Younger sibling to our sun's solar system has been detected

[Omaha Steve]

Source: MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS (via OWH)

WASHINGTON — For the first time, astronomers think they've found evidence of an alien solar system around a star close enough to Earth to be visible to the naked eye.

They say that at least one and probably three or more planets are orbiting the star Epsilon Eridani, 10.5 light-years — about 63 trillion miles — from Earth. Only eight stars are closer.

The host star, slightly smaller and cooler than our sun, is in the constellation Eridanus — the name of a mythological river — near Orion in the northern sky.


At least one and probably three or more planets are orbiting the star Epsilon Eridani, 10.5 light-years — about 63 trillion miles — from Earth.

Epsilon Eridani is much younger than the sun — about 850 million years old, compared with 4.5 billion years for our system.



Read more: http://www.omaha.com/index.php?u_page=1100&u_sid=10476610

[zelta gaisma]

1. oooooo pretty :D

[RaleighNCDUer]

30. Nice place to visit - but you wouldn't want to live there.

Let it cook for another couple billion years.

[roguevalley]

34. and what a fine little thing it is!

[NRaleighLiberal]

2. Would hate to do this to them, but perhaps Bush/McCain supporters would like a trip?

[BrklynLiberal]

3. Tell them all about this great book called "To Serve Man"

[Omaha Steve]

6. Marta and I met Lloyd Bochner and got his autograph on that episode

Antoinette Bower, Frank Aletter and Lloyd Bochner

Dial up warning on the TZCon links for photos.

TZ Convention 2002: http://www.steveandmarta.com/graveyards/tzcon2002.htm

TZ Convention 2004: http://www.steveandmarta.com/graveyards/tzcon2004.htm

We have already lost several friends from the Conventions including Lloyd.

OS

[BrklynLiberal]

7. That is sooooooo cool.

When you keep seeing the shows on TV, these guys are still young, you forget how old they must really be.

[BrklynLiberal]

9. Wow! Your sites are fantastic. Obviously you two are great film buffs.

I do remember seeing lots of those TV shows...back in the days of mostly Black and White TV.
It must have been so amazing to meet all those people...and to be able to talk to them about all the stuff you
had seen them in.

Thanks again for those links. I had fun looking thru them...

[sce56]

12. That is one of my favorites along with William Shatner in Nightmare at 20,000 Feet

[Parche]

32. "Its A Cookbook"

:woohoo: :hi:

[FREEWILL56]

10. NO, NO, NO. I don't want to be accused of

polluting the rest of the universe with our garbage.

[baldguy]

27. Yeah, we know what happens then.

[VaYallaDawg]

28. I think that's where some of them came from in the first place n/t

[Darkseid69]

4. Wasn't....

Epsilon Eridani the star system for Vulcan in Star Trek? Paging Mr. Spock!

http://gizmodo.com/5070216/scientists-claiming-planet-vulcan-may-exist-dont-have-pointy-ears

[muriel_volestrangler]

25. Maybe - or maybe that was 40 Eridani

Astronomers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory have recently concluded that the upcoming planet-finding mission, SIM PlanetQuest, would be able to detect an Earth-like planet around the star 40 Eridani, a planet familiar to "Star Trek" fans as "Vulcan." 40 Eridani, a triple-star system 16 light-years from Earth, includes a red-orange K dwarf star slightly smaller and cooler than our sun. Vulcan is thought to orbit that dwarf star, called 40 Eridani A.

When pondering the idea that SIM might be able to detect Vulcan, astronomer Dr. Angelle Tanner at Caltech had two questions: Can a planet form around 40 Eridani A? Can SIM detect such a planet? She consulted a planetary theorist, Dr. Sean Raymond of the University of Colorado, Boulder. "Since the three members of the triple star system are so far away from each other , I see no reason why an Earth-mass planet would not be able to form around the primary star, 40 Eridani A," he said.

If Vulcan life were to exist on the planet, the orbit of the planet would have to lie in a sweet spot around the star where liquid water could be present on its surface. Water is an essential ingredient for any organism to live long and prosper. For 40 Eridani A, this spot, or "habitable zone," is 0.6 astronomical units from the star. That means Vulcans would get to celebrate a birthday about every six months.
...
When asked what life would be like on Vulcan, Tanner speculated that the inhabitants might be pale. "A K dwarf star emits its light at wavelengths which are a bit redder compared to those from the sun, so I wonder whether it's harder to get a tan there," she said.

http://planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov/news/planetVulcan.cfm

And, from Gene Rodenberry himself:

"Star Trek 2" by James Blish (Bantam, 1968) and "Star Trek Maps" by Jeff Maynard and others (Bantam, 1980) name the star 40 Eridani as Vulcan's sun. "The Star Trek Spaceflight Chronology" by Stan and Fred Goldstein (Pocket, 1980) cites Epsilon Eridani instead.

We prefer the identification of 40 Eridani as Vulcan's sun because of what we have learned about both stars at Mount Wilson. The HK Project takes its name from the violet H and K lines of calcium, both sensitive tracers of stellar magnetism. It turns out that the average level of magnetic activity inferred from the H and K absorptions relates to a star's age; young stars tend to be more active than old ones (Sky & Telescope: December 1990, page 589). The HK observations suggest that 40 Eridani is 4 billion years old, about the same age as the Sun. In contrast, Epsilon Eridani is barely 1 billion years old.

Based on the history of life on Earth, life on any planet around Epsilon Eridani would not have had time to evolve beyond the level of bacteria. On the other hand, an intelligent civilization could have evolved over the aeons on a planet circling 40 Eridani. So the latter is the more likely Vulcan sun.

SALLIE BALIUNAS
ROBERT DONAHUE
GEORGE NASSIOPOULOS
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
Cambridge, MA
GENE RODDENBERRY
Paramount Pictures Corp.
Los Angeles, CA

http://www.projectrho.com/vulsun.htm

[slampoet]

5. Yet this younger solar system STILL has faster download speeds than in the USA

[Indenturedebtor]

8. Am I way off base here or would it take about 250,000 years to get there

using an Apollo rocket?

[NeedleCast]

39. MUCH MUCH Longer than that at our current speeds

Consider that the speed of light in almost 300 million meters per second in a vacuum and it would take light from earth 10.5 light years to reach that solar system.

Edit: Basically, that means you'd need to be traveling at a speed relative to light for 10.5 years to get there. Our current space vehicles travel at a tiny fraction of that speed.

[Indenturedebtor]

43. Longer than 250k years???!?!!

Yikes :(

[CRF450]

44. I read on wikipedia about the Voyager 1 space probe...

Its said that with its current speed, it will take around 400,000 years for it to reach one of the closer stars thats around 5 light years away. Right now its over 14 light hours away.

[CRF450]

45. Oh BTW, the speed its moving at is 38,400mph

[bjobotts]

11. Don't be stupid.Earth is only 6000yrs old.Bible doesn't mention Epsilon so its not there

[DUlover2909]

20. You are soooo wrong!

The whole universe is only 6000 years old. The universe blinked into existence as it was 6000 years ago and the light from the galaxies further than 6000 light years away was magically placed within 6000 light years of Earth as were the fossils and the carbon 14 isotope found in organic material. Don't bother yourself with thinking about other isotopes like those of thorium or uranium, because they too came into existence during the latter portions of their half-lives just to test our faith in writings written only a few years after the beginning of the universe by totally ignorant, uneducated, and recently created human beings.

DUH!

[BearSquirrel2]

24. Don't be modest ...

Don't be modest. That light and those fossils were placed there by the devil to deceieve you into disbelieving god's plan.

[saigon68]

41. Asswipes

[Zhade]

13. SCIENCE IS SO AWESOME!

Is this in the "Goldilocks" zone?

[Duppers]

17. good question. nt

nt

[eridani]

14. I knew it!! I knew it!! n/t

[Hissyspit]

15. Klaatu Barada Niktu! Klaatu Barada Niktu!

[Connonym]

16. that's just a trick by the devil

to make you believe that the earth is the only thing in the universe, sorta like how the dino bones and carbon dating are tricks to make you believe the earth is older than 6000 years. Don't be fooled! Love, Sarah ;-) Palin

[Control-Z]

18. That pic is not the real McCoy, is it?

It appears modeled. Either way, it is still just beautiful.

[DRoseDARs]

22. That's still decades away from being possible. So far, only one extrasolar planet has been...

..."photographed" "directly" by astronomers. It's a gas giant several times larger than our own Jupiter. This was announced in October, but really isn't all that interesting because it was a speck - a picture only nerds could love (^_^) - the rest of the non-scientific community could give a fuck. They managed to blot out the glaring light of the host star and caught the light reflecting off the gas giant.

Things you and I would recognize as photographs (or rather, like something we get to see after the data is compiled into useful visual information from Hubble) is still decades away from reality. Because of the great distances involved and how small planets really are, the most likely method to capture them on film (not really on film; all digital) will be setting up multiple optical telescopes (like mini Hubbles) either in a field similar to the Earth-bound VLA or Very Large Array in New Mexico


(Note:These are radio telescopes, not optical telescopes)

but placed in the airless environment of Earth's moon (preferably on the dark side to completely cut out Earthglare, the bane of Hubble's existence), or in a synchronized orbital field at one of the 5 Lagrange points of Earth



L1 and L2 are the most accessible and L3 is the least (being on the exact opposite side of Sol from Earth) and all three would require constant orbital corrections to counter gravitational effects: Luna for L1 and L2 and other planets on L3. L4 and L5 are likewise susceptible to the pull of other planets, but don't have to deal with the influence of Earth's moon, with added bonus of not having to deal with any potential Earthglare like L1 and L2.

This type of multiple space telescope setup is called either planetary interferometry or space interferometry, depending on who you ask. NASA likes the second version.

[RedCloud]

29. How much larger before it ignites?

Do we really need something that close becoming a sun? I mean from the radiation it would emit.

[ArbustoBuster]

35. The lower limit for the mass of a star is generally...

...eight percent of the mass of our Sun. That's about 80 times the mass of Jupiter. Any smaller than this, and the star can't "light up" and begin to fuse its hydrogen into helium.

More science data here: http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/astronomy/BrownDwarf.html

(Can you tell I love astronomy? :) )

[Control-Z]

37. Thanks for the full explanation.

Had I given it a little thought in the first place, I would not be in the embarrassing position I find myself. :blush:

[CRF450]

46. Think of it this way, if our galaxy was scaled down to 132km

Our whole solar system would be 2mm wide.

[Bear down under]

23. It's an artist's impression

None of the extrasolar planets discovered so far has actually been seen -- they are discovered by calculating the effect of their gravity on the motion of the star concerned.

http://www.astro.uiuc.edu/~kaler/sow/pp.html

And here is Professor Kaler's discussion of the Epsilon Eridani planets:

http://www.astro.uiuc.edu/~kaler/sow/epseri.html

[Ian David]

26. It's an artist's conception. n/t

[NeedleCast]

40. It is an artistic rendition

Not the real deal.

With our current technology, planets in extra-solar systems are detected by a (very slight) dimming of the star they orbit as they pass in front of the star. We can also get some vauge measure of their composition when the extra-solar planets do this (for example, tell if the planet is rockey like earth, or a gas giant like Saturn).

[Name removed]

19. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Xithras]

21. It's a shame they can't find one of the suns REAL siblings.

Our sun ignited in a stellar nursery and in all probability has several "sibling" stars that developed out of the same nebula at the same time. Since they would have the same age, starting composition, and probably be of similar size, our suns own sibling stars would be excellent candidates for finding extrasolar life. In fact, they'd probably be the best candidates for finding life similar to what we see on our own planet.

The problem is that our sun and its siblings have completed more than 20 revolutions around the galactic core and are now so spread out that there's no real way to identify them.

[sofa king]

31. I bet there will be a way to find them.

Each one of those stars is like a giant spectrometer buzzing away in the sky, and they should all be burning along a predictable series of wavelengths... right?

No, I don't really know what I'm talking about.

[Xithras]

33. Sure, but it's a needle in a stack of 400 billion needles.

And after 20 revolutions, those siblings could be on the other side of the galaxy at the moment. Even if they're visible, with up to 400 billion stars in the galaxy, scanning even one star a second (a feat that we cannot accomplish currently) would take over 12,000 years to complete. The galaxy is a BIG place, and our suns siblings have had 5 billion years to spread out.

But if we COULD find them! It's now thought that the first life appeared on Earth only a few hundred million years after the planet formed, during a period when the stars from the stellar nursery would have still been nearby and hurling rocks at each other. We can tell, by comparing the makeup of our solar system to other stellar nurseries in existence today, that our sun probably started out in a multi-star nebula and that the other stars would have probably been similar in size and makeup to our own.

Those stars COULD be surrounded by empty space, or giant Jupiter clones, or cold and rocky Mars lookalikes. Our own solar system, with all of its advantages, only managed to sustainably create complex life once in twelve tries (counting planets and plutoids). The odds that we'd find complex life around our suns siblings is small, and the odds that we'd find anything like Earth is almost zero, but these odds are astronomically higher than our chances of finding life just by blindly poking around.

[AngryAmish]

36. If the goal is to find life, finding the suns siblings is irrelevant

ASSUMING: (and we all know where that gets us)

Liquid water is necessary for life and a nearby gas giant is also necessary (to attract asteroids, comets et al. that would wipe out life)
a earth-like orbit in the same general vicinity of the galaxy (too much ionizing radiation near the center of the Milky Way) could well support advanced civilization. Amino acids want to form proteins. Proteins, once formed, want to sustain themselves.

OK, maybe that is a bit of a stretch. But if chemistry is the same everywhere, I think if a planet can get in a similar orbit that us near a gas giant then life may occur and last long enough for intelligence to happen.

[Xithras]

38. Ah, but the chemistry is not the same everywhere.

Complex life requires access to many elements that are only formed in the wake of a supernova and only exist among second and third generation star systems. The makeup of the stellar nursery directly determines the makeup of the stars and planetary systems it spawns, which in turn controls the elements available for the formation of life. Could you imagine, for example, what would happen in a star system formed from a nebula lacking in iron? Or how about a stellar nursery that also forms supergiants, which generate strong solar winds that blow lighter elements (like hydrogen) out of its smaller neighboring siblings?

Our sun formed in a very favorable environment, and it's safe to assume that the other stars formed from the same nebula shared in the same benefits. With the same chemical makeup, those stars have a higher chance of sustaining life. Since those stars were close to ours when life appeared here, they would have been subject to the same conditions that led to the creation of the first protein chains on our own planet. The odds that our sibling stars have life are substantially higher than that of any random star.

[Hawkowl]

42. Vulcan

It is the star that Vulcan orbits in the Star Trek universe. Very cool.