My Inward Eye.....

Wednesday, September 5, 2012

THE SUPER EARTH(Gliese 581g)

It is possible to believe that all the past is but the beginning of a beginning and that all that is and has been is but twilight of the dawn, it is possible to believe that human mind has ever accomplished, is but the dream before the awakening. Out of our...lineage , minds will spring, that will reach back to us in our littleness , to know us better than we know ourselves. A day will come, one day in the unending succession of days when beings, being who are latent in our thoughts and hidden in our loins, shall stand upon this Earth as one stands upon a foot stool, and shall laugh and reach out their hands amids the Stars........H.G. Wells "The Discovery of the Future".....(1902)

The Exoplanet Gliese 581g was discovered by Steven Vogt, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz, and Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution lead the Lick-Carnegie Exoplanet Survey.. A planet outside our Solar System Gliese581g is nearly 20 light years away from a red dwarf Star in the constellaion 'Libra'. Red dwarfs are 50 Times dimmer than our Sun. The planet Gliese581g is closer to its Sun still remains in the habitable zone also known as Goldilock zone. (not too hot not too cold right temperature and has liquid to sustain life.). It takes just 37days(earth) to complete its rotation round its Sun. "This really is the first Goldilocks planet," said co-discoverer R. Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution of Washington.

Vogt and Butler used ground-based telescopes to track the star's precise movements over 11 years and watch for wobbles that indicate planets are circling it. The newly discovered planet is actually the sixth found circling Gliese 581. Two looked promising for habitability for a while, another turned out to be too hot and the fifth is likely too cold. This sixth one bracketed right in the sweet spot in between, Vogt said.

With the star designated "a," its sixth planet is called Gliese 581g.

"It's not a very interesting name and it's a beautiful planet," Vogt said. Unofficially, he's named it after his wife: "I call it Zarmina's World."

The Gliese581g planet is tidally locked to the Star. Meaning one side always basks in daylight and the other side in perpetual darkness. Like our moon it same side is always facing our earth. The Scientist further predict that the most habitable zone of Gliese581g will be the line between the shadow and light.(Known as the Terminator).

Gliese 581g mass is 3.1 to 4.3 times that of Earths . It is considered as Super Earth.“It’s really hard to detect a planet like this,” Vogt said. “Every time we measure the radial velocity, that’s an evening on the telescope, and it took more than 200 observations with a precision of about 1.6 meters per second to detect this planet.”

The discovery of a potentially habitable planet like Gliese 581 g so early in the search might mean that habitable planets are more widely distributed than had been previously believed. According to Vogt, the discovery "implies an interesting lower limit on the fraction of stars that have at least one potentially habitable planet as there are only ~116 known solar-type or later stars out to the 6.3 parsec distance of Gliese 581."This finding foreshadows what Vogt calls a new, second Age of Discovery in exoplanetology:(wikipedia)

Due to its proximity to Earth and potential in habitable zone.- Search for extra terristrial Life of any form is being explored by NASA.and ESA in following years. Scientist have further predicted that there are more than 10% such planets(habitable zone) in our Galaxy itself.