Space/Science — HabitableZone

Space/Science » in reply to Tau Ceti has a planet in "habitable zone."

Tau Ceti has always been at the top of our list of suspects.

It's one of the stars in Frank Drake's Project Ozma program back in the 60s. (No signals were picked up).

It's about half as bright as the Sun, so its habitable zone is much smaller, but the spectral type is similar, it appears to be a fairly stable G8 subdwarf, not identical to the Sun, but fairly similar.

The planet is 5 times as massive as earth, but depending on its radius, it need not have 5 times our surface gravity. It might be a fairly nice place to visit.

The article does not mention if the orbit is highly eccentric or near
circular. The latter would be better for life, but the former would be easier to detect using the wobble method.

The really good news is statistical, it suggests reasonable size planets in the habitable zones of main sequence subdwarfs are not a fluke, and are probably quite common.

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