The discovery of a relatively small planet, with unique conditions, makes it possible to hallucinate about intelligent beings living in eternal twilight
Dennis Overbay, New York Times, Haaretz, News and Walla!
Direct link to this page: https://www.hayadan.org.il/planet436B.html
Like most New Yorkers, I too am infected with the real estate disease. Even though I hate moving, I can't move to a new place without wondering what it would be like to live there. I can't walk through the East Village without checking ads and assessing the state of restaurants and playgrounds in the area.
And outside of New York, whoever goes to sleep in a sleeping bag in a place like the Mesa Verde Nature Reserve, located at an altitude of more than two kilometers in the Colorado mountains, and wakes up in the middle of the night - will discover the entire Milky Way around him. There are about 200 billion stars in the Milky Way and a similar number of galaxies in the observable universe. Surely there are some not bad properties there, and maybe even living neighbors will be discovered there.
This is an optimistic time for those who enjoy thinking of the universe as a benevolent place and hope that there is a chance for life on other planets. As of early September, the official number of extrasolar stars discovered was 111, according to the International Astronomical Union. But the numbers change every week. What started as a trickle of discoveries of strange stars with no chance of finding life in them, about ten years ago, has become a flood of new stars, which look more and more friendly.
One of these discoveries revolves around the dimly lit star Gliza 436, whose mass is less than half that of the Sun and is classified as a "red dwarf" - a small, cool star. At the beginning of the month, it was announced that there is a 436th planet orbiting around it, whose mass is only 20 times greater than the mass of the Earth - similar to that of Neptune from our solar system.
This planet orbits its "sun" every 2.6 days, at a distance of about 4.1 million kilometers from it. And like all the other planets discovered outside our solar system, which are much larger than it, life cannot develop there either - except, in one particular combination of circumstances, which cannot yet be confirmed or denied. And here begins the chain of unfounded hypotheses and dreams.
Astronomers have calculated and found that the planet is so close to its sun that one side of it always faces towards it, just as the moon always faces the same side towards the earth as it rotates. This means that one side of the planet is exposed to a constant intense scorching of the sun while on the other side there is constant frost and frost. But in the twilight zone between the two parts, where Gliza 436 shines forever orange like a clown's face, there is a slight chance that the temperature is in the "golden range" - neither too hot nor too cold - where liquid water can be found; The prerequisite for the existence of life as we know it.
I began to imagine a kind of ringed world on the face of Galiza 436b (the current unpoetic name of the planet) as a narrow strip of dust and green, like a summer swamp in Alaska filled with intelligent creatures, surrounded by ice and desert on both sides, building their little cities and sitting on the edge of the canal infested with bass fish . It is interesting to delve into the psychology and cosmology of creatures that live in eternal twilight. Interesting, can it be said in Galiza 436b that there is an eternal dawn or an eternal sunset? Do they know about other stars?
Of course, these are far-fetched dreams. You can forget cities and creatures. After all, even a few unknown bacteria in a mud puddle will change the face of science. Even the possibility of water being found somewhere will make astrobiologists and other scientists jump for joy. But this possibility depends on the nature of the atmosphere on the surface of the planet: if it is too dense, the heat from the bright part of the planet will concentrate around the dark part and the whole planet will be suffocated. And if the atmosphere is thin or doesn't exist at all, there is no preventing a section of the illuminated part from remaining warm. But no one really knows what the conditions are in Galiza 436b: is it made of stone and iron, like the Earth, or ice and snow, like Neptune, and what are the atmospheric conditions there. Does, for example, the water evaporate from the light part and turn into snow when it falls on the dark part?
And even worse: red dwarfs like Glyze 436 are subject to giant eruptions and sunspots, so its planet and everything on it must be resistant to changes in exposure to sunlight and to "showers" of radiation.
It is still too early to get excited about the possibility of finding life on Galiza 436b, or on any other speck of dust in the sky. But the chances definitely support the possibility that one day, on one of the planets, the "golden conditions" will exist that will make it a good bet for building a new real estate venture.
A leap in research
All the last planets that we have become aware of were discovered indirectly - usually by measuring the fluctuations that their gravity exerts on the light emitted from their sun. Because large planets create large wobbles, the first discovered outside the solar system were Jupiter-sized and orbited close to their sun, so their temperatures are too high and their atmospheres are too dense to support the types of life we know. But as astronomers made longer and more sensitive observations, they began to discover star systems that looked more pleasant.
Galiza 436b is one of three such planets recently discovered, and all three are small - about the same size as Neptune. One of them, known as Kankri 55e, is part of a system of four planets that, among the astronomers' discoveries, is the closest thing to our solar system.
Those discoveries jump-started the research, said Dr. Jeff Marcy, an astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley, who has long worked to discover new planets. According to him, when he and his colleague, Dr. Paul Butler from the Carnegie Institution, began working in the field in the early nineties, "people looked at their shoes with embarrassment when we said we were looking for new planets." It sounds to them like a search for UFOs.
Today, this is a major field in astronomy, receiving ever-increasing shares of NASA's budget. The next step, according to the astronomers, is the discovery of Earth-sized planets, although this will require a deep space search. NASA is planning several missions within a few years, the purpose of which will be to identify and study planets where there is a chance for life to develop.
And closer to home, the findings from "Spirit" and "Opportunity" confirmed that sometime in the past there was water on Mars. Last week, researchers from the University of Colorado published their conclusions, according to which the site where "Opportunity" landed was once a sea, the size of the Baltic Sea. Scientists also believe that beneath the ice on the surface of Jupiter's moon, known as "Europa", water is hidden.
But no one knows if there really was life in these places. So far they have found life everywhere on Earth they have looked, from the driest and coldest places to the hottest and most humid places. But the odds of finding extraterrestrial life are incalculable even under the best conditions one could hope for. Many questions remain unsolved. After all, we don't even know how life evolved on our planet. Beyond that, the scientists are not even sure that they will be able to identify life forms, which will be excessively different from the only life form we know - ourselves, in the chemistry and DNA we know. So I look at the universe and think: everything is still possible. I believe that astronomers will discover planets like Earth in my lifetime and most likely long before anyone manages to land on Mars.
Know planets outside the solar system
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