635 light-years from where you are sitting, way out in outer space, lies a planet. The first planet to be discovered inside the habitable zone of a Sun-like star. Its name is Kepler 22-b. When a planet is located within a star’s habitable zone, it means that there is a chance that liquid water exists on its surface. And where there’s water, there’s also the possibility of life. Human life. What would the weather be like over there?
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00:00 Could this be Earth 2.0?
01:10 Exoplanets
04:10 Kepler 22-b might have an ocean
06:30 Growing plants
08:14 How would we thrive?
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How do we search for exoplanets?
With the global warming and sea pollution constantly growing trends, the future of Earth might be at serious risk. In addiction, the overpopulation of some regions might cause a global food crisis in nearly 30 years.
These are just a few reasons why some brilliant minds such as Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk have started to plan a colonization of other planets like Mars, launching several rockets of their futuristic companies Spacex and Blue origin.
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What are exoplanets? How can we reveal their presence? Is it possible to find a place similar to our beautiful Earth? These and other great questions will be discussed in this video. Stick with me and I’ll tell you everything in a moment.
It’s surely interesting to wonder about a possible future destination for everyone, but in order to understand how this can be done we need to take a step back and try to look at our planet: Earth.
We all agree, except for some sceptics, that it has a spheric shape and that it has two main rotating motions: one around the sun, which causes the existence of four different seasons, and another around his axis, which is the source of day and night.
But why we use to call Earth as a planet? What is a planet?
The first revolution around the sun takes more time than the rotation around the axis, but this is not something that Earth shares with other “colleagues” of the solar system: for example, on Venus a year lasts less than a day. So what do all planets have in common?
They all complete a close motion around the Sun and they have a stable shape typical of a certain mathematical equilibrium called hydrostatic equilibrium. Practically speaking, this is the reason why all planets are spherical.
Addictionally, to gain the definition of planet a body must have a clean orbit without rocks or other astronomical detritus. As a matter of fact, in 2006 Pluto was declassified to the rank of dwarf planet because Eris was discovered, a big satellite that had nearly 27% of Pluto’s mass.
Finally, a planet must have less than thirteen times the mass of Jupiter, the biggest one in the solar system.
In parallel, an exoplanet is an astronomical object orbiting around a star different from the sun, but with the same features we already listed.
Is it easy to detect the presence of an exoplanet? Definitely not. They’re not simple to find and only a bit more than four thousand have been discovered after 1992, when the first two planets were seen orbiting around a pulsar. Even if this number seems really big, it’s totally incomparable with the amount of stars discovered, which is almost 500000 only in the milky way.
Stars are way easier to be discovered and catalogued as they shine on their own. On the contrary, planets happen just to radiate some tenuous infrared rays, that are surely not capable of reaching our detectors on earth. As a matter of fact, just less than 30 exoplanets have been detected by this technique called “direct imaging”.
Given the fact that it’s not possible to measure their emission, how can we “see” a planet? Through indirect methods. Physicists love to study little changes in the radiation of the major star that are capable of revealing the presence of one or more planets.
Let’s investigate the main techniques that are commonly used in astronomy for searching exoplanets.
The first one deals with radial velocity. A planet has certainly a consistent amount of mass that weakly attracts the star, which has some slight displacements due to its presence. More precisely, both the star and the exoplanet are orbiting around the center of mass, a virtual point on the line that connects the two bodies, which is located near the heaviest one. This movements of the star can be well detected through a very common technique: redshift. Have you ever heard anything about this?
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Could there be an even better planet for us than Earth? Scientists are searching for a superhabitable world that wouldn’t just rival Earth, but be a place where life could thrive even more easily. And they’re looking at exoplanets. How would we discover Earth 2.0? What would make an exoplanet habitable? How long would it take to get there?
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Batman
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What If is a mini-documentary web series that takes you on an epic journey through hypothetical worlds and possibilities. Join us on an imaginary adventure through time, space and chance while we (hopefully) boil down complex subjects in a fun and entertaining way.
Are you looking for a change of scenery? Are you tired of boring old Earth?
How would you like a new home away from home? Really far away from home. Like outside our Solar System far. What exoplanet would suit us best? Are there any pros? And more importantly, what are the cons?
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What If is a mini-documentary web series that takes you on an epic journey through hypothetical worlds and possibilities. Join us on an imaginary adventure through time, space and chance while we (hopefully) boil down complex subjects in a fun and entertaining way.
From what this new exoplanet is, to what it could mean for our understanding of the universe as a whole, and more! Join us as we reveal to you the discovered two super-Earth exoplanets orbiting a star! (Gliese 887b And Gliese 887c)
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Humanity has a goal to explore the stars, a goal that may find itself getting a boost in feasibility by the end of the decade. But we also know that to look outside our solar system is important because we can learn even more from the planets and stars that range across the solar system and see how it reflects what is near us. To that end, one of our greatest goals is to find and research as many exoplanets (a planet which orbits a star outside the solar system) as we can and see what they are like and what we can learn from them. Which is good, because we just found a major discovery which might just change things forever.
Because looking at the brightest red dwarf star in the sky may have presented the best chance astronomers have yet to analyze the atmospheres of alien worlds — and perhaps detect whether those worlds have life. This is according to a new study that was recently released.
Scientists focused on the red dwarf star GJ 887, also known as Gliese 887. (Red dwarfs are the most common kind of star in the galaxy, and weigh between 7.5% and 50% the mass of the sun.) At a distance of about 10.7 light-years from Earth, Gliese 887 is the twelfth-closest star. Furthermore, at visible wavelengths, Gliese 887 is the brightest red dwarf in the sky, and with nearly half the sun’s mass, Gliese 887 is the heaviest red dwarf star within about 20 light-years of Earth. That may sound like a lot of needless stats but when it comes to stars you need to know as much about them to fully understand their power, potential, and lifespan.
Previous work found that many red dwarfs host planetary systems, ones usually made up of multiple small worlds. Still, “we’ve been looking for exoplanets orbiting Gliese 887 for nearly 20 years, and while we saw hints of a planetary signal, it wasn’t strong enough to convince ourselves that it was a planet,” study lead author Sandra Jeffers, an astrophysicist at the University of Göttingen in Germany, told Space.com.
But that has now changed in a major way.
Pressing forward, the researchers examined Gliese 887 for 80 nights in 2018. They relied on the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) instrument at La Silla Observatory in Chile, combining this data with archival measurements of the star spanning nearly two decades.
Astronomers use two strategies to discover most exoplanets, or worlds beyond our solar system. One method relies on how distant worlds regularly block out a fraction of light from their stars as they pass in front of their stars from the observer’s perspective. However, this method will only spot planets that pass through the line of sight between Earth and their stars, meaning it will only detect a small fraction of exoplanets.
Instead, the scientists in this latest work looked for any wobbles from Gliese 887 due to gravitational tugs from orbiting planets. This was where their breakthrough came from. They found the red dwarf has at least two “super-Earth” exoplanets, dubbed Gliese 887 b and Gliese 887 c. The former is about 4.2 times Earth’s mass and orbits just 6.8% of an astronomical unit (AU) from its star (one astronomical unit is the average distance between Earth and the sun), whereas the latter is about 7.6 times Earth’s mass and orbits 12% of an AU from the red dwarf.
To be honest, finding even one exoplanet there after two decades of finding nothing would’ve been momentous in its own right, but finding two? That is something truly special. And yet, that wasn’t all.
The researchers also found evidence for a possible third planet farther out from Gliese 887. Although the red dwarf’s two confirmed planets are likely too hot for life as we know it on Earth, this potential third planet might lie within the star’s habitable zone, where surface temperatures are suitable to host liquid water. Which by our definitions is important to have life, which is one of the many reasons we search for exoplanets so we can see if there’s another planet of life out there.
