Exoplanet and Alien Life NEWS ...

Dejan Corovic

As above, so bellow
This is a thread for any news that relates to the discovery of alien life in general and intelligent life in particular on any of thousands of newly discovered exoplanets.

For starters, here is an excellent video that once more reveals how lucky we had been. Video is by well known Youtuber Scott Manley who's known for his rocket technology videos. Here he analyses how big chemical rocket one needs relative to the size of a planet. For example, while on Earth Saturn V can take you to the Moon, on an exoplanet that is a double the Earth diameter it Saturn V wouldn't be able even to get you into the orbit.

That directly means, that civilizations on an exoplanet larger than Earth, would take much longer to start exploring its solar system. So, relatively speaking, we've been lucky that Earth is neither too big to take off into orbit, neither too small to have insuficient amount of metals to make the rockets.

 
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Dejan Corovic

As above, so bellow
And here is another nice video by Anton Petrov, where he discusses about what is the maximum number of planets that can fit into habitable zone and what is required for that. This time it turns out we were unlucky, because few massive plants, like our Jupiter, can destabilize orbits of smaller planets and cause them to collide with each other. And indeed, that's exactly what happened to Earth, when a planet size of Mars collided with Earth and created Earth-Moon system.

It turns out that a Sun-like star can hold up to 7 Earth-like planets in a habitable zone, if there is no gas giant to mess things up. An intelligent alien civilization that would be the first to spring up in such a solar system would be really lucky to have 6 additional planets to colonize. Unlike ourselves, who just have choice between two barren worlds like Moon and Mars.

 

Dejan Corovic

As above, so bellow
Now, this one is as fascinating as two previous ones put together.

It turns out that if we wanted to get just one pixel of light from a distant potentially life hosting planet, we would a telescope mirror that is 90,000 km (50,000 ml) in diameter. Suffice to say, it's never gona happen.

But here, @Thomas R. Morrison and @waitedavid137 will be pleased to hear, kicks in the marvel of General Relativity. Sun bends light that is coming from distant stars, but very little. That still means that Sun acts as a lens. So some scientists worked out the theoretical model, based on GR, of using Sun as a giant lens to see exoplanets. Setup is quite elaborate, with special sun-shade etc. but on the practical side, using the Sun as gravitational lensing telescope will be able to create an image of the 100 light years distant exoplanet with a resolution of 12 km ( 7 ml ) per pixel! Unbelievable!

Here it is:

 
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