(ORDO NEWS) — At present, Earth is our only plane of planetary habitability. There may be life somewhere out there in a large, wide galaxy, but our world is the only one we know for sure that it has arisen.
The problem is, we didn’t find anything. there it is exactly the same as our own planet: the same size and composition, occupying the same place in its planetary system, at the correct “Goldilocks” distance from its star, at temperatures suitable for life as we know it.
Most of the 5,300 planets we have discovered to date are actually much closer to their stars than the Earth is to the Sun.
Thanks to this proximity, they not only hiss, but are also tidally locked in place. This means that one side always faces the star, cooked in constant daylight, and the other always faces away, into the frosty, eternal night.
A new paper has found that there is room in close orbit. , exoplanets with dueling personalities that could be habitable: a thin twilight zone where day meets night, known as the terminator.
“You need a planet that is in the sweet spot with the right temperature for liquid water, says geophysicist Ana Lobo of the University of California, Irvine.
“This is a planet that can be very hot on the day side, well beyond habitability, but on the night side it will be cold and potentially covered in ice. There may be large glaciers on the night side.”
Our search for Earth-like exoplanets is currently somewhat hampered by the limitations of our technology.
Our most useful methods are best suited for finding worlds that orbit their stars fairly closely, completing an orbit in less than 100 days.
If we only looked at stars like the Sun, this could pose a problem for potential habitability. However, most of the stars in the galaxy are red dwarfs; smaller, dimmer, and much colder than our own star.
While this means the habitable zone may be a bit closer, it also creates a tidal lock problem.
This happens when the gravitational interaction between two bodies “tethers” the rotation of the smaller body to the same period as its orbit, so that one side always faces the larger body.
This especially happens on exoplanets with close orbits because the star’s gravity stretches the exoplanet in such a way that the distortion causes a drag effect. We see it both on Earth and on the Moon.
For exoplanets, sometimes referred to as “eye planets,” this means that the day and night sides experience extreme climatic conditions that may not be the most favorable.
To determine whether such worlds could be habitable, Lobo and her colleagues used modified climate modeling software commonly used for Earth.
Previous attempts to determine the potential habitability of exoplanets have largely focused on worlds. are rich in water, as life on Earth needs it.
The team hoped to expand the range of worlds in which we should look for signs of extraterrestrial life.
“We’re trying to draw attention to more water-limited planets that, despite not having extensive oceans, could have lakes or other small bodies of liquid water, and those climates could actually be very promising,” explains Lobo.
Interestingly, the team’s work has shown that more water is likely to make eyeball planets less habitable.
If there were liquid oceans on the day side of such a world, the interaction with the star would fill the atmosphere with steam that could envelop the entire exoplanet, causing a suffocating greenhouse effect.
However, if there is a lot of land on the exoplanet, then the terminator becomes more habitable.
There, the ice from the nighttime glaciers could melt as temperatures rise above freezing, turning the terminator into a habitable belt surrounding the exoplanet.
Together, they suggest that we should add eyeball exoplanets to the mix in our future search for signs of life in the atmospheres of planets outside the solar system.
“By exploring these exotic climate states, we increase our chances of finding and correctly identifying a habitable planet in the near future,” says Lobo.
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