Possible habitable planet found

Breaktown

Though it can't be known for sure until more observations can be made in the future. Interesting article about it on Skymania.

Fenster

Running water != habitable. We should be extremely skeptical of any claim until it is checked, checked and checked again.

The Arxiv paper is much more conservatively worded, and in essence seems to say "it is a rocky planet that isn't too hot for running water; if X and Y additional conditions true, then it might be habitable by humans."

Conor108

~1.4g surface gravity, not bad!

Plug

Can they check exo planets for water, atmosphere type and gravity. If so, how?

Breaktown

Fenster wrote: »

Running water != habitable. We should be extremely skeptical of any claim until it is checked, checked and checked again.

The Arxiv paper is much more conservatively worded, and in essence seems to say "it is a rocky planet that isn't too hot for running water; if X and Y additional conditions true, then it might be habitable by humans."

Well the article does say that "there are many other factors which go into defining the HZ other than the region where liquid water can exist" and also "So the planet is not necessarily habitable simply because it resides in the HZ, but this is certainly an important step towards finding planets like our own."

AugustusMinimus

Conor108 wrote: »

~1.4g surface gravity, not bad!

6 months there and you'd come back an Olympic athlete.

Conor108

Plug wrote: »

Can they check exo planets for water, atmosphere type and gravity. If so, how?

For water/atmosphere I THINK they look at the light reflected by the planet and use Spectroscopy to see what elements are present since each element has its own unique light pattern.

Gravity I guess they just measure the radius and mass, and throw it into that formula.



Where G=Universal gravitational constant, m= Mass of planet and r= Radius of the planet.

How do they measure mass actually??

Rubecula

I believe the mass is measured by the effect it has on it's parent star.

slade_x

Conor108 wrote: »

For water/atmosphere I THINK they look at the light reflected by the planet and use Spectroscopy to see what elements are present since each element has its own unique light pattern.

Gravity I guess they just measure the radius and mass, and throw it into that formula.



Where G=Universal gravitational constant, m= Mass of planet and r= Radius of the planet.

How do they measure mass actually??

A few links that may be of interest

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methods_of_detecting_extrasolar_planets
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extrasolar_planet

http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/42985

physicsworld.com wrote:

Researchers in the Netherlands and in the US are the first to measure directly the mass of a planet orbiting a star other than our Sun. In developing their new technique, they also discovered that this planet, which is approximately the same size as Jupiter but closer to its star, is being tormented by a raging storm.

Previous attempts to gauge the mass of such exoplanets have relied on estimations, where astrophysicists look at the slight "wobble" of a star caused by the gravitational pull of the planet. The extent of this movement can be used to estimate the planet’s mass as a proportion of the stellar mass – which itself is an estimate based on its spectral characteristics and distance from Earth.

Ignas Snellen of Leiden University led a team in developing a more accurate method by focusing on the atmosphere of an exoplanet. They demonstrate the technique on HD 209458b, a well known "hot Jupiter" some 150 light-years from Earth. Because this planet sweeps between Earth and its host star, every three and a half days, it changes the star's chemical spectrograph as recorded on Earth. By comparing the star's spectrograph before and during a transit the researchers can calculate the chemical content of the planetary atmosphere.

Doppler shift

Using the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, fitted with the CRIRES spectrograph, Snellen's team was able to hone in on the planet's carbon-monoxide (CO) signal, which was predicted to produce many spectral lines over these wavelengths. They were able to detect a small Doppler shift in the CO gas. From this they could calculate that the planet is orbiting its star at a velocity of 140 km s–1.

With relative ease, Snellen's team was then able to calculate the masses of both star and planet using Newton's law of gravitation, knowing also the velocity of the host star due to its orbit round the centre of mass of the system. "This is exactly the same method used to calculate the mass of binary star systems, except one of the bodies here is an exoplanet," says Snellen.

Obtaining more accurate values for exoplanet masses could enable researchers to glean more information about the nature of exoplanets. "The mass is one of the most important parameters of the planet. It is by measuring the mass, together with other properties such as orbital period and eccentricity and radius, that we learn what exoplanets are made of, and how they form and evolve," says Susan Aigrain, an exoplanet researcher at the University of Oxford in the UK.............................continued at above link

Rubecula

Good post Slade_X