MnAstro Forums

I'm sure many of you have already seen info on this, but thought it was interesting. Potentially habitable planet found:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070425/ap_ ... ble_planet[/url]

Very interesting.

Maybe we could name it Caprica, after the home planet in Battlestar Galactica.

Personally I am going to reserve judgement until more is known. There are dozens, if not hundreds of parameters that must all be within narrow limits for a planet to be able to support life. For years astronomers have been making various references to Goldilocks because of this need for everything to be 'just right'. A good book outlining some of this is Rare Earth by Brownlee and Ward.

.


Fair enough to think of naming it (even though it hasn't been "seen", only detected as spectra-wobble of the star), but Glise 581 is so close and "bright" (10th mag) and in the night sky still, that Ron (and Dale?, and others?) are calculating right now if and how they are going to try to "observe it" themselves?

LoL! :: )

Habitable is a bit premature. If you read it closely it seems they aren't even sure it is rock. They think it is rock based on math that tells them a body in that orbit should be rock not gas. That's still speculative though.

Also, there is no information on the atmosphere of this planet. Given that. I found the temperature range given to be highly suspect. Look at Earth and Venus. They are relatively similar size and sure, Venus is a little close to the sun so we would expect it to be a little hotter but because of the atmosphere of Venus the temperature is out of control and somewhere around 700° F. all the time. This would not be the case if it had an earth-like atmosphere. This isn't something we would expect based merely on the distance it is from the sun.

Maybe I am missing something but how can they make any claims about a surface temperature range when they know nothing about atmospheric composition?

~Kirk