Europejczycy odkryli pierwsza planete do ewentualnego zamieszkania.

[cracovian]

Temperatury podobne do naszych, byc moze jest woda, a sama planeta jest na orbicie bardzo bliskiej do czerwonego karla (14 razy blizej niz my do slonca), ktory jest duzo mniejszy, ciemniejszy i zimniejszy od slonca. Malo o tej planecie na razie wiadomo poza tym, ze jest stosunkowo blisko (20 i pol lat swietlnych) i poza Marsem, ktory spelnia podobne wymagania, to jest pierwsza planeta poza Ukladem Slonecznym, na ktorej mozna "zamieszkac". Widok dosc ladny, karzel z powierzchni wyglada na 20 razy wiekszego niz nasz ksiezyc. Prawdopodobnie, planeta nie kreci sie wokol swojej osi, czyli tylko jedna strona jest sloneczna. Grawitacja to 160% naszej.

I kto mi tu jeszcze powie, ze Star Trek albo Battlestar Galactica to science fiction? Przeciez to czysta nauka ze scenariuszem opartym na prawdziwych wydarzeniach ;-)

Planeta zostala odkryta przez 11 naukowcow z Genewy uzywajacych specjalnego teleskopu w La Silla, Chile.


Potentially Habitable Planet Found

By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer


WASHINGTON - 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.

"I expect there will be planets like Earth, but whether they have life is another question," said renowned astrophysicist Stephen Hawking in an interview with The Associated Press in Orlando. "We haven't been visited by little green men yet."

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.

___

On the Net:

The European Southern Observatory: http://www.eso.org

[Mchl]

Planeta nie obraca się... to sobie napisali...
Raczej chodzi o to, że obraca się wokół osi w tym samym okresie co obiega gwiazdę. Podobnie jak Księżyc obiega Ziemię...

[MJ19]

Czyli coś w stylu planety podwójnej :roll: Jeśli człowiek by ją zamieszkał to nie lada dylemat by miał czy się osiedlić tam gdzie wiecznie jest dzień czy tam gdzie egipskie ciemności panują :) Trzeba by skandynawskich astronautów tam posłać :wink:
P.S. ciekawy artykuł

[Mchl]

A dlaczego od razu taki dylemat?
Przecież to otwiera nowe niespotykane możliwości...
Można na przykład wybrać sobie urokliwe miejsce w krainie wiecznego zachodu Gliese 581. Włosi i inni Południowcy zamieszkaliby na pewno w obszarze, gdzie wiecznie panuje sjesta. A miłośnicy filmów z dreszczykiem mogliby zamieszkać w strefie mroku.

[kempler]

Ewentualnie pół miasta w strefie mroku a pół w strefie nasłonecznionej :)

[MJ19]

Wiadomość ta rozeszła się szerokim echem.Było o tym na wszystkich portalach i nawet w teleexpresie mówili :) A to pewnie dopiero początek tego typu odkryć :) Mam nadzieję :wink:

[Mchl]

Lada moment sprytny przedsiębiorca rozpocznie sprzedaż działek z widokiem na wschodzącą Gliese 581

[cracovian]

Brytyjski William Hill zmniejszyl prawdopodobinestwo odkrycia pozaziemskiego zycia z 1000:1 do 100:1 po tym odkryciu, wiec efekt ekonomiczny juz czuc.

A Kapitan Kirk juz zdjecia nawet porobil:

[Mchl]

Skoro szanse wzrosły, to chyba zwiększył ;) I nie samo prawdopodobietwo, ale swoją ocenę tegoż :)

[cracovian]

Masz racje, szanse wzrosly czyli ewentualna wyplata zmalala. Liczylem na 1000 z funciaka, a teraz tylko stowka, wiec jak tu plany mozna snuc na przyszlosc i emeryture? Trzeba sie teraz do roboty wreszcie zabrac...