Citizen Science and Planet Discovery
15 New Planets Hint at “Traffic Jam” of Moons in Habitable Zone
“Volunteers from the Planethunters.org website, part of the Oxford University-led Zooniverse project, have discovered 15 new planet candidates orbiting in the habitable zones of other stars. Added to the 19 similar planets already discovered in habitable zones, where the temperature is neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water, the new finds suggest that there may be a “traffic jam” of all kinds of strange worlds in regions that could potentially support life.”
Planet Hunters. V. A Confirmed Jupiter-Size Planet in the Habitable Zone and 42 Planet Candidates from the Kepler Archive Data, astro-ph
This is a good News!
Folks:
Nice to know for sure that planets are the rule, not the exception (as if the diversity of our own Solar System wasn’t clue enough).
Still some unanswered questions though. Are moons around planets close to their home stars common or not? We don’t have gas giants in our inner solar system and the moons of our inner planets don’t give clues to whether small rocky inner planets commonly have moons either: two without (Mercury, Venus), one with a overly large moon (Earth) and one (Mars) with two small rock-pile moons.
At least we know that moons can exist for long periods of a planets history in an inner solar system.
If gas giants in an inner solar system can maintain a family of moons as grand as Jupiter, the chances for life bearing moons around them get better. Moons tidally locked to their gas giant parents could have reasonable length ‘days’ and an orbit around their parent somewhat off the star systems ecliptic plane would give the moons ‘seasons’. Other moons around the gas giant could replenish the atmosphere of a moon (as we see around Saturn) with a smaller mass then Earth (thus making it easier for ‘them’ to get into space with In Situ Resources right at hand ;)).
Well, at least we know there’s places to go (if we want to go).
tinker
Uhm, we know that there might be places we could fantasize about going. Given what we know and what physics says, we have no way to get to those places.
Zooniverse has a new project: http://planetfour.org/ They need thousands of volunteers to help map and classify mysterious fan and blotch-shaped features in the southern polar regions of Mars