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| -Signs, Portents, and the Weather- |
| Solar System's 'look-alike' found |
| 2008-04-10 |
 Astronomers have discovered a planetary system orbiting a distant star which looks much like our own. They found two planets that were close matches for Jupiter and Saturn orbiting a star about half the size of our Sun. Martin Dominik, from St Andrews University in the UK, said the finding suggested systems like our own could be much more common than we thought. So somewhere on this parallel Earth, is there a parallel Fred who runs a parallel Rantburg with its own Army of Parallel Steve? |
| Posted by:Mike |
| #11 "There are tremendous problems with there being intelligent life 'out there'." I'm more concerned about whether there's intelligent life here. :-( |
| Posted by: Barbara Skolaut 2008-04-10 20:45 |
| #10 So two gas giants orbiting a yellow dwarf is a "look-alike"? Pretty lax ruleset ya got there, mister. |
| Posted by: Chief Running Gag 2008-04-10 16:48 |
| #9 crosspatch: There are tremendous problems with their being intelligent life "out there". Remember that life evolved and re-evolved on Earth several times before coming up with an intelligent species, so if Earth has a sister planet somewhere, they might have had an intelligent species 50 million years ago, now long gone. We have only had about a 50 year window in which to receive intelligent transmissions. |
| Posted by: Anonymoose 2008-04-10 16:08 |
| #8 our planet has only about 250 million more years or so left before the sun becomes too hot and Earth outgasses all its water WHEW!! It's a good thing I only got the short term mortgage! |
| Posted by: AlmostAnonymous5839 2008-04-10 15:11 |
| #7 Journey to the Far Side of the Sun. Get EUROSEC on the horn! |
| Posted by: Rex Mundi 2008-04-10 13:48 |
| #6 I hope it's heaven and I can go there someday. |
| Posted by: Woodrow Slusorong7967 2008-04-10 13:02 |
| #5 There are many more problems to a planet developing intelligent life than simply being the right size, temperature and composition, though that is the first part (and for the more zealous in the religion department, I am going to assume that God could create life in more than one place in the universe if He wanted to). You need a star that is stable for very long periods of time ... stable for billions of years. You need a magnetic field on the planet so that the solar wind from the star doesn't strip the water out of the atmosphere as happened on Venus. You need a Galactic region that is free from large doses of cosmic rays that can destroy life. Irradiation from a nearby nova can sterilize a planet yet leave it physically intact. The need for a magnetic field rules out "first generation" star systems composed mainly of hydrogen and other light elements. Such a planet would need iron and oxygen and nitrogen and calcium and silicon and carbon so it would need to be composed of materials made from an earlier generation of stars. Those elements are products of fusion from the initial hydrogen stars. So we are looking at 2nd or 3rd generation stars that have been stable for a period of billions of years with no nearby nova and relatively free of damaging cosmic radiation. Such a place will likely be way out on the edges of a galaxy just off of the main galactic plain. Given that stars probably live a few billion years and this would need to be a second or third generation star, such a star could not even form until several billion years after the formation of the universe. The bottom line is that yes, we could very well be alone even if there are several million planets much like our own. There might be planets that look like ours did a billion years ago. We have only had "intelligent" life in the form of humans that could use tools for a million years or so ... almost no time at all, on a planet that could support life for almost 3 billion years. (Oh, and our planet has only about 250 million more years or so left before the sun becomes too hot and Earth outgasses all its water) |
| Posted by: crosspatch 2008-04-10 11:44 |
| #4 is there a parallel Fred who runs a parallel Rantburg with its own Army of Parallel Steve? Alterna-Rantburg runs its Army of Steve's on a serial bus. It's a port0808 thing. |
| Posted by: Seafarious 2008-04-10 11:43 |
| #3 Time to grow a goatee. |
| Posted by: Excalibur 2008-04-10 11:43 |
| #2 Bizarro World Lives! |
| Posted by: tu3031 2008-04-10 11:27 |
| #1 Parallel Fred: We have a troll. The Agonizer, Mr. Steve. |
| Posted by: ed 2008-04-10 11:22 |