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15 day orbit, 170 day planetary rotation, that's an interesting one Sucks for the amount of radiation ofc Would be interesting to hypothesize of it being a larger mercury like planet than a earth like one Please some more up to date astro-duders out there, is the James Webb currently capable of direct spectrography of exoplanets? We can do spectrography during the transit I am aware, but direct spectrography, is that…
31 light-years away. Proxima Centauri b is about 4. Don't think I'd like to visit either. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxima_Centauri_b I'd like to visit Kepler-452b but it's 1,500 light-years away: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler-452b
Why not Wolf 1069B? Kepler-452b has 2X Earth gravity.
Kepler-452b has 2X Earth gravity.
But seriously, these are all too far away for us to reach in any of our lifetimes, barring some insane discovery that breaks all the rules as we know them.
So I thought this would be big news, so I did some reading. Turns out that in like the past 5-6 years we've gone from "who knows how many habitable zone planets there are" to "we're finding them all freaking over the place!" Does anyone have a good blog/news site that covers topics like this? Because evidently I'm missing out.
Over the course of the past 2 decades we've gone from "perhaps some day we'll find extra solar planets" to "most if not all stars have planets". JWST's already found water. At this point it's no longer a matter of if but when extrasolar life will be confirmed, and with which instrument. Might be JWST, might be WFIRST, might be HabEx.
The star is much smaller than the Sun. What is the expected life of that star?
In particular, orbiting so close, they are all tidally locked 1:1 to their star, presenting always the same face. If they have any water, it is frozen on the dark side. But they might have no water anyway because they (might!) have no magnetic field to fend off the solar wind that would take away all their hydrogen, as happened to Venus.
Earth has its big moon helping it not get tidally locked, thus still spinning and generating its strong magnetic field. Probably Earth-size planets with a Moon-size moon are vanishingly rare. Dual planets might do better. Or maybe a dual moon of a gas giant, but the radiation belts of the gas giant would be a problem.
So actually-habitable planets must be much, much rarer, among those announced, than astronomy departments' PR crew would have us think. Inside moons of Jupiter and Saturn might even present a better prospect.
That is not to say actually habitable planets must be rare; rather, we can't spot them yet. But our big moon might be important.