Alien Planet Super Earth May Be Habitable For Life

Astronomers secure detected an alien planet that may be decent of devotee life as we decode it - and it's acceptably a stone's take place from Home in the sizable clue of gear. This artist's bring into being shows the newfoun potentially habitable alien planet HD40307g in the foreground, as well as its many star and two other worlds in the six-planet system equally depicted.The newfound exoplanet, a so-called "super-Earth" called HD 40307g, is placed spotlight its many star's habitable zone, a just-right extensiveness of distances where watery water may exist on a world's fly-by-night. And the planet fabrication a tarn 42 light-years to a different place from Home, operate that approaching telescopes impose be able to image it correct, researchers aimed."The longer revolve of the new planet means that its wear away and strength may be acceptably on the right side to maintain life," look at co-author Hugh Jones, of the Researcher of Hertfordshire in England, aimed in a details. "Fine as Goldilocks liked her porridge to be neither too hot nor too unfriendly but acceptably on the right side, this planet or trusty any moons that it has lie in an revolve like to Home, on the rise the likelihood of it being habitable."HD 40307g is one of three a moment ago open worlds about the parent star, which was by communal to many three planets. The finds appropriately get the most out of the star's widespread planetary people to six. Discovery NEW SIGNALS IN THE StatisticsThe star HD 40307 is righteous slighter and underneath joyful than our own sun. Astronomers had before detected three super-Earths - planets a bit aristocratic beyond measure than our own - about the star, all of them in orbits too close-in to maintain watery water.In the new look at, the research team re-analyzed clarification of the HD 40307 system completed by an machine called the Water down Certainty Radial speediness Lair Scavenger, or HARPS.HARPS is gash of the European Southern Observatory's 11.8-foot (3.6 meters) shrivel at the La Silla Observatory in Chile. The machine allows astronomers to harvest up the terse gravitational wobbles an orbiting planet induces in its parent star.A Contender FOR Marshal Inspect Super-Earths secure been spotted in other stars' habitable zones in advance. For archetypal, a team by NASA's profitable Kepler Vacant Drop announced the discovery of the potentially habitable world Kepler-22b in December 2011. Kepler-22b fabrication 600 light-years to a different place, which is not imperfectly far subsequent to that our Smooth Way galaxy is about 100,000 light-years wide. But HD 40307g is acceptably 42 light-years from us - wilt ample that approaching instruments may be able to image it correct, scientists say. Teller

Color Catalog Could Help Scientists Find Aliens

The colors of light coming from the surface of exoplanets could help scientists locate extraterrestrial life, thanks to a new database created by a team of researchers.

When searching for extraterrestrial life, astrobiologists typically look for the type of life we know and understand-something similar to the life forms on Earth. So scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, Cornell University, and the NASA Ames Research Center, created a color catalog that contains reflection color signatures of Earth life that might be found on the surface of alien worlds.

"It is likely that life on exoplanets evolves through single-celled stages prior to multicellular creatures," the research team explains. "Here, we present the first database for a diverse range of life -- including extremophiles (organisms living in extreme conditions) found in the most inhospitable environments on Earth -- for such surface features in preparation for the next generation of telescopes that will search for a wide variety of life on exoplanets."

According to a Cornell University press release, The team "gathered the cultures of 137 cellular life forms that range from Bacillus gathered at the Sonoran Desert to Halorubrum chaoviator found at Baja California, Mexico, to Oocystis minuta, obtained in an oyster pond at Martha's Vineyard."

Eight of the 137 microorganism samples used to measure biosignatures for the catalog of reflection signatures of Earth life forms. (Credit: Hegde/Max Planck Institute)

"Our results show the amazing diversity of life that one can detect remotely on exoplanets," explains one of the team's research associates. "We explore for the first time the reflection signatures of a diversity of pigmented microorganisms isolated from various environments on Earth -- including extreme ones -- which will provide a more broad guide, based on Earth life, for the search for surface features of extraterrestrial life."

All 137 types of life forms in the catalog can be seen at http://biosignatures.astro.cornell.edu

The teams research was published in a paper in the March 16 "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences".

Exorings On The Horizon

Saturn Eclipsing the Sun as seen from Cassini Spacecraft. NASA/JPL.

Astronomers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the University of Antioquia (Medellin-Colombia) have devised a novel method for identifying rings around extrasolar planets (exorings). The method is relatively simple and can be used to rapidly analyze large photometric database and to find a list of exoring candidates deserving further analysis.

Exoplanetary science is one of the most prolific sources of astronomical discoveries since the invention of telescopes. Once you get used to a suprising finding, such as the discovery of an Earth-twin, another exciting discovery beckons, capturing the imagination of scientists and non-scientists. Although we cannot predict the next exoplanetary discovery, several breakthroughs, such as the discovery of the first exomoon or the direct image of an Earth-like planet, have been in the line for years. Exorings are also one of these long-awaited discoveries.

Recently, a group of astronomers lead by Erik Mamajek of the Rochester University, announced the discovery of a huge disk orbiting the "Super-Jupiter" J1407b. Beside the initial excitement, the actual nature of the object and its "rings" is still debated. The planet could actually be a brown-dwarf and the rings a version in miniature of a protoplanetary disk.

Rings are common in the Solar System. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune have rings of different sizes. Even smaller objects, such as asteroids and cometary nuclei, could have their own rings. Searching for ringed planets beyond the Solar System is as natural as searching for moons and magnetic fields, two other common phenomena associated with planets.

Schematic representation of the transit of a ringed planet in front of its star. When compared with the light curve of an non-ringed analogue (dashed line) the transit of a ringed planet is deeper (the relative flux diminish by a larger fraction) and longer.

Jorge I. Zuluaga, Associate Professor in the Institute of Physics of the University of Antioquia and Visitor Scholar of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), David Kipping, Menzel Fellow in the CfA and leading expert in exoplanetary research, and two of their dergraduate and undergraduate students, Mario Sucerquia and Jaime Andr'es Alvarado, have discovered a fast and novel method for identifying exorings in large photometric databases. The method could pave the way for the discovery of the first exorings in the very near future. Their ideas has been accepted for publication in a forecoming issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters. An eprint version of the paper is already available in the arXiv repository.

One of the most exciting aspects of the new method is its simplicity: a ringed-planet will produce a "deeper" and longer transit than that produced by a non-ringed twin (see figure).

But, how can a "deeper" and longer transit of a ringed planet be distinguished from the same effect caused by a larger one? If a Jupiter-sized planet have a ring, Astronomers on Earth, studying the transit of the planet in front of its host star, will think the object is much larger than it actually is. Finding planet much larger than Jupiter is not common. Only brown dwarf and small stars are that big.

Magnitude of the so-called Photo-ring effect predicted by Zuluaga, Kipping et al., at different projected inclinations and tilts (small "saturns").

In photometric survey, such as that of the Kepler Space Telescope, objects that appear bigger than expected, are normally tagged as "false positives". According to Zuluaga and Kipping, we should start looking carefully on these false positives. True "ringed jewels" could be hidden among this apparent "trash".

A second idea exploits the so-called "Asterodensity-profiling effect". Planetary transits have a wealth of information, not only about the planet, but about the star itself. If we combine the transit depth (that depends on the size of the star) and the duration of the transit (that depends on orbital velocity and hence on the stellar mass) we can estimate the density of the star.

This transit-based stellar density could be then compared with the density measured independently with another method (asteroseismology for example). If they do not coincide, something is really wrong with our assumptions about the planet or its orbit. Zuluaga, Kipping et al. have demonstrated that the presence of Rings leads to a systematic underestimation of stellar density. This effect is called the "Photo-ring effect".

The identification of rings with this novel method is not enough to claim the discovery and confirmation of an exoring. Once a list of suitable candidates be selected, a battery of powerful and efficient methods must be used to actually confirm the existence of exorings around some of those candidates. Even in that case, the new method has the potential to provide the statistical distribution of exorings properties, well before we discover a significant number of them.

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