Just because Earth is a place known for harboring life, doesn’t mean it’s the best planet for a job.
Somewhere outside the universe, another orbiting object may be in a better position to support object life, and it may not feel like our own.
“We have to focus on some of the planets that have the most promising conditions of complex life,” says Dirk Schulz-Makuch, an astrobiologist at Washington State University.
“Still, we have to be careful not to get stuck in the search for another Earth because there may be planets that may be more suitable for life than ours.”
If we focus too much on finding another planet like Earth, we may fail to notice a sun that not only gets older, bigger, warmer and wetter, but also orbits a star that has a longer lifespan than our sun.
Astronomers have been debating the idea of a “superhighble” planet for years, and now, we may have some first candidates.
From the thousands of exoplanets outside our solar system, Schulz-Makuch and his colleagues have identified two dozen that seem to be more hospitable than Earth in at least one context.
When none of these planets meet the full criteria for a portable home, one of them ticks four key boxes, indicating that it could provide a better and longer life for life than Earth here.
Although the point of the study is not to identify any planet B, many of these planets are thousands of light-years apart and have not yet been statistically recognized, meaning they may be astronomical false positives.
Confirmed planets are also far from being practical places for further research. Especially when we recently found a potentially habitable exoplanet the size of Earth, only 124 light-years away.
“Our point is not to identify potential targets for the observations that follow, but to explain that superhuble worlds may already be among the planets to be discovered,” the authors write.
A planet larger than Earth, for example, allows for more habitable land and more diversity. The size of a planet also affects its gravitational pull, and someone larger than Earth will be able to maintain its own atmosphere for longer.
Water is a key component of life, as we know, and even in Earth’s own history, we know that when there is too much moisture, life tends to prosper.
The Carboniferous period, which was hotter and wetter than it is today, produced so much biomass that we are still harvesting coal, oil and natural gas from it.
“It’s sometimes difficult to articulate this theory of soluble planets because we think we have the best planets,” says Schulz-Makuch.
“We have a lot of complex and diverse lifeforms, and a lot of people who can survive in extreme environments. It’s good to have an adaptive life, but that doesn’t mean we have the best of everything.”
One thing that is not the best on our planet is time.
Approximately billion for the appearance of macroscopic life on Earth. It took billions of years and for another billion billion years, our sun will burn.
Other stars with people like us may run out of energy before complex life develops, while stars with lower masses, like orange dwarf stars, can last much longer.
Orange dwarf stars are somewhat colder than our Sun, but they can sometimes burn for up to 70 billion years.
This astonishing amount of time allows inhabited planets to create higher biodiversity and more complex ecosystems than our own planet, which is only about 4.5. has existed for billions of years.
Of course, all of this assumes that the life we are searching for is the same as the one we know on Earth. And that may not be the case at all. Still, we have to deal with something, and in this case, the earth is the only example.
Of the 24 superhubble candidates, astronomers say they orbit 9 stars, 16 planets 5 to 8 billion years old and complex life are considered sweet spots – and 5 planets in the optimal temperature range for a superhubble planet, about 19 19C.
All of these exoplanets were located in habitable zones around their star, the area where water could exist.
Only one of the candidates fits all four criteria – an exoplanet named KOI 5715.01 is 1.8 times larger than Earth and located about 3,000 light years away.
That doesn’t sound very cool, but in the search for life outside our solar system, the authors believe that the potential for a superfatable planet with even better conditions than ours deserves a higher priority for follow-up observations than most planets like Earth. “
“With the next space telescope, we’ll get more information, so it’s important to choose some targets,” says Schulz-Makuch.
They don’t all need to meet like our own planet.
The study was published in Astrobiology.
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