Promising Worlds Found Around Nearby Ultra-cool Dwarf Star

It's very unlikely that a world in the goldilocks zone of a red dwarf would be habitable, as the goldilocks zone around stars that small are so close to the star that any planets there would most likely be tidally locked (one half of the planet would always face the star, the other half would always be in darkness).

A tidally locked Earth wouldn't be the haven of life it is today. The sun-facing side would be hotter than our hottest deserts in the dead of summer, and the dark side would be a frozen wasteland. There would be a thin band between the two where the temperature would be in between, however the temperature differential between the light and dark side would cause massive, permanent hurricanes to exist in that band, negating any hope for the development of civilization.

The only life possible on a tidally locked planet, would be if the planet had both deep oceans (like ours) and active volcanism. If the oceans were deep enough that there is liquid water under the frozen side, life could exist at deep underwater geothermal vents like they do in our oceans.

This is also aside from the fact that red dwarfs are extremely variable in luminosity. Stars like our sun are usually fairly constant in luminosity, but red dwarfs can do through dim spells where they can be half as luminous as normal, and then through bright spells where they can be twice as luminous as normal. This variance would cause huge changes in temperature on any potentially habitable worlds.

There's an interesting article on Wikipedia about it:
habitability of red dwarf systems

It's a thin strand of hope that they could find a habitable planet around a red dwarf. They are banking on the idea that there are so many of them, that even if it's less likely to be habitable worlds in a red dwarf system, that there might still be a lot of them out there. They are also overly-optimistic about the environmental effects of being tidally locked - like cloud formation blocking solar radiation (isn't it the opposite? look at Venus).

Sorry to be a downer, but I'm seeing articles all over news sites about these new "potentially habitable" planets and then I read "dwarf star" and I facepalm.

originally posted by: odzeandennz
but yea... the source is sketchy... NASA. the greatest cash cow in history of man. when its almost funding time, a lot of 'discoveries are 'made'.

Are you kidding? NASA gets half a percent of the federal budget. Sketchy source? Are you kidding? This discovery was made with TRAPPIST, which is a BELGIAN telescope (not even NASA) and the very name TRAPPIST is an acronym for "TRAnsiting Planets and PlanetesImals Small Telescope." It was discovered using a telescope within the size range of a large amateur telescope. An amateur telescope with an appropriate deep space CCD camera can verify and, if necessary, expose any hoaxed "discovery" here.

originally posted by: odzeandennz
experts, feel free to correct me.

The apparent flux was not used to measure the distance. These planets orbit 2MASS J23062928-0502285, which has a measured parallax of 82.58 milliarcseconds, placing it approximately 40 light years away.
simbad.u-strasbg.fr...
Here's the paper reporting its trigonometric parallax:
iopscience.iop.org...

originally posted by: odzeandennz
but when funding ever stopped. i can remember several times when the armed forces budgets were capped or the government 'shut down' over budget.

And guess what happened? Most of NASA shut down then as well! Here's NASA's budget over time:
upload.wikimedia.org...
Half a percent of the federal budget, whoop de doo. There are MUCH bigger cash cows out there to complain about. You want to shut it down altogether? Just wow. You probably have no idea how much space technology and space-derived technology has influenced your daily life.

Anyway, back to topic...

Interesting...

This comes on the heels of this -

April 5th 2016 - Red dwarf stars to be examined for alien life by SETI Institute astronomers - Red dwarf stars have usually been ignored by alien-hunting scientists, but new research suggests they could support life

After years of scanning the skies without spotting anything, alien-hunting scientists are going to start looking somewhere completely different.

Researchers working on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) have previously focused on areas of space similar to our own.

However, a team from the SETI Institute is now set to begin looking closely at red dwarf stars, which are far cooler and smaller than the Sun.

As SETI Institute engineer Jon Richards said: “Red dwarfs - the dim bulbs of the cosmos - have received scant attention by SETI scientists in the past.”

“That's because researchers made the seemingly reasonable assumption that other intelligent species would be on planets orbiting stars similar to the Sun.”

The typical red dwarf is so dim that it was assumed there would be few planets in its habitable zone, the areas around it which are the right temperatures for life.

Click link for full article...

Coincidence or?

Hey Guys I found maybe something, don't know if it is or not nibiru....

www.youtube.com...