This morning I came across this very interesting article on the Centauri Dreams website. By the way, Centauri Dreams, the website of the Tau Zero Foundation, is a very rich source for writers of realistic SF, especially in relation to planetary exploration and interstellar travel.
The article summarises results and speculation arising from new planets discovered by the European Southern Observatory’s HARPS spectrograph, which provides the most accurate Radial Velocity measurements we currently have (see an earlier post on how planets are discovered). Because of its increased sensitivity, HARPS can detect smaller planets. The smallest planet found at this point in time is a mere 1.5 times Earth’s mass. One of the, perhaps expected, outcomes of the spectrograph’s bevy of newly found low-mass planets (super-Earths or near Earth-mass) is that there are many of these smaller planets, a lot more than there are very large planets, and that the previous bias was merely a product of larger planets being easier to detect. The galaxy is swarming with smallish rocky planets. It is quite likely that some will be found inside the habitable zone.
We may already have found some of these planets. Much was made last year of the ‘discovery’ of Gliese 581g, supposedly in the habitable zone of an M class star. However, further analysis has so far failed to confirm the existence of this planet. But the star has two other planets which orbit at the edge of the habitable zone, and out of these, Gliese581d looks the most promising. The width of the habitable zone is not absolute, but varies with the planet’s albedo (basically, how much light it reflects) and composition and (if any) atmosphere composition (see another post on that here). So a newly discovered planet, HD85512b, at 3.6 Earth masses, may also fit the bill. It is a little close to its K class parent star, but could harbour liquid water on its surface if certain conditions of composition and atmosphere are met (see original paper by Kaltenegger et al. here).
Using the HARPS spectrograph, another group of researchers report on the search for planets orbiting sun-like stars within 40 light years from our solar system. (original paper by Pepe et al here). This work has resulted in a the discovery of a number of planets, again, most in the smaller size category. One of the main targets for the hunt is Alpha Centauri B, but there are some problems, one of the main ones being that it is part of a triple star system, and that any model the describes the wobble of the star that is caused by an orbiting planet must take into account that there are two other stars in the system, and as you could understand that is tricky business.
Image depicting an exoplanet system snarfed from NASA JPL
