Graphic Source: Me

The world today is quite different in some ways than it was even 30 years ago. The technological progress we have made in some areas has revolutionized different fields of science. For the longest time, Mount Palomar in California contained the biggest telescope on earth. This monster scope has a mirror with a diameter of 200 inches. It was thought, at the time it was built, that this would be the biggest reflecting telescope ever able to be made. The rational was that any mirror bigger than this would be too heavy to move and would sag. Little did those builders know that colossal scopes would be created that would change our ideas of the mechanics of the heavens.

The United States has NASA which controls much of the civilian entry and exit into space along with many of the observational instruments. The Hubble telescope is no where as big as the one on Mount Palomar, but because of it's strategic location in space, it is capable of better seeing. Being outside the earth's atmosphere makes the viewing of the heavens much clearer since the turbulent air currents are not present along with clouds and such. There are new types of devices that attach to earthly optics that can now avoid this turbulent viewing by bending the mirrors of these scopes thousands of times a second to match the bending of the atmosphere above the scope. These devices are of course computer controlled because no human would be able to make these adjustments so quickly.

Europe also has their equivalent of NASA, it is the European Space Agency. It seems that this agency is growing in leaps and bounds. It is every bit as capable as NASA for launching payloads and sometimes we even use them to launch some of our projects. The europeans have a host of telescopes that they control that are world class. While some may not be as big as even the 200 inch scope at Palomar, they are more advanced and because of their placement and attachments, they have better viewing. One such scope is in the European Southern Observatory. It is a 3.6 meter instrument (142 inches +) and has a HARPS spectrograph fitted to it. You may wonder why I am going into such detail here in an article that is written basically for lay people, but you will understand when you get to the next paragraph.

The instrument that I spoke of above has discovered that a nearby star system has three Neptune size planets revolving around a sun that is slightly smaller than our own. It is believed that the planet closest to the sun is rocky. The two inner most planets are probably too close to their sun to sustain life but here is the good part. The third planet from the sun (no I am not talking about Earth which is also the third planet from it's sun) is in the proper position to sustain life if it exists there. As far as I know, this is the first time we have found a planet in such a favorable position. In our solar system a 150 pound person would only weigh 168.7 pounds on Neptune so gravity doesn't seem to be a problem, but the suggested masses of these planets is guessed at 10 to 18 time that of earth. The europeans claim that the HARPS machine is currently the world's foremost planet finding machine. It is claimed by some that life on earth came from collisions with asteroids and comets. This other system has an asteroid belt of it's own, making the discovery even that much more intriguing. The Planetary System is known as HD 69830. It is located 41 light-years away towards the constellation of Puppis.

European scientists speculate that the third planet in HD 69830 contains a rock ice core which would make it quite different than the earth's molten core. Measurements indicate that this system is quite stable as is our own. So is there a chance that there may be some sort of life on this planet? Well there could be bacteria or some sort of microscopic life. The fact that the planet has an icy rock core and not a hot one does seem to make the odds for life much more unfavorable as does the mass of the planet if it is correct. Gravity is proportional to mass thus if a body has 10 times the mass, then gravity should be 10 times as much. But wait a second. We have always believed this and it hasn't been challenged since Newton discovered gravity. But what if there is a type of matter on that planet that we are not familiar with, will gravity act the same way? We really don't understand gravity as well as we should.

When we look at life, we tend to think of it in terms of life on this planet. This is not a good idea because life could be far more diversified than we ever suspect. Why life may not even be carbon based on a different planet in a different solar system. It might not even be carbon based on a different planet in our solar system. We could walk right by a life form on a different planet and not even recognize it as being alive. Life on a world such as the one in HD 69830 might be so alien to us that we would have no way to even communicate if we found rational beings. No mention was made of water, but since ice was mentioned, it could be water ice. On the other hand it could be some other form of ice that is much less friendly to life. I guess we will just have to wait for better instruments and faster space probes to find out the true story of this system. The release from the European Southern Observatory was dated 18 May, 2006.