Tin foil hat time:Does ET live on Goldilocks planet?

How scientists spotted 'mysterious pulse of light' from direction of newly-discovered '2nd Earth' two years ago
By NIALL FIRTH
Last updated at 6:09 PM on 30th September 2010

An astronomer picked up a mysterious pulse of light coming from the direction of the newly discovered Earth-like planet almost two years ago, it has emerged.

Dr Ragbir Bhathal, a scientist at the University of Western Sydney, picked up the odd signal in December 2008, long before it was announced that the star Gliese 581 has habitable planets in orbit around it.

A member of the Australian chapter of SETI, the organisation that looks for communication from distant planets, Dr Bhathal had been sweeping the skies when he discovered a 'suspicious' signal from an area of the galaxy that holds the newly-discovered Gliese 581g.

The remarkable coincidence adds another layer of mystery to the announcement last night that scientists had discovered another planet in the system: Gliese 581g - the most Earth-like planet ever found.


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1316538/Gliese-581g-mystery-Scientist-spotted-mysterious-pulse-light-direction-newEarth-planet-year.html

Probably was the end of their own "war on terror"- when they blew themselves up in the name of "homeland security".....

I don't think red dwarf stars have enough energy to support life and I think tidally locked planets are less likely to support life than planets that rotate like Earth. However this is still an incredibly exciting discovery and is most certainly the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Earth like planets in habitable zones.

Not the other way around. And red dwarfs have plenty of energy though that energy is not necessary for life to exist. There is life on this planet that does not rely on our sun to live.

to come and seize out planet and its abundant sunlight.

We really DO need those tin-foil hats!

;-)

This reminds of the old joke about building a big fire (our Sun) and having to stand far away or building a small fire (Gliese 581) and standing close. The total energy output of the star is rather irrelevant.

Red dwarfs also have the advantage of being stable and incredibly long lived with estimated lifespans longer than the estimated age of the universe providing many billions of years for life to evolve.

I don't see how the tidal lock precludes life. It creates a temperate zone based on longitude analogous to Earth's temperate zones which is based on latitude. Want more warmth? Move towards to the sun side. Too hot? Move away from the sun side.

it's a rocky planet, last I heard.

Fascinating, regardless!

It's probably a rocky planet.

snip from the press release:

Its mass indicates that it is probably a rocky planet with a definite surface and that it has enough gravity to hold on to an atmosphere, according to Vogt.

I hope it turns out to be a rocky planet. This is exciting!

not the best living conditions

First one from the TextCentauri Dreams website: GL 581g: Rocky and Potentially Habitable}. This article contains some interesting comments from Professor Paul Davies, from his talk at the International Astronautical Congress in Prague. Prof. Davies was careful to distingish between 'habitable' and 'inhabited:'
[br />

We might, for example, call a planet ‘habitable’ because it can support liquid water at the surface. But is this enough? Again from the Davies paper (and all the italics are his):

Water does in fact seem to be abundant in the solar system and beyond, so (it is reasoned) life should also be abundant. Unfortunately this simplistic reasoning confuses a necessary with a sufficient condition. To be sure, liquid water is necessary for life (at least as we know it), but it is far from sufficient. The reason life on Earth inhabits almost all aqueous niches is because Earth has a contiguous biosphere, and life has invaded those niches; it has not arisen there de novo.

Davies is concerned less about life’s ability to adapt to extreme conditions than about the likelihood of its formation in the first place. Indeed, this is the question that so confounds our pulling meaningful information from the Drake Equation, in his view. He goes on:

Another reason given for the current optimism about life beyond Earth is the dawning recognition that life can survive in a much wider range of physical conditions than was recognized hitherto, opening up the prospect for life on Mars, for example, and generally extending the definition of what constitutes an “earthlike” planet. But this at most amounts to a factor of two or three in favor of the odds for life. Set against that is the exponentially small probability that any given complex molecule will form by random assembly from a soup of building blocks. In short, habitability does not mean inhabited. It is natural that we should concentrate on the habitable planets in our search for life – by the “keys under the lamppost” principle –but at this stage we cannot put any level of confidence – none at all – on whether such a search will prove successful.

http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_videos.jsp?cntn_id=117765&media_id=68454&org=NSF

One of the points they made was that we still can't quite detect an Earth equivalent, i.e. an Earth mass planet orbiting an Sun-like star. This planet was found because the planet is relatively massive and the star is relatively less massive thus creating a greater Doppler signal.



The Earth's tug on the Sun is on the order of centimeters per second and the current state of the art is around a meter per second. Still, the science has come a long way in fifteen years of improving this technique and is expected to get better.

The most important thing to take away from all this is that finding one so close and so quickly would indicate that there are lots of "Earth"-like planets out there waiting to be discovered.

PB