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Possible Habitable Planet, LHS 1140b, Only 40 Light Years Away

posted by martyb on Saturday April 22 2017, @04:32AM   

kaszz writes:

A exoplanet has been discovered (paywalled) that is called "LHS 1140b" and it's deemed a super earth. It lies in the Goldilocks zone where water is in an accessible fluid phase. The atmosphere, however, also plays a critical role, as can be demonstrated with the planet Venus. Seven exoplanets had been found two months ago orbiting TRAPPIST-1, but LHS 1140b is deemed exceptional. Jason Dittmann, an astronomer at Harvard University that lead the research group, says it's the most interesting exoplanet he has seen in the past decade. In contrast with the TRAPPIST-1 star, LHS 1140 spins slowly and does not emit much high-energy radiation, which may also help the likelihood of life on its planet.

The planet is circa 5*10^9 years old, 500*10^6 years older than Earth. The diameter is 40% larger, the mass 6.6 times that of Earth, and gravity is 3.4 times that of Earth.

The first exoplanet was discovered in 1995 and since then at least 2000 has been discovered.

Many more details are available in a research letter (pdf).

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Original Submission

• Re:6.6 earth masses?More like Neptune than Earth t Re:6.6 earth masses?More like Neptune than Earth t (Score: 3, Informative) by Ramze on Saturday April 22 2017, @07:27AM (1 child)

  by Ramze (6029) on Saturday April 22 2017, @07:27AM (#497833)

  Hard to say. Planetary formation isn't well understood. Some theories say the reason the gas giants got so big was because of their distance from the Sun -- which would have either absorbed most of the hydrogen gas itself or blown it off of the gas giants with solar winds if they were formed closer. It's also possible that since water ice acts more like rock that far out, it helped with planetary formation early... which allowed the early formed planets to get the jump on the rest on gaining a lot of mass and gasses. Earth's atmosphere is thought to have come from escaping gasses from its crust as well as H2O from impacts after it had cooled down significantly, but no one knows for certain.
  
  I do agree that with that sort of gravity, it's very likely that the atmosphere is very dense -- probably very like Venus in density.... but it's hard to say. Venus is smaller than Earth, but has a much denser atmosphere... which means Earth could support an even denser atmosphere than Venus! Yet, ours is fine. This new planet could probably support an incredibly dense atmosphere, but that doesn't mean it has to be that way.
  
  Either way, the surface gravity is expected to be 3.4 times Earth gravity... which means humans won't be able to live there unless they're Olympic weightlifters.

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• Re:6.6 earth masses?More like Neptune than Earth t (Score: 2) by HiThere on Saturday April 22 2017, @07:53PM

  by HiThere (866) on Saturday April 22 2017, @07:53PM (#498042) Journal

  Perhaps the capture of the moon had something to do with thinning the atmosphere? It does seem like the atmosphere should be a lot thicker unless something stripped a lot of it away.

  --
  Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.

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