New potential locations for life in other planetary systems

An international team of astronomers, composed of Bruno Lopez (Observatoire de Nice), Jean Schneider (Observatoire de Paris, LUTH) and William Danchi (NASA, Goddard Space Flight Center), has recently realized that the emergence of life on a more distant planets is possible within the red giant phase of the parent star. They estimate that more than 150 red giant stars are close enough - within 100 light years - to be good targets for upcoming or proposed missions such as the Darwin (ESA) or Terrestrial Planet Finder (NASA) proposals. There is a common consensus that the development of life on a planet, as we know it on Earth, requires the presence of liquid water. The planet must therefore lie in what is called the "habitable zone" where the planet, heated by its parent star, acquires a temperature suitable for liquid water : too cloe to the star, the water would boil, too far from the star water would freeze. For a a star similar to the Sun, the habitable zone has a radius of about 1 AU. But, as Lopez and his colleagues have realized, if a planet sits far outside the habitable zone and is thus too cold for having liquid water, during the read giant phase of the star, the habitable zones extends significantly and can reach the planet, making it suited for the development of life. Morover, The authors realized that the interplanetary migration of small sized material, from dust to comets, may serve as an appropriate vehicle to seed the planet with life coming from an inhabited planet at 1 AU.

Before ambitious missions such as Darwin and TPF, to be launched between 2015 and 2020, the european French-led CoRoT mission, to be launched in 2006, will search for Earth-like planets around 60,000 stars.

Reference

• an Life develop in the expanded habitable zones around Red Giant Stars ? Bruno Lopez (1), Jean Schneider (2), William C. Danchi (3) (1) Nice Observatory, (2) Paris Observatory (LUTH), (3) NASA - Goddard Space Flight Center Astrophysical Journal, in press astro-ph/0503520 NASA Press release

Dernière modification le 21 décembre 2021