- 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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------ “Jim Detrick” -----------
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--------------------- Saturday, October 27, 2018 -------------------------
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