I was booking flights to Seattle this morning, a fairly short hop away from Minneapolis, when I saw another interesting destination: a new planetary system only 100 light years away, HD 110067. United and Delta didn’t have any flights to that exotic destination, and I don’t think I can squeeze the trip into my 3 week break, unfortunately.
It looks like an interesting but impractical place to visit, in so many ways. Six planets, ranging in size between 1.94 and 2.85 Earth radii, so probably a bit of a workout to take a stroll, and you couldn’t walk there anyway, with surface temperatures between 170 and 525°C. The atmospheres are mostly hydrogen, so breathing will be tough.
The interesting thing is that they’r all whipping around their star at a rapid rate — their years vary between 9 and 55 Earth days. I’m getting dizzy imagining it.
Also, all six are in resonant orbits, which I guess isn’t totally surprising since they’re so close to each other in such tight orbits around their star.
Maybe if I wait until summer break I’ll have time enough to visit? It’s not very practical, but it does look like a fascinating novelty star system.
It’s a K type, so not so many crazy death flares!
What’s the likelihood of all the planets being tidally locked?
Maybe you can hijack one of those UFOs Loeb has been telling us about…the one’s from the Permian event or whenever. Bet they could get you there lickety-split. Don’t worry about not knowing how to fly them because with their hyper-advanced ML/AI systems I’m sure they can read your thoughts to know where you want to go, and then take care of the navigation and steering. All you have to do is sit back and relax. Read a book.
Well, a few weeks for you is doable, think work will wait for a thousand years or so for you to get back?
The acceleration will be a touch on the harsh side though.
Phil Plait wrote about something similar to PZ’s space tourist desires in his entertaining book Under Alien Skies
https://wwnorton.com/books/under-alien-skies
Robert Westbrook @ 1
Just the comment I was about to type!
A ‘habitable’ (as in , being a close analogue of Earth) planet needs to be further out* (maybe a 200-day orbit?) to avoid locked rotation, while not having much larger radius than Earth (or else the atmosphere becomes too massive – no UV light reaching the surface- , or the oceans too deep to allow dry land).
.
Our biosphere also have a lot of important trace elements injected by a putative supernova into the nebula that spawned the sun. Maybe a spectral analysis of thr K0 star may reveal the abundance of such trace elements.
.
*to permit a strong magnetic field the rotation needs to be much faster than Venus’. I assume an orbit taking more than 200 days. As luminosity falls off rapidly with stellar mass, even a star with 80% the mass of the sun will be significantly weaker (but much stronger than any red dwarf).
Expect Martian-level temperatures on a world with a strong magnetic field and an Earth-like mass.
Resonant orbits… music of the spheres… Assume A440, then x2/3,m x3/2, x3/2, x4/3, x4/3 we get a chord of
A4,E5,B5,f#6 (a bit flat), B6, E7
There’s something for you composers to play with.
Currently Id be more intrested in this palnetary system aound a triple red dwarf – especially the last planet – if thits actually there :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LTT_1445
^ A system where they recently measured the size of the innermost world which turns out to have a diameter very similar to Earths – but given its closeness to red dwarf is almost certainly a barren Super-Mercury or Mustafar like lava world :
https://www.space.com/hubble-telescope-earth-size-exoplanet-transit
Probly having its atmosphere stripped away by extreme stellar flares long ago. Same applies to the second world there – as were found wth the innenrmost Trappist 1 planets and at least one other rocky world around a red dwarf previously :
https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2023-03-28/james-webb-space-telescope-trappist1-rocky-exoplanet-atmosphere/102142158
But this planet noted it seems really only in the wokipage above and the paper here :
Source : https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.09713
Empaisis added. A more distant relatively small world in the habitable zone? Maybe not too big at about 3 earth masses and maybe enough far enough away and with enough gravity to retain its atmosphere. So far that’s quite intriguing and sounds like somewhere that just might be worth visiting. Athough it could eb more of a hycean world (Hydrogen- ocean) than a suepr-sized rocky Earth. Still.
On the HD 110067 system itself :
https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/news/1771/discovery-alert-watch-the-synchronized-dance-of-a-6-planet-system/
Via the NASA exoplanet catalogue which includes specific exoplanet details like this one :
https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/exoplanet-catalog/8378/ltt-1445-a-c/
although it doesn’t seem to have this sorta page for any of the Hot Super-Mercuries of HD 110067 up yet.
Plus see this latest news via Space dot com :
Source : https://www.space.com/webb-finds-water-carbon-in-harshest-region
Of course, there is the question of how long such disks last in this environment but still sounds like good news for possibly habitable worlds here.
Just seen this article from Amercian ABC news :
https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/planet-solar-system-perfect-synchrony-found-milky-105241630
On this exoplanetary system which also notes :
^ Hopefully it does have more outer planets icnluding some rocky ones in the habitable zone. From any such hypothetical world they’d see quite a few bright evening & morning “stars” with these ïnterior “(or interior, inside their orbits like Venus & Mercury are to Earth) Hot sub-Neptunes. Well, assuming their atmospheres and putative clouds permitted..
@ ^
The more exoplanets discovered, the more astonishingly rare Earth seems to be. (That is, an environment close to the triple point of water.)
Bad news for “principle of mediocrity” fans.
(Or to be more precise, a relatively radiation shielded environment rich in organics near the triple point.)
@12 & ^ Silentbob : Yes – although seems to be is still a key point and there’s a lot we don’t know for sure yet. Uncertainties that work in both directions. Only found a fraction of the worlds that exist out there and most in closer rather than more distant orbits around smaller stars so a certain degree of sample bias at work. Something that will change as we continue find fin d more worlds especially mor edistant ones around more sun-like (late F, G type * early K type yellow and ornage dwarf) stars. Hopefully..
PS. The big and, I think, still not resolved question here is can exoplanets around red (M type) dwarf stars be habitable or are they all just too close and too flare-blasted by their volatile suns to sustain atmospheres?. We’ve seen that the very innermost worlds around red dwarfs like the closest two planets of Trappist 1 are almost certainly barren rocks with little atmosphere if any and in essence super-sized versions of Mercury (or Mustafar!) :
https://www.space.com/james-webb-space-telescope-discovers-trappist-1-might-not-be-habitable
But the ones further out like Trappist-1 d & e juu-usst mii-iiiight – or might not – be different stories? :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRAPPIST-1#List_of_planets
with the verdict due later with astrophysicist Dr Becky saying here that we”ll learn that in about 6 months to a year’s time or so in this excellent youtube mini-doco specifically near the 16 minutes 30 seconds mark and which I still hope could be positive news habitable worlds~wise. Then again, it could well turn out that all red dwarf stars render their planets uninhabitable and barren rocks due to their active and regular extreme flares.
However, even if that’s the case; we’re still left with a huge number of other yellow and ornage dwarf stars and their potentially habitable exoplanets – at least numerically even if not in percentage terms.