Gliese 581g

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jaspie
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01 Oct 2010, 4:33 am

Full story here.
It probably would not be fully confirmed until NASA's TPF or even ESA's Darwin Array program gets final approval.

nodice1996
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01 Oct 2010, 6:04 am

Cool. Now all we need is FTL travel.

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01 Oct 2010, 8:13 am

Four times Earth mass, -10 in summer, Life would be iffy, liquid water, lower gravity, maybe.

Billions wasted when we should be building defenses for the coming Alien Invasion.

Tollorin
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01 Oct 2010, 8:31 am

Inventor wrote:

Four times Earth mass, -10 in summer, Life would be iffy, liquid water, lower gravity, maybe.

Billions wasted when we should be building defenses for the coming Alien Invasion.

If it got a atmosphere, then the surface will be warmer.

In the news yesterday though they said that the planet slowly rotate and always show the same face to it's sun; if so then the temperatures must be rather extremes and make it less likelly to harbor life.

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01 Oct 2010, 9:10 am

Inventor wrote:

Four times Earth mass

Surface gravity depends on mass but also and more importantly on radius. The higher the radius the lower the gravity. As Gliese 581 g has a radius larger than Earth the gravity at its surface will not be 4g, which would be problematic for some (but by no means all) life, but somewhere under 2g, which is survivable indefinitely even for puny Earth creatures.

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01 Oct 2010, 11:39 am

According to articles I've been able to track down, the surface gravity should be slightly over 1g - uncomfortable, perhaps, but hardly crippling. The "average temperature" is a bit misleading, as the planet seems to be tidally locked to Gliese 581, leaving one side in perpetual noon and the other in perpetual night. There may be a livable band between the two, if your definition of "livable" includes perpetual reddened twilight (the star is a red dwarf, after all).

Looks like we might have found the homeworld of Niven's chirpsithra, from the "Draco's Tavern" stories (they live on planets like Gliese 581g, and visit other worlds only for trade and tourism, although they also run an interstellar STL liner service carrying other species between the stars - chirps are sufficiently long-lived to fly the craft, passengers go in coldsleep). Nothing to worry about, unless we next find an F-class star with a humid planet about the same size as Gliese 581g - that could be the Kzin homeworld...

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01 Oct 2010, 12:38 pm

Red dwarf star in a tidally locked orbit, these types of stars are likely to flare up too, so if there was life its been long dead from those flares

Last edited by Friskeygirl on 01 Oct 2010, 2:25 pm, edited 1 time in total.

ruveyn
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01 Oct 2010, 1:35 pm

nodice1996 wrote:

Cool. Now all we need is FTL travel.

Don't hold your breath for that to happen.

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01 Oct 2010, 2:12 pm

DeaconBlues wrote:

Average temperature is also normally calculated as the surface temperature as it would be without an atmosphere as well. You would need to take an atmosphere into account to get a real temperature. For all we know, heat from the hot side could be carried over to the cold side due to weather patterns. Though that's really a radical speculation.

ruveyn
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01 Oct 2010, 2:18 pm

DeaconBlues wrote:

Looks like we might have found the homeworld of Niven's chirpsithra, from the "Draco's Tavern" stories (they live on planets like Gliese 581g, and visit other worlds only for trade and tourism, although they also run an interstellar STL liner service carrying other species between the stars - chirps are sufficiently long-lived to fly the craft, passengers go in coldsleep). Nothing to worry about, unless we next find an F-class star with a humid planet about the same size as Gliese 581g - that could be the Kzin homeworld...

Not so fast. We don't know (yet) if anything lives on this planet.

ruveyn

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01 Oct 2010, 3:45 pm

Friskeygirl wrote:

Red dwarf star in a tidally locked orbit, these types of stars are likely to flare up too, so if there was life its been long dead from those flares

Gliese 581 isn't known to flare, so far as I can find. At least not UV Ceti style uberflares. Where there's hope there's life. :lol:

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graywyvern
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09 Oct 2010, 2:04 pm

Jono wrote:

the scientific consensus has shifted appreciably just since the 90's, e.g. http://tinyurl.com/2frj99x

now red dwarf planets with enough atmosphere are thought to be highly suitable for life.

the actual discoverers' paper is here: http://arxiv4.library.cornell.edu/abs/1009.5733

on a side note, a lot of the blog entries about "Zarmina's World" erroneously use the picture of a globe with a polar cap at the top. needless to say, it would be on the dark side as pictured here:

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Qh8q2tFWYKs/T ... urelia.jpg

this is from an excellent BBC TV series that explored two hypothetical planets ("Aurelia" & "Blue Moon") & the life they might harbor; it can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNeTxPgGJ7I Aurelia is the one that resembles the planet we have just discovered.

m.

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Last edited by graywyvern on 12 Oct 2010, 3:05 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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12 Oct 2010, 12:59 pm

Friskeygirl wrote:

Red dwarf star in a tidally locked orbit, these types of stars are likely to flare up too, so if there was life its been long dead from those flares

Wouldn't life on the dark side of the planet be safe from said flare's?

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12 Oct 2010, 3:01 pm

Titangeek wrote:

Friskeygirl wrote:

Red dwarf star in a tidally locked orbit, these types of stars are likely to flare up too, so if there was life its been long dead from those flares

Wouldn't life on the dark side of the planet be safe from said flare's?

Good question. I think it might be.

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12 Oct 2010, 3:53 pm

graywyvern wrote:

Jono wrote:

Thanks for the links. With regards to that Youtube video, I just get the message "This video contains content from National Geographic, who has blocked it in your country on copyright grounds." I think I can't watch that video, sorry.

graywyvern
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12 Oct 2010, 8:35 pm

Jono wrote:

With regards to that Youtube video, I just get the message "This video contains content from National Geographic, who has blocked it in your country on copyright grounds." I think I can't watch that video, sorry.

maybe http://www.vidbuzz.net/play.php?vid=9693

or

http://www.vbox7.com/play:1e2cb138

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