate simply because they think they possess a large vocabulary.

[tama]

43. For people with philosophical and poetic attitude to world

languages are a strange and funny beast, not just top down dictionary definitions... and you have full right to have nothing but contempt for philosophers and poets.

[Android3.14]

45. Contemptible

Poets and philosophers are fine. I've threaded a lemma or two in my time, taught poetry classes, and published a few vanity books of poetry myself. Language has been my job for decades. My contempt is for those who hide their own ignorance behind a clumsy pseudo-intellectual smokescreen.
Perhaps in your world, contemptible means something is only potentially worthy of contempt, but I found your response to this little debate was contemptible, using the definition of the suffix that the rest of the English-speakers on planet use.
I'd bet money you know exactly that means.

[tama]

47. OK

You are native speaker of English, I'm not. Aristotle's definition of possibility or potentiality was that all potentials actualize, but no need to follow Aristotle's reasoning in headline writing.

[Ganja Ninja]

9. There are some drawbacks for a planet orbiting Tau Ceti.

Like a disk of dust and asteroids 10 times as dense as the one around our sun.

More on Tau Ceti here: http://www.exoplaneten.de/tauceti/english.html

[NoMoreWarNow]

12. just rain on our parade!

[Xithras]

27. Its metal deficiency is also a concern

Spectroscopy suggests that it's a fairly metal deficient system. This could either mean that it's a very old star, or that it formed from a nebula relatively free of heavier elements. Neither possibility is promising for life.

If it's a very old star, the presence of the thick debris disk suggests that it can't have a planetary system anything like our own. Our solar system once had a very thick debris field, but our 8.5 planets sweeping through their regular orbits have swept them up and cleaned the system out over the past 4.5 billion years. If the low metallicity is caused by age, it would mean that Tau Ceti is substantially older than our own sun. The fact that its debris disk is still so thick would suggest that its planetary bodies have been far less efficient in doing the same thing. This could be caused by unstable orbits or a number of other things, but it's not promising.

The second possibility doesn't preclude life, but is a serious problem for surface life like our own. If the system has simply lacked heavier elements from the beginning, it's far less likely to have rocky planets. Even if it does, those planets are unlikely to have iron cores that would help to develop magnetospheres, essential for keeping solar radiation off the surface.

You could, theoretically, end up with a planet like Mars. Small, and with a fairly irradiated surface, but technically habitable. Given the amount of debris in the system, you may even find a Mars-like planet covered in a few miles of liquid water. That would be more than capable of supporting life, but probably not anything we could interact with. Still, alien fish would be pretty cool to see.

[Ganja Ninja]

28. From what I've read it's thought to be a 10 billion year old star.

http://www.solstation.com/stars/tau-ceti.htm

Lots of information on that site. It covers all G type stars within 100 years of earth.

[Xithras]

33. Fascinating. Thanks!

Very cool site. One of the papers linked from that page also gives another third possibility for the dust cloud, though it's still not all that friendly to life. Apparently there's some evidence that the relative velocities of the material in the dust cloud are very high. Rather than accreting into larger bodies, collisions between cloud objects simply results in a spray of new smaller objects in new and random trajectories. The system, even today, is highly energetic. If it's really 10 billion years old, it must have been far more energetic earlier in its life. Any forming planets would have been continually bombarded and smashed apart by extremely violent impacts, and may continue to be so today.

It's also possible that any planets in the system are relatively young, even though the star itself may be old. The dust cloud around the star may have only recently (as in, the past few billion years) stabilized enough for the dust to begin accreting into larger bodies. If the planets are young, it might explain why so much dust still exists in the system.

[Posteritatis]

39. So we bring helmets when we go there. Problem solved!

[SemperEadem]

13. and the atmosphere

if there is one, consists of what exactly? Ammonia? Everything but sufficient oxygen?

How about reversing the behavior that's causing the damage being done to the planet we're on right now?

[tclambert]

17. Well, you probably don't have oxygen without life.

Oxygen wants to combine with other elements. To have much in the atmosphere, something has to steadily replenish it. On Earth, that comes from green plants.

[SemperEadem]

19. no duh...

non sequitur...

[tkmorris]

36. ?? The poster was simply responding to your post

I'm not sure why you had the reaction you did. Take it easy, we're all friends here.

[tclambert]

46. Well, not everybody knows that.

George Lucas, Frank Herbert, lots of Star Trek writers . . . they kept making up lifeless planets with oxygen in the atmosphere.

[Marrah_G]

15. This is really exciting!

I really wish we would put more focus back on research, development and space exploration instead of all these stupid wars.

[struggle4progress]

20. Traveling at 669 million mph, we could get there and back in only 24 years!

[FiveGoodMen]

34. But that turn-around at the far end would really be something!

[struggle4progress]

37. Yeah, well, mebbe we could chill there for a while before heading back. There must be

restaurant or coffee shop or strip club or something

[AldoLeopold]

21. As others have pointed out

from what I understand being in the habitable zone doesn't make it habitable by us water bags. I hope they are - but all sorts of crazy stuff is needed from a breathable atmosphere heh.

I just learned the other day that we could never reliably terraform Mars because it has no magnetic fields of sufficient strength to buffer its atmosphere against solar winds - which is why it has a very thin atm. The solar winds just blow it off and thats probably why more complex lifeforms are unlikely to have ever evolved there. Bummer. I was looking forward to Utopia Planetia Shipyards, man.

[The Stranger]

26. Amazing, isn't it, that us "waterbags" were given this incredibly beautiful planet as a home,

where we could live without environmental engineering, and we completely fucked it all up.

[AldoLeopold]

29. It might just be our way

I have a pet theory, not originally mine, that there may be other forms of sentient life out there that, while sentient with complex cognitive abilities, simply do not behave as we do. Non-simian/homonid based I suppose you could say. Those species may survive and peacefully co-exist with their biosphere. We certainly do not. I suspect our innate behavioral traits will kill us and everything else before this tale is finished.

Like an r-selected species which becomes sentient by happenstance and not a K-selected predator. That may be the species that survives and goes to the stars or whatever. Like space-elk or something.

We may not be destined for survival simply because of who and what we are.

[FiveGoodMen]

35. I don't think the word "given" is accurate

We are what arose from this planet.

Whether that was an amazing coincidence or just another day's work in the universe is still under debate.

[blackspade]

23. Very cool!

[toby jo]

24. Sharing life intelligence with other beings - so cool

Bet on a right wing site this news would be met with - 'we need to have firepower to overwhelm them'
and, of course, control them, etc.

My guess would be that their scientists are pretty level headed folks, like ours. Maybe there'll be a great space meet-up, like the early rendezvous, and we can all warn and enlighten about our perspective cultures. Probably not so much in the physical sense, but more on a techno sense. Whatever space radio waves are about. I've always thought we're all related, anyhow. Universal glowy stuff, space karma.

Peace, guys.

So fascinating and interesting. I want to be an astronaut.

I wonder if this'll all happen kind of spontaneously, like so many of earth's cultural advancements. Like speech, artworks, metal-working, etc, appeared at relatively the same times in cultures around the world. The harmonic convergence was seen by people in different cultures around the world at the same time.

Our expanding stuff. I wonder. Going universal.

[ZM90]

30. Is this the same planet where Teabaggers come from?

I don't think they're from planet Earth.

[NYC Liberal]

31. Venus is in the "habitable zone" here.

Being in the habitable zone doesn't really mean much in and of itself.

[and-justice-for-all]

32. I find at times that the scope in which they look for 'life'

is narrow. Sure, 'Earth like planets' are worth seeking but it is a narrow scope in which to look for life. Who says that a planet that is inhospitable to us is not the perfect environment of some other form of life, even intelligent life?

And if this planet is capable of maintaining human life, then I find that the effort to reach is worth investing in...we can not stay here.

[1monster]

41. Hmm... 12 light years. That's only 73,584, 000,000,000 miles away.

Our current record for top speed in space was set by Pioneer 11 in 1979 when it used Jupiter's gravity to increase its speed to 107,373 MPH (http://in.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20061014045651AA0UxCc ).

So at a 107,373 MPH it would roughly take only 78,232 years for a one way trip...

If anyone is interested in taking this trip, let me know. I'll see if I can broker some tickets for you.

[underpants]

42. It's MAHVELOUS!! It's MAGNIFICIENT!! What I am doing there will be the BEST

[sarcasmo]

48. Kick!

[Bombero1956]

49. very good

Now we have a place to send NRA members and Republicans. They should start to pack their bags now.