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Seven earth-sized planets discovered circling a star 39 light years from Earth

nature.com

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Re: Seven earth-sized planets discovered circling a star 39 light years from Earth

#161

Post by tim333 »

methodover wrote: post #37
rubicon33 wrote: post #9

I was reading up about earth alternatives recently, and upon realizing the distance was always going to limit us, no matter how perfect the planet, I realized we need to travel at the speed of light. I think our "best shot" at that right now, is to digitize humans. If we could store consciousness in binary, we could then transmit it at the speed of light (like we do with data every day!). You'd need a receiver on the…

40 light years isn't a big deal if humans lived to be thousands of years old. That's another solution.

Or cryogenically freeze yourself with instructions to be brought back in a few millennia near the new star system. From the observer's point of view you could be there Tuesday week or so.

Re: Seven earth-sized planets discovered circling a star 39 light years from Earth

#162

Post by throwanem »

dagurp wrote: post #153
dmreedy wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess J.J. Abrams is somewhat forgiven for this, then: http://vignette4.wikia.nocookie.net/startrek/images/2/29/Vul... [edited for direct .jpg]

Firefox tries to download this file

It's a webp. Firefox doesn't support those.

Re: Seven earth-sized planets discovered circling a star 39 light years from Earth

#163

Post by [deleted] »

wallace_f wrote: post #128
kcorbitt wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That actually sounds... more plausible than I would have expected. Like, doable with technology I can imagine being within reach in the next 50 years even if we don't achieve any currently-unforseen breakthroughs.

Is it plausible for anything we'd build to travel .998c and survive the journey?

[deleted]

Re: Seven earth-sized planets discovered circling a star 39 light years from Earth

#165

Post by ionwake »

gus_massa wrote: post #94
ionwake wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not according to public research on theoretical designs that have been about for decades . Unless you consider them unicorn farts! I'm only a coder though so I have no knowledge of this domain tho. I think the problem is simply it's too expensive to build space ships that probably won't work at all :( wasnt NASAs budget slashed ?

> Not according to public research on theoretical designs that have been about for decades. Which ones? Do you have a link? The only one I remember is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propuls... but it's more a general idea that a detailed blueprint that only need some money to get built.

Thats the one I read. It sounds awesome.

Srsly give me 5% of the GDP of the US and I'll put a monkey on Trappist within 5 years. Monkey time.

*Im not being serious, I have no idea how much it would cost or if it would even work.

Re: Seven earth-sized planets discovered circling a star 39 light years from Earth

#166

Post by RangerScience »

nickff wrote: post #134
noobermin wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the callers (a biologist, so not a crackpot) on TV suggested that given how close the planets were, he wondered if it were possible for there to be cross contamination between the planets given how close they are to each other. He referred to them being part of the same "ecosystem." I'm not sure how feasible that is as a non-astrobiologist, but it is an interesting idea.

There has been and continues to be cross-contamination between Venus, Earth, and Mars, so it seems likely that planets much closer together, and passing each other more frequently would have more 'communication' of materials.

Continues to be...? Outside of human action, what's the vector?

Re: Seven earth-sized planets discovered circling a star 39 light years from Earth

#167

Post by jerf »

noobermin wrote: post #88
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> are there...hazards simply due to the proximity of a dim star Tidal locking [1]. Similar to how our moon shines at us ass first all the time, the planets around TRAPIST-1 would be expected to have one face locked to their star. Instead of an equatorial belt bookended with loops of temperate zones, as we have on Earth, we should expect, climatically, an "equatorial" face and a "polar" face separated by a tropic-to-t…

Of course, #askNasa didn't win me a question, but could any astrobiologists comment on this question: Tidal locking means the planets would always have a side facing the star, leading to very different thermodynamics in terms of climate and weather on the planet, not to mention radiation. Doesn't that very much hurt the chances for life on those planets?

The debate rages. The problem is that one side of the planet is essentially exposed to space and thus tends to be at cosmic background temperature, and the other side exposed to the star. It is thought by a lot of people that anything volatile enough to be a gas, ever (so, including water), would rapidly end up migrating over to the frozen side, so even if the planet started with the right mix of water and whatever other volatiles are needed it would shortly not have any in the temperate range. Some have objected that the planet could wobble and periodically unfreeze some of that stuff, and maybe life could exist in a resulting narrow temperate zone. My personal feeling is that it would still far-too-rapidly simply freeze out again, this time out of reach of the wobble, so the parched zone would simply grow to include everything ever touched by the sun rather than forming a stable temperate zone.

But we won't really know until we go look at a planet like this, because we don't have one locally to look at. (Plenty of tidally-locked bodies, plenty of bodies with volatiles and enough energy to keep them moving, I'm pretty sure nothing in the Solar system with both.)

Re: Seven earth-sized planets discovered circling a star 39 light years from Earth

#169

Post by elastic_church »

kcorbitt wrote: post #47
e0m wrote: post #33

To get a spacecraft there it would take: Accelerating at 1g the 1st half, and decelerating at 1g the 2nd half, the traveler would experience 7.3 years of time. For observers it would take 41.8 years at a max speed of 0.998c If you had a near perfect hydrogen -> helium fusion engine, it'd take about 6 million tons of fuel (about the mass of the Pyramids of Egypt or 2,000 Saturn V rockets)

That actually sounds... more plausible than I would have expected. Like, doable with technology I can imagine being within reach in the next 50 years even if we don't achieve any currently-unforseen breakthroughs.

All about funding. NASA, for example, is about 35 years behind schedule by my math, solely from funding.

Now whether throwing money at a public agency would have made advancements in lensing, transistor along with propulsion technology happen quicker. Thats a tougher question that leans towards the "unlikely".

Re: Seven earth-sized planets discovered circling a star 39 light years from Earth

#170

Post by wallace_f »

delecti wrote: post #157
wallace_f wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it plausible for anything we'd build to travel .998c and survive the journey?

Just going that fast isn't really risky at all (assuming you don't hit anything, which isn't actually a safe assumption). The tough part is making something capable of a constant 1g of acceleration for a 7 year trip. Most of the craft we make only accelerate for the first small percent of a trip. We can do accelerations that high, but not for very long, and we can't even manage acceleration for such a long duration e…

My layman's reading of physics-for-layman books has taught me that if we were to travel at the speed of light, we'd convert into energy. However, I'm not so sure about 99.999999% the speed of light. That's really OK, as far as we know?
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