Astronomers have discovered 85 possible planets outside our solar system with temperatures potentially cool enough to sustain life.
These exoplanet candidates are similar in size to Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune, and were discovered using data from Nasa’s Transitioning Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS).
TESS enables scientists to observe dips in the brightness of stars, known as transits, caused by objects passing in front of them.
Typically, at least three transits need to be seen to discover an exoplanet in this way, in order to determine how long they take to orbit their star.
But are they also hip and rad?
dammit, there’s only one comment here and it’s a better version of the joke i was gonna make.
They groovy
Remember it’s only a possibility these planets are cool. They’re likely lame.
Hell yeah, I’d hate to move to a lame ass planet when we fuck up this one. Hopefully they’ve got like, Dino sharks or something
Will they be warm enough to sustain life?
I think the idea here with not mentioning too cold is that rocky planets (at least those we can find) are usually relatively close to the stars they orbit (unless there was a realignment event in the solar system that knocks one to a larger orbit), and can have a lot of strong tidal forces and radiation that heat up the planet.
Within the range most rocky planets fall, too hot is much more common than too cold, and models and data indicate that even snowball exoplanets can have some far-from-ocean land regions that host liquid water, extending the range even further.
Just look at our own solar system for an idea of the possible spread, assuming we are relatively average (which so far seems to be the case). We have 2 uninhabitable hot planets, two not too hot and not too cold (mars may not have atmosphere, but there’s evidence of liquid water, maybe even somewhat recently, putting it in the “not too cold” category.) and none that are too cold (moons yes, rocky planets no). Where we would commonly get “too cold”, on the outer edge of the habitable zone for that star type, we usually see gas giants, just due to how solar systems form.
(When solar systems are forming, there is a cloud of dust and gas that starts to rotate, and collapse toward the center. The disk of material outside of the center will mostly become planets, and the rotational energy eventually turns into the orbital momentum. When the star finally amasses enough material to ignite, a wave of radiation goes out in all directions, pushing the gas, but not as much of the dust and rock, outward, to right around the edge of the likely habitable zone. Planetoids out where the gas wasn’t blown away form gas giants, those within the wave form rocky planets.)
Was one of them earth?
Now that I understand the infinite nature of the universe, I am certain that we are not the only life, and existence is slightly less mysterious.
