First habitable Earth like planet found!

CptStern

CptStern

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Munich, Apr 23 : An international team of astronomers from Switzerland, France and Portugal have discovered the most Earth-like planet outside our Solar System to date.

The research team used the European Southern Observatory's (ESO's) 3.6-m telescope to discover the super-Earth, which has a mass about five times that of the Earth and orbits a red dwarf already known to harbour a Neptune-mass planet.

The planet has a radius only 50 percent larger than Earth and is very likely to contain liquid water on its surface.

unlike our Earth, this planet takes only 13 days to complete one orbit round its star. It is also 14 times closer to its star than the Earth is from the Sun.

However, since its host star, the red dwarf Gliese 581, is smaller and colder than the Sun - and thus less luminous - the planet lies in the habitable zone, the region around a star where water could be liquid!

"We have estimated that the mean temperature of this super-Earth lies between 0 and 40 degrees Celsius, and water would thus be liquid,"
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sign me up, what time does the intergalactic express leave the terminal?


..unforetunately I wouldnt start packing yet:

According to the research team, the host star, Gliese 581, is among the 100 closest stars to us, located only 20.5 light-years away in the constellation Libra
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http://story.malaysiasun.com/index.php/ct/9/cid/b8de8e630faf3631/id/243780/cs/1/
 
...mass about five times that of the Earth...

sounds like gravity could be a problem
 
Don't worry, I heard they've got a contact ship coming over to us in the next few days.

independence2.jpg
 
Hazar said:
...mass about five times that of the Earth...

sounds like gravity could be a problem
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You'd have to be a bit careful stepping off pavements otherwise you could break your legs kind of gravity.
 
Assuming it has a density equal to earths or great you will likely die on the planet.

No blood to brain = not good.
 
it wouldn't bother religious people, they don't believe in gravity in the first place.
 
it atleast can be see trough a telescope?
 
That's the most exciting thing I've heard in a while. I'll spend 20 years of my life frozen to get to a new planet.

Hope the gravity isn't as bad as we think, though!
 
No trouble with the gravity, Intelligent Falling defies it all.
 
20.5 light years away....who the hell knows if it still even exists anymore!

Still damn cool, though.

You gotta figure, there has to be other life out there. Math supports it. You figure in all the variables it took for us to become homosapiens today, and the sheer number of stars outnumber those odds, and every star has at least a few planets orbiting it, so there are thousands, maybe milions of planets out there that are almost exactly like ours...
 
20 lightyears away means we're seeing it as it were 20 years ago. It's not likely to just vannish or anything. Neither can we 'hope' to find a weaker gravity than we measure, because it's just a fact. 5 times the mass is 5 times the gravity. With its radius 50% bigger, that means we'd be 2.22 times heavier there than on earth.
 
I hope they will find a wormhole or something so we won't have to travel 100+ years to get there.
 
I think we are doomed to stay in our little planet called earth.
 
ahh force evolution. Put people on that planet..the body will find a way to overcome the gravity.
 
Ehh no we'd probably just all die, and that's when evolution doesn't work.
 
theoreticly speaking if we could survive on that planet, chances are forced evolution would take place. you would see people with a shorter stature, stockier build, and over all more strength. the whole process could possibly happen within the span of a (couple?) thousand years. of course i am going off the rate of people breeding as soon as (legally) possible.
 
Well, if we do end up dying, the we aren't as great of a species as we claim to be. I personally think we would probably live, but only with some sort of modification to our heart...since it would be pumping harder to get the blood to our brains....but nothing to where we wouldn't evolve into something that WOULD be able to survive.
 
CyberPitz said:
Well, if we do end up dying, the we aren't as great of a species as we claim to be. I personally think we would probably live, but only with some sort of modification to our heart...since it would be pumping harder to get the blood to our brains....but nothing to where we wouldn't evolve into something that WOULD be able to survive.
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of course by the time we are able to get there, we will already be well on the way to becoming the borg. we already replace some organs and limbs with machinery, next step is incorporating computers.
 
Ridge said:
20.5 light years away....who the hell knows if it still even exists anymore!

Still damn cool, though.

You gotta figure, there has to be other life out there. Math supports it. You figure in all the variables it took for us to become homosapiens today, and the sheer number of stars outnumber those odds, and every star has at least a few planets orbiting it, so there are thousands, maybe milions of planets out there that are almost exactly like ours...
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How do you know the math? We don't even know how life evolved, so there is no way to predict the probability of it happening somewhere else. You have a really enormous number of planets, and you have a really small probability of life evolving, neither of those numbers are certain, so it is difficult to compare them, and we only have one positive data point to use.
 
Kamikazi said:
theoreticly speaking if we could survive on that planet, chances are forced evolution would take place. you would see people with a shorter stature, stockier build, and over all more strength. the whole process could possibly happen within the span of a (couple?) thousand years. of course i am going off the rate of people breeding as soon as (legally) possible.
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It would be a planet of supermen. They wouldn't realize it on their home planet, but when they came to the weaker gravity of earth they would be able to leap tall buildings in a single bound.
 
Kamikazi said:
of course by the time we are able to get there, we will already be well on the way to becoming the borg. we already replace some organs and limbs with machinery, next step is incorporating computers.
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i want an m-16 for my leg!! i bet we could make soem pimpin pacemakers that would be able to cope with the gravity... but that would only work for a while.. the new borns i guess would have to just suck it up. :D

think about it..

you would be 2x as strong just from do the same things you do here. :O that would be mad pimpin! and if all else fails we can just blow the planet into 5 parts.. then we have 5 places to live.. right?? :afro:
 
I'm less excited about the prospect of humans colonizing it than I am the possibility of serious life over there... honestly, those are good conditions
 
Ennui said:
I'm less excited about the prospect of humans colonizing it than I am the possibility of serious life over there... honestly, those are good conditions
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Yeah, I wonder how hard it'll be to kill it all and take the resources?
 
I say 20 days from first contact we'll have wiped them out

I don't even want to think about what the current US government would do if we made contact with aliens
 
Ridge said:
20.5 light years away....who the hell knows if it still even exists anymore!

Still damn cool, though.

You gotta figure, there has to be other life out there. Math supports it. You figure in all the variables it took for us to become homosapiens today, and the sheer number of stars outnumber those odds, and every star has at least a few planets orbiting it, so there are thousands, maybe milions of planets out there that are almost exactly like ours...
Click to expand...

thousands, maybe millions?

Try like, billions, maybe trillions.
 
Ennui said:
I say 20 days from first contact we'll have wiped them out

I don't even want to think about what the current US government would do if we made contact with aliens
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well, you got to take germs into consideration. might come across something worse then the plague.
 
Dan said:
It would be a planet of supermen. They wouldn't realize it on their home planet, but when they came to the weaker gravity of earth they would be able to leap tall buildings in a single bound.
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That was the origin of supermans "flying" ability actually. In early comics he could only leap very high because gravity was said to be much higher on his planet.

I dont think they would be able to do that on earth though. They would just be twice as strong... Not to mention that their organs would probably throw a few wrenches in their mechanics with less gravity, much like ours would if we were on their planet.
 
Dan said:
How do you know the math? We don't even know how life evolved, so there is no way to predict the probability of it happening somewhere else. You have a really enormous number of planets, and you have a really small probability of life evolving, neither of those numbers are certain, so it is difficult to compare them, and we only have one positive data point to use.
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Ehm we do know how life evolved, we just don't exactly know how it began. All you need to have is a self replicating molecule, evolution will do the rest. You're underestimating the amount of planets in the universe. Even if the odds are 1.000.000 to 1 of life ever beginning on a planet (it's probably a LOT more probable than that, but even if), it would still happen about 1.000.000.000 times in the universe.

The 'math' behind all this is that no matter how unlikely this even is, it's overwhelmed by the amount of chances it gets for actually happening.
 
Dan said:
It would be a planet of supermen. They wouldn't realize it on their home planet, but when they came to the weaker gravity of earth they would be able to leap tall buildings in a single bound.
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Due to the squarecube-law, they would become smaller and weaker then we are. This is becouse smaller (organic) things can be much stronger relative to their size, even if weaker in pure lifting capacity.
 
Now we just have to wait for the robots to nuke us so we can commandeer a battlestar and fly there
 
Ennui said:
I say 20 days from first contact we'll have wiped them out

I don't even want to think about what the current US government would do if we made contact with aliens
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Well, it depends; do the aliens have oil?

:O

EDIT: I think it's rather interesting, finding another planet similar to our own. Though I'm not in love with the though of trying to inhabit it, unless we advance quite a lot as a species. Why rape another planet?

But, I wonder if it has life inhabiting it, if not just germs or the like. It would be quite amazing to study life from an environment completely isolated from our own. :O
 
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