Saturday, October 27, 2018

Exoplanets in other Solar Systems.



-  2145  - Exoplanets in other Solar Systems.  There are nearly 1 trillion stars in our Milky Way Galaxy. With one fifth of the 1 trillion Milky Way stars being Sun-like, this works out to 40 billion Earth-like planets with liquid water potentially existing on their surfaces. That’s a lot of opportunities for the chemistry of life to commence.
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-----------------------------------  2145   -  Exoplanets in other Solar Systems
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-  The NASA Kepler space telescope has discovered a bounty of other solar systems around distant stars.  Over 1,700 new planets have already been cataloged.
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----------------------   340 are cataloged as new planetary systems
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---------------------    850 planets have been confirmed
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-  Some of these solar systems have at least six orbiting planets.  Our Solar System has eight orbiting planets and several orbiting dwarf planets.  Over 100 of the exoplanets discovered are
Earth- size.  Several of these are at the right distance from their star to retain liquid water on their surfaces. 
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-  Water is the staff of life. Without it you cannot even begin the chemistry of life. In November 2013 scientists announced that one fifth of all Sun-like stars in the Milky Way have an Earth-sized planet in the water zone.
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-  There are nearly 1 trillion stars in our Milky Way Galaxy. With one fifth of the 1 trillion Milky Way stars being Sun-like, this works out to 40 billion Earth-like planets with liquid water potentially existing on their surfaces. That’s a lot of opportunities for the chemistry of life to commence.
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-  On Earth this happened only a few hundred million years after the surface of Earth cooled enough for standing water to exist. Then bacteria emerged and dominated the planet for the next 4 billion years.
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-  Astronomers have been able to study the atmospheres of over 50 of these new worlds. Water, carbon dioxide, methane, sodium, and water vapor have all been detected in these planetary atmospheres, along with actual clouds in the atmospheres of planets.
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-  There are planets so hot that they are evaporating right before our eyes. One planet was found to have an atmosphere hot enough to have clouds of iron gas and raindrops of liquid iron raining down on the planet’s surface.
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-  For some of the more massive, Jupiter-sized planets, it could even rain diamonds!
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-  One of the stars star is orbited by an object that is circled by a ring system much larger than Saturn’s rings. The mass of the enigmatic object is not known; it could be a brown dwarf or a low-mass star instead of a planet.
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-  Because the exoplanet catalog includes nearly 1,000 other planets that transit their stars, we can eventually study their atmospheres too. The goal is to find an Earth-sized, water-supporting  with an atmosphere showing trace amounts of oxygen.
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-  Earth’s atmosphere is 22-percent oxygen because Earth has a biosphere created over the eons by bacteria and plant life. Because oxygen reacts quickly with other compounds and rocks to oxidize them, only a planet with an extensive biosphere can continuously regenerate such a massive amount of atmospheric oxygen.
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-  If astronomers detect an exoplanet with a significant oxygen atmosphere, that can only mean an alien biosphere has created it. It is only a matter of time, perhaps a few decades, before enough planetary atmospheres will have been surveyed to find one with such life signs.
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-  We know that planetary systems are not rare in the Milky Way. We know that small planets like Earth outnumber the giant planets like Jupiter.  We know that planets find themselves in the “water zone” from time to time. Statistically, over 40 billion of these Earth-like worlds may exist in the vastness of our own Milky Way.
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-  So far we have discovered some of these distant worlds through glitches in the movement of their parent stars, or the brief diminution of their star light, but we now have a tally of 17 exoplanets that have been directly imaged as faint dots of light near their parent stars.
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-   The closest of these orbits the star Fomalhaut, located 25 light years from Earth. Larger than Jupiter, and with a distance from Fomalhaut that is four times the distance between Neptune and our Sun, this planet takes over 1,500 years to complete one orbit.
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-   We have broken out of our parochial Solar System.   We see innumerable planetary systems strewn throughout our galaxy.  We see many bountiful opportunities for life that may very well exist on some of the exoplanets.
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-  2119  -  This Review shows how math is used to detect these exoplanets.  They detect the slightest sinusoidal wobble in the stars light spectrum.  Our Sun wobbles due to Jupiter's 11.862 years orbit.  And due to Saturn's 29.458 year orbit.
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-  2107  -  To better understand these solar systems planet temperatures are measured.  Planet masses are calculated.  Their chemical compositions are measured.  The number of diverse planets is already confounding.
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-  This review lists 8 more reviews about exoplanets.  Request to learn more:
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-  October 25, 2018.      
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 ---------------------   Saturday, October 27, 2018         -------------------------
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