Posted on 06/12/2023 7:40:42 AM PDT by McGruff
A nearby exoplanet orbiting within the habitable zone of a star just 4.2 light-years from Earth may be home to a vast ocean, boosting its chances of supporting life. Since its discovery, questions about the conditions at the surface of Proxima b have been swirling; the planet’s mass is just about 1.3 times that of Earth’s, and the red dwarf star it circles is similar in age to our sun.
Studies over the last few years, however, have both bolstered hopes of its habitability and shot them down. Now, a new study has once again raised the possibility that Proxima b could support life, suggesting that under the right conditions, the exoplanet could sustain liquid water.
“The major message from our simulations is that there’s a decent chance that the planet would be habitable,” Anthony Del Genio, a planetary scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told LiveScience.
Since its discovery, questions about the conditions at the surface of Proxima b have been swirling; the planet's mass is just about 1.3 times that of Earth's, and the red dwarf star it circles is similar in age to our sun. Artist's impression
In the study published this month in the journal Astrobiology, the researchers ran what are said to be the first climate simulations of Proxima b with a dynamic ocean. The planet is thought to be tidally locked with its star, Proxima Cent
(Excerpt) Read more at blog.thespaceacademy.org ...
Continuos cold surface winds cominfrom the dark side and hot winds at elevation towards the dark side.
FINALLY ,a place where wind generated power is reliable.
Yup! A decent chanced of not crashing beats 100% chance of being tortured and murdered by your own countrymen after the foreign army leaves, every single time!
The probe starts at zero mph and if we have great technology results gets up to half the speed of light. But wait, then at turnover it has to start slowing down to arrive and debark. So it isn’t nine years at half “c” but instead perhaps quadruple that — a generation ship.
This light speed thing is really annoying to my useless speculation.
Well it would only take 24,000 years to get there going at the speed of the pioneer probe (which is not going in that direction). Just think of how much taxpayer money government funding could be squandered spent on a project like that. You could support 100 generations of engineers and scientists without getting any useful work out of them.
I’m so outta here...
There is no point to searching for habitable planets. Life at 1.1 G would suck. Life at 0.8 G would suck. And free Oxygen requires native life, so you pretty much need to live in a dome anyway. Might as well build floating, spinning rings. The asteroids will do nicely for building materials.
you give the thread some sanity
The first ecological catastrophe we had was when plants started polluting the Earth's atmosphere with poisonous oxygen.
Only a few anaerobic bacteria survived.
The rest of us learned to use oxygen.
Correction - 24k years is how long it takes to go 1 LY, closer to 100k years for the whole trip, but if it went at the speed of voyager I it would only take 70,000 years.
Recent astrophysicist observations have found the giant solar flares from Red Dwarf stars shoot out from the poles of the star while most planets orbit with a range close to the equatorial plane of their star. That means the planets of a Red Dwarf star might not be as hindered by the radiation from that star than previously believed.
I wonder this about being tidally locked. Let’s say you have a planet with a lot of fluids, including those that might form oceans at the right temperature and pressure. But it’s a hot, young planet with a super-dense atmosphere making the land beneath featureless. The planet could spin just from momentum, no?
So let’s say this planet froze. Now you have a significantly non-round planet; all the ice is on one side. OK, so the center of gravity simply shifts and the planet locks tidally despite the non-round shape.
But now you add a large moon. The uneven shape of the planet causes a slightly non-uniform tug as the moon revolves. Couldn’t this tug be strong enough to prevent tidal locking with the sun? At a low enough of a stellar gravity, the planet could tidally lock with the moon? Is this low-enough gravity point necessarily too far away form the star to have sufficient heat to be life-friendly?
Why are so many of us on FreeRep (like you and I) more respectful of the term “habitable” than so many psuedo scientists that get their works published??? Or, is it all really about click bait?
“There is a “Highly Habitable” Planet Just 4 light years from Us, Astronomers Say”
The title is totally “misinformation”.
As usual the psuedo scientists start with a single variable - distance a planet orbits from its star (they call the “sweet spot of that variable the habitable zone). Yet even that is scientifically false, because a mere “habitable zone” does not account for differences among the stars. Prozima Centauri is a little Red Dwarf, while our sun is a yellow dwarf - and the solar output of the two stars is much different, in terms of the wavelengths of light and how much energetic output they produce. Those two sets of variables alone can “make or break” any idea of a “habitable zone”.
In re: “A nearby exoplanet orbiting within the habitable zone of a star just 4.2 light-years from Earth may be home to a vast ocean, boosting its chances of supporting life.”
The key here is “may be home to a vast ocean”. That is a fact they KNOW they do not have in evidence. But then they go and speculate using “models” in which they have filled in a set of data elements they do not have (a) a vast ocean that (b) is not only vast but “dynamic”. Their models may be no more reliable than the UN’s “climate models”. Yet, they still ignore all that and title the report as if it is already known to be a “highly habitable” planet.
In re: “suggesting that under the right conditions, the exoplanet could sustain liquid water.” That is an admission they do not have facts, just “what ifs”.
In re: “The major message from our simulations is that there’s a decent chance that the planet would be habitable,”
No. The “major message” is the report is written for the purpose of click bait to the website on which the report was produced.
If He wanted to He could could do it in the twinkling of an eye.
Apparently He thinks you need to suffer us little children...
It is amazing that a game that old could still be so deep and enjoyable.
So are we, on about a 12,000 year cycle.
Is it free of liberals?
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