Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Wolf 1069B: Earth-mass planet in the habitable zone of a nearby, low-mass star

arxiv.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 132 posts

Re: Wolf 1069B: Earth-mass planet in the habitable zone of a nearby, low-mass star

#91

Post by bulatb »

govg wrote: post #46
skykooler wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then we'd better start as early as possible.

There's a funny paradox-like situation that arises in space flight where because of the distances involved/ time taken, it might be better to wait some time for a faster method of flight to develop. Of course, it is up for debate whether there are many more ways of propulsion that are yet to be invented.

For anyone interested, this is called the wait calculation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_travel#Wait_calcu...

Re: Wolf 1069B: Earth-mass planet in the habitable zone of a nearby, low-mass star

#92

Post by rich_sasha »

moloch-hai wrote: post #40

None of these "habitable" planets is really plausibly habitable. 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 b…

I was reading about "eyeball planets", which are possibly suitable for life, and match this description (vaguely, IANAAstrophysicist). Basically, the idea is that a planet of right size and roughly in the right distance to its star is tidally locked in a 1:1 resonance, so one side is always pointing at the star, and one always poiting away.

Now, the perpetual noon point is very hot, and the perpetual midnight point is very cold, but you get a consistent temperature gradient inbetween. Somewhere there, it's about 20 deg C ~all the time.

It's also somewhat tunable. If the planet is closer to the star, perhaps only the perpetual midnight is a happy spot, and the rest too hot. Or maybe the planet is further out, and only the perpetual noon is nice. And so on.

Of course you also make the point about magnetic field requiring rotation, which is not addressed by this, but the temperature side at least maybe is OK.

Re: Wolf 1069B: Earth-mass planet in the habitable zone of a nearby, low-mass star

#93

Post by mcv »

loxias wrote: post #71
fullstackchris wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At this point it's no longer a matter of if but when extrasolar life will be confirmed There is absolutely no data to confirm this, simply because no matter what equations or variables you throw around, we have no way of knowing the probability of life. We have only earth, and we still don't fully understand how that all worked out. We do not know what (or if!) any filter is present that prevents complex life. From…

I never claimed to have proof, just that it's true. ;-) Personally, it "feels true" that life exists as a undeniable consequence of statistical thermodynamics (see: http://www.englandlab.com/uploads/7/8/0/3/7803054/2013jcpsre... referenced in https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics-theory-o... ). But I know I'm an engineer, not a scientist or mathematician. I'm perfectly comfortable with things being true…

I still have my doubts. I agree it feels true, and yet every "earthlike" planet found so far is nothing like the Earth. How many exoplanets have been found, and how many of those are Earth-size planets with a large moon in the habitable zone of a sun-like star? Because it's entirely possible that all of those are necessary.

Because as inevitable as life may seem, it's also fragile. Practically the entire universe is extremely hostile to it, with the exception of a small layer on the surface of this one planet. Radiation will destroy life, so we need a thick atmosphere and a strong magnetic field, something of the rocky planets in our solar system, only our planet has. The focus is mostly on water and the Goldilocks Zone, but it's entirely possible that there are a lot more requirements to make life possible.

I want to believe there's lots of life out there, but I don't want to be suckered into wishful thinking; evidence does matter.

> I'm perfectly comfortable with things being true even sans iron clad rigorous proof. If you limit your worldview to only that which has been rigorously proven you miss out on a lot of necessary and interesting truths, I think.

A sensible outlook in general. And I frankly think it's true of everybody, even if some people claim otherwise. Most of the human experience is not provable or falsifiable, yet we experience it and believe it.

Re: Wolf 1069B: Earth-mass planet in the habitable zone of a nearby, low-mass star

#94

Post by rich_sasha »

loxias wrote: post #30
bloaf wrote: post #23

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.

One thing that gives me pause for thought: even here on Earth, we are all, likely, descendants of a single organism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_universal_common_ancestor .

It doesn't necessarily mean that the 0-1 creation of life happened exactly once on Earth (maybe it happened many times but the other lineages died out), but I think it makes this argument likely. We see a near-infinite menagerie of different organisms, from archaea and bacteria to reptiles and mammals, each finding its own niche, yet we don't see, on our own planet, any other blueprint for 0-1 life creation. Everything is DNA/RNA and cells, based on carbon and water, etc. And here we know conditions are just right, and we have studied the Earth like no other alien world.

I'd expect, if the universe is in fact teaming with life, that we would see "aliens" on our own planet. But all we see is descendants of LUCA. It seems to me that either "life" is in fact vanishingly rare, or there's lots of other life forms we don't notice (including on Earth). My gut feeling is on the former.

Re: Wolf 1069B: Earth-mass planet in the habitable zone of a nearby, low-mass star

#95

Post by bryanrasmussen »

caf wrote: post #88
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #61

If Science Fiction has taught me anything then going to a planet named Wolf {alphanumeric sequence} is a really great idea that won't get most of your crew horribly killed.

Max Wolf catalogued over a thousand high proper motion stars, which tend to be relatively nearby which I guess makes them popular locations for sci-fi.

thanks, I find it amusing the guy named Max Wolf catalogued over a thousand stars named Wolf.

Re: Wolf 1069B: Earth-mass planet in the habitable zone of a nearby, low-mass star

#96

Post by b800h »

rich_sasha wrote: post #94
loxias wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One thing that gives me pause for thought: even here on Earth, we are all, likely, descendants of a single organism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_universal_common_ancestor . It doesn't necessarily mean that the 0-1 creation of life happened exactly once on Earth (maybe it happened many times but the other lineages died out), but I think it makes this argument likely. We see a near-infinite menagerie of differen…

I think once you have one particular "life framework", it likely makes it super-difficult for other frameworks to develop in any major way.

Re: Wolf 1069B: Earth-mass planet in the habitable zone of a nearby, low-mass star

#97

Post by marginalia_nu »

moloch-hai wrote: post #70
Dylan16807 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about word games, it's about how high the prevalence of 1:1 locking is. Especially when you use words like "all" and "can't spot". Looking at the moons in our solar system is evidence but not definitive.

Looking at the hundreds of moons defines "locked" without qualification to imply 1:1. Mercury is literally the only body in the whole solar system in any sort of more complicated "lock". So, no, it really is about word games.

> Mercury is literally the only body in the whole solar system in any sort of more complicated "lock". So, no, it really is about word games.

How would you even begin to demonstrate this is true? There are so many bodies in the solar system, and we're still fairly frequently discovering new minor planet moon-systems..

Re: Wolf 1069B: Earth-mass planet in the habitable zone of a nearby, low-mass star

#98

Post by rich_sasha »

b800h wrote: post #96
rich_sasha wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing that gives me pause for thought: even here on Earth, we are all, likely, descendants of a single organism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_universal_common_ancestor . It doesn't necessarily mean that the 0-1 creation of life happened exactly once on Earth (maybe it happened many times but the other lineages died out), but I think it makes this argument likely. We see a near-infinite menagerie of differen…

I think once you have one particular "life framework", it likely makes it super-difficult for other frameworks to develop in any major way.

Maybe, but why? We have everything from archaea to mammals living and thriving alongside. Why not DNA life alongside non-DNA life?

Is DNA-based life some kind of cosmic inevitability, like gravity? Or substitute for "DNA" any other common property of all life in Earth.

Re: Wolf 1069B: Earth-mass planet in the habitable zone of a nearby, low-mass star

#99

Post by porcheetoh »

flanked-evergl wrote: post #39
_dark_matter_ wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the resource? Satellite time, compute power, grad students?

All of these are proxies for money.

Money and intention I think. There’s plenty of money, but it must be paired with the intention to use it in such a way. This is what is rare.

Re: Wolf 1069B: Earth-mass planet in the habitable zone of a nearby, low-mass star

#100

Post by moloch-hai »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #97
moloch-hai wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking at the hundreds of moons defines "locked" without qualification to imply 1:1. Mercury is literally the only body in the whole solar system in any sort of more complicated "lock". So, no, it really is about word games.

> Mercury is literally the only body in the whole solar system in any sort of more complicated "lock". So, no, it really is about word games. How would you even begin to demonstrate this is true? There are so many bodies in the solar system, and we're still fairly frequently discovering new minor planet moon-systems..

Find another. It would not change anything.
Post reply on HN