An Earthlike Planet Is Coming Soon …

One day in the future perhaps not 10 years from now we will be able to look up into the night sky at particular stars and know that they have Earth like planets orbiting them. SETI is going to scan the stars with exoplanets for intelligent life in 2011 and you never know do you? I expect that in the distant future, perhaps not so ahead as sceptics would make out, an expedition would be undertaken to a planet whose radio signals had proved intelligent life existed. It would take a major breakthrough to find some way of overcoming the speed of light but an experiment such as the large hadron collider may find the Higgs boson which could lead to a way of making an objects mass less than normal.

So what can we discover about exoplanets at the moment? Well, I’m afraid, gravity takes over and we hit the Earth with a bump of reality. We can only detect indirectly the sign of a planets presence although this does go on to allow us to estimate its mass and the diameter of its orbit with in some cases a rough estimate about the atmosphere and perhaps wind dynamics.

Scientists have found that most solar systems have the same composition and therefore will have a makeup very similar to our solar system and would include planets like Earth. It is therefore obvious that we need to learn more about the exoplanets that we have discovered and will discover in the future.

It is expected that two different types of super-earth (named because they are bigger than Earth but Rocky) may exist. The first one exists at a further distance out than the Earth does from the sun and therefore, due to the abundance of ice particles, probably contain a lot more water than Earth does. The planets that form close to their stars would have a lack of water, due to the temperature of the sun being greater than we find here on Earth.

Being a super Earth is a disadvantage when it comes to the magnetic field that is produced by the planet. Earth has a solid inner core of iron and nickel and a molten outer core which together with produces a magnetic field. A larger planet may not have a solid core as the heat retained may keep it molten. This may cause a problem for the existence of life on the larger planets as a magnetic field is required to protect the planet from the deadly solar wind produced by the parent star.

It is expected that on the planets that are covered in water that, due to pressure, a thick layer of ice will form above the seabed. This would not be the ordinary ice we know on earth but an exotic form of ice only created in laboratory experiments.

The advantage of a super Earth could be that plate tectonics would be a very active phenomenon. Plate tectonics is thought to be needed on a planet suitable to support life so as to produce a carbon silicon cycle which acts like a thermostat keeping the temperature to within that needed to allow for liquid water. Plate tectonics on the larger planets is a much more active phenomenon because of the extra primordial (left over from the creation of the planet) and radioactive heat produced by uranium and thorium. Because there is more heat the cycles within the interior will produce much more rapid and regular plate tectonics regulating the atmosphere much better than here on earth and therefore could be much more susceptible for life.

This would change the landscape of the planet as tectonics produce mountains quicker and the erosion then levels the mountains in a shorter timescale. The high gravity on this planet would not allow the mountains to be as high as on Earth so it’s probably best to go to Mars if you want to climb an extra large mountain (Olympus Mons). The atmosphere might also be different as the volume of volcanic activity produces a lot more gases.

More and more earth like planets will be found in the future and possibly will occur with the release of information that Kepler will provide early next year (2011). We may only be theorising here but it only takes one good discovery of an earth like planet with water to set the human race off in the right direction. We mustn’t forget though that the information received from these planets from the light picked up is going to be old information and if we ever were to arrive at the planet a civilisation that we may have picked up by SETI may not exist anymore. A shame.

Source:Weirdwarp