Alien Earths: why life on other worlds would be far weirder than us

[astr0144]

Alien Earths: why life on other worlds would be far weirder than us

And you thought your planet was strange.



Last month, the American Astronomical Society's 223rd meeting featured the announcement of a few breakthroughs: Using the Kepler space observatory, researchers had discovered a planet roughly the mass of Earth orbiting a star beyond our solar system, and with the Hubble telescope they had provided the first detailed look at the weather of a "super Earth" — a planet larger than ours but smaller than Neptune — in our galactic neighborhood. Astronomers found that GJ 1214b, like much of the Earth on any given day, is cloudy.



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These similarities to Earth are tantalizing. But despite them, these planets' respective solar systems look nothing like our own. Rather than circling a big, hot, yellow sun like ours, they spin around small, cool, red stars called red dwarfs. Kind of like Krypton. Although not visible to the naked eye from Earth, these red dwarfs are the most populous stars in the Milky Way. And over the last year, a flurry of research has shown that red dwarf stars are also the best targets in the search for exoplanets that might support life. Right now the chances that a red dwarf star has a planet orbiting in its habitable zone, an astronomical goldilocks area neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water, are better than for a star like our sun. Research also suggests that these planets (and maybe life on them) behave in ways that, from our Earth-centric view, seem bizarre.

"The first planet on which we'll be able to discover signs of life is most likely going to be orbiting a red dwarf," says Courtney Dressing, an astronomy graduate student at Harvard.

Dressing and her advisor David Charbonneau kicked off the series of recent discoveries last February with a look at data from NASA's Kepler telescope. Using what Dressing calls "conservative" estimates for the habitable zone around red dwarfs, they came up with an occurrence rate of 15 percent — meaning that one in six of the most common type of star in the galaxy had a potentially habitable planet. That's no small result, but it proved to be only a starting point.

"I just jumped out of my chair."
"I thought that particular number was pretty low," says Ravi Kopparapu, a researcher at Penn State. He recently published a paper that more than doubles the habitable zone boundaries that Dressing and Charbonneau estimated. "I just jumped out of my chair," Kopparapu recalls. "No matter how many times I did it I got the same number." According to Kopparapu's findings, first submitted in March, around 50 percent of red dwarfs should have a planet in the habitable zone. A consensus was forming: a study by Eric Gaidos at the University of Hawaii study soon came up with a similar number, which also matched a 2012 European paper.

http://www.theverge.com/2014/2/13/5405788/exoplanet-search-for-habitable-planets

[Norval]

Accepting that there are UFOs and ETs, that they are far more advanced technologically, and have the ability to travel vast distances, causes me to wonder why all this misdirection in trying to find any kind of life at all? Then we get told that they haven't found any as yet. How many time have we seen the possibility of life in photos only to have it destroyed right in front of us? 

Then there are all the photos of obvious intelligently designed artifacts that we get told are "natural" or just passed over with out much comment. Why? 

Because we are all ignorant mushrooms "they" think. 

As I live on a world that has been engineered, or as some call it terra formed (some say created), for our existence, it is easy for me to accept that we will find life on other worlds.