Space/Planets

I am writing this article on the latest version of IBM Symphony. I decided to test it out. It is a jazzed up version of Open Office. It looks great, feels good and best of all it is free.

Seager is the science team lead for the Extrasolar Planet Characterizer, a future exoplanet mission concept.
Graphic Source: NASA

Scientists are hell bent on finding other “Earths”. It seems that they are putting a disproportionate amount of resources into this quest. Let's face it, with all the billions upon billions of stars out there, there has to be other earth type planets. I can't help but feel that just because a planet is not earth like, doesn't mean that there is no life on it. So is this really a hunt for life, or is it just a hunt for a planet that looks like ours? Hunting for an earth like planet seems to be the answer to whether life could have evolved there as here, to some scientists. I would like to know this, if we do find earth like planets and they are orbiting stars that are different than our own sun, will scientists feel that they are the same? Could there be a different component in the type of radiation given off by a different type of sun?

Right now we believe that stars evolve the same way, that there is a pattern to their development. I am not talking about something like a pulsar which are highly magnetized rotating neutron stars, but I am talking about your run of the mill stars that fall into the types of O,B,A,F,G,K, and M. These stars are classified by decreasing temperatures. Here is a problem that I have with this. Recently some scientists stated that the theory that the sun operates on a fusion process may be wrong, because they calculated that the material in our sun should have been used up by now if that were so. I haven't heard much more about this, but I am wondering if this has been swept under the rug, because it doesn't fit in with current theories. This has happened so many times in different fields of science. If this is true then they state that the sun may be a lot older than we think and thus the Earth could also be a lot older than currently thought.

Artist's Conception of System, Gliese 581
Graphic Source: NASA

What does this have to do with searching for earth like planets you are thinking? Well if we are looking for planets that are a lot older than thought, some of them may have already met their demise. An example of this could be the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. We should try and figure the mass there, to determine if an earth like planet existed in that area. Why would we want to do this? That area could be where life started in this solar system. If the search for earth like planets is really a search to see if life like ours could exist somewhere else, I think that this is important, don't you? The accepted theory is that there was no planet there, but a bunch of smaller bodies formed that have been in collision causing the smaller pieces. Does this mean that this theory is correct? Absolutely not. No one really knows if a planet existed between Mars and Jupiter or just a bunch of rocks, but it would be interesting to get an answer. Doesn't it seem a little strange that in between the eight planets and Pluto, that is the only place that these bodies would have formed, according to science? If these things were being formed, why don't they appear in many different areas?

So far the smallest planet found is still 1.9 times the size of Earth. Not only that, but it is orbiting a very weak dwarf star and is very close to it. I guess this could mean that it might be getting too much radiation from the star due to its close proximity, or so they would think. Scientists have also found another planet in the same system that is about seven times the size of earth. They are very excited about this because it puts this planet into what they term the “habitable zone”. If that planet has seven times the gravity, if life exists on it in the form of animals or even intelligent life, than it would have to be pretty strong. Life on a heavy gravity planet would be much different than life on earth, due to that fact that it would take much more strength just to move. You would not want to meet one of these guys in a fight, if they existed. A scientist said about the find, “It really gives us confidence that we're going to be finding planets rather than a null result. The giant planets do not wipe out all the small planets. That's a great discovery."

Earth Seen From Mars
Photo Source: NASA

I am not entirely sure what the scientist meant when he said that the giant planets do not wipe out the small planets? Who ever thought that they did? Anyway a MIT scientist had this to say about the discovery, “"It's not a huge surprise, but it's taking us down the inevitable path to finding planets like Earth. . . . It's just a matter of time." I would wonder how any scientist could come to any other conclusion? So far, except for one exception that I know about, these planets are not seen directly and are detected because the star that they circle around registers a wobble from their gravitational pull, or by other non line of sight means. This means that a so called planet could turn out to be a heavenly body of a different sort than expected. It could turn out that at least some were nothing more than big rock circling a star. On the other hand maybe they might be some sort of compressed gas balls. I think that one thing that we have to keep in mind is that we have very limited experience with planets having seen only the ones in our own solar system and not having a very complete knowledge of even some of these.

It is claimed that soon we will be able to get a direct view of extra solar planets as we launch new telescopes that are more powerful. If this is true than it will change things enormously. Oceans could become visible along with land masses. Will some planets have a lot of surface water? Again it stands to reason that with all those stars out there that this has to happen. The question is will they be common or rare? Will we perhaps find liquid seas that are not filled with water at all, but with something else and will there be life in them? Will it turn out that we will discover life so different that we wouldn't even recognize it as life at first? I guess that anything is possible when we are talking in such vast numbers as we are here. If we were to go down to the beach and count the number of grains of sand, they would be far less than the number of stars in the universe.

Is it worth devoting a good portion of our resources to look for Earth like planets? I guess it depends on how you look at it. As I said, I think that finding any planet is interesting and even this business about a “habitable zone” might not apply if a race like ours lived inside a planet and not on the surface. So who knows what we will find and where it will be? Of course we will need a powerful form of space travel before we can come to any conclusions.

By the way I have to discontinue using IBM Symphony, it is in Beta and the cut and paste feature didn't work.