Life-sustaining planets like Earth, on which our human species can inhabit, are so-far undiscovered. Space is infinite. Is discovering inhabitable alien life still light-years away?
Subscribe to World5List us on...
-- Proxima Centauri b
Ok, so let's start off with a planet that most experts say isn't habitable, Proxima Centuari b. This is an exoplanet that is sitting comfortably in what's known as the "habitable zone" of it's star, which essentially just means it experiences the right amount of gravity, heat and other factors to potentially have liquid water.
HD 85512 b
HD 85512 b was considered the best possible exoplanet for us to try and go to back in 2011... but times have changed, and the special connection we had has drifted away in the wind. No, seriously though, this exoplanet has 3.6 times the mass of Earth, and was sitting just on the edge of what scientists considered habitable, and the fact that there's cloud cover visible from it's atmosphere? Tau Ceti E
Tau Ceti e is another exoplanet that looked really promising as a canidate for life-support, seeing as how it sits right in the habitable zone of it's sun, and it's atmosphere is pretty strong, which is good. It's 1.8 times bigger than our Earth, with surface temperatures reaching around 158 degrees fahrenheit.
Kepler-186f
Most of the exoplanets on this list are way, way bigger than Earth, and if we could live on them, we'd have to come to grips with a totally different year cycle, more-than-24 hour days, and a host of other things. Not so with Kepler-186f, as it's only 10% larger than Earth.. would probably be the least drastic change from Earth.
Gliese 667 Cc
What happens when you take Mars, and cross it with a bigger version of itself? Gliese 667 Cc, a super-Earth, (which means it's 5 times the size of Earth), that circles a red dwarf star. The star it circles is actually just one of 3 stars in that solar system, the Scorpius system.
Kepler-22b
So there's one thing that we need in a new home, more than anything else. Temperatures we can adapt to, but we can't adapt to life without water. That's why an exoplanet like Kepler-22b is so promising. It's very likely that it's a water-world, and it might even have creatures living in it's oceans.
Mars
There's substantial evidence that liquid water once existed on Mars, in fact, water still exists there, as ice. There's also the large amounts of iron and other minerals there, just waiting to get mined. Of course, there's the Gale Crater, that at one point in ancient history was a freshwater lake. That's right, the same kind of freshwater that living organisms just love to grow up in.
No comments:
Post a Comment