Space/Science — HabitableZone

Space/Science » in reply to re: Couple of questions:

Splitting Hairs - 3 days per 2 years
M.A.E. — (archived)

"Until 1962 it was thought that Mercury's "day" was the same length as its "year" so as to keep that same face to the Sun much as the Moon does to the Earth. But this was shown to be false in 1965 by doppler radar observations. It is now known that Mercury rotates three times in two of its years. Mercury is the only body in the solar system known to have an orbital/rotational resonance with a ratio other than 1:1 (though many have no resonances at all)." From http://www.nineplanets.org/mercury.html

We thought it was locked based on observation. The new planet is much closer its star than Mercury is to ours and is tidally locked by theory not observation.

If the point is that the new planet is likely not to be tidally locked, I'd bet against it. Possible, but not probable.

I believe tidal locking is an issue. There was an excellent issue on what makes a world habitable a few years back (I think in Astronomy) and I'm pretty sure being tidally locked was an issue unless you had a dense atmosphere to distribute the heat which could pose other problems such as those on Venus. It should have a dense atmosphere with respect to Earth due to it's mass. It could be a lot denser. I assume they took a potential Venusian style atmosphere into account in their range and it simply isn't too bad in this case due to a weak star. I'd like to see that explicitly addressed though. If all planets in a red dwarf habitable zone are likely to be tidally locked that probably makes them poor candidates for advanced life imo.

Sounds promising but a little over hyped to me. Don't think the habitable worlds article which would be helpful in evaluating this discovery is available online anymore. I Know the link went dead at least once on me.

Regards,
Mark

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