Controversial Clues Of Two ‘Goldilocks Planets’ That Might Support Life Are Proven False, Video b4in.org/h5MM Mysteries about controversial signals coming from a dwarf star considered to be a prime target in the search for extraterrestrial life now have been solved in research led by scientists at Penn State University. The scientists have proven, for the first time, that some of the signals, which were suspected to be coming from two planets orbiting the star at a distance where liquid water could potentially exist, actually are coming from events inside the star itself, not from so-called “Goldilocks planets” where conditions are just right for supporting life. The study will be published by the journal Science in its online Science Express issue on July 3, 2014 and in a future print edition of the journal. “This result is exciting because it explains, for the first time, all the previous and somewhat conflicting observations of the intriguing dwarf star Gliese 581, a faint star with less mass than our Sun that is just 20 light years from Earth,” said lead author Paul Robertson, a postdoctoral fellow at Penn State who is affiliated with Penn State’s Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds. As a result of this research, the planets now confirmed to be orbiting this dwarf star total exactly three. “We also have proven that some of the other controversial signals are not coming from two additional proposed Goldilocks planets in the star’s habitable zone, but instead are coming from activity within the star itself,” said Suvrath Mahadevan, an assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State and a coauthor of the research paper. None of the three remaining planets, whose existence the research confirms, are solidly inside this star system’s habitable zone, where liquid water could exist on a rocky planet like Earth. Mysteries about controversial signals coming from a dwarf star considered to be a prime target in the search for extraterrestrial life now have been solved in research led by scientists at Penn State University. The scientists have proven, for the first time, that some of the signals, which were suspected to be coming from two planets orbiting the star at a distance where liquid water could potentially exist, actually are coming from events inside the star itself, not from so-called “Goldilocks planets” where conditions are just right for supporting life. The study is published by the journal Science in its early online Science Express edition on July 3, 2014, and also in a later print edition of the journal. This image shows the location of the six candidate planets that were believed to orbit the red dwarf star Gliese as of 2010. Blue indicates candidate planets in the habitable zone where conditions might be able to support life, orange indicates detections in the too-hot region that is too close to the star, green indicates detections in the too-cold region farther away from the star. More with video and additional illustration b4in.org/h5MM
Posted on: Sat, 05 Jul 2014 00:45:56 +0000
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