Vocal Voices

Why all this fuss? The new-found planet scientists are so excited about is so far away that
it takes light 39 years to travel that far. Furthermore, as space must be infinite, (because it
cannot end), there is sure to be life somewhere else out there. So what? Why waste time and
money on such a useless project? It would make more sense if they tackled the problems now
facing our planet - caused by us humans.

I don’t think astrophysicists are going to solve Climate Change Aggers. However they may just help us to understand the universe we live in. That knowledge may, some day, bring us fusion power and travel to the stars. Both of which will help with overcrowding and Climate Change in the long run.

What has them excited is that they’ve been looking at G type starts like our sun to try and find planets. They’ve found a few but it’s a long search and they are not finding as many as they might have thought.

But this sun is just slightly larger than Jupiter, about 1/10th the size of our sun and has 7 planets rotating around it; which are all more like earth than the other planets in our solar system. They had not been looking at these type suns because they didn’t believe they would have planetary systems like ours.

The first thing that went through my mind, after reading the news on this, is that this is exactly the kind of solar system you would get if a race with extremely high technology had created it. Nobody is saying that, but, also, they are not saying how so many planets of the same size wound up orbiting such a small sun and so closely.

In this solar system there are at least 3 or 4 planets which could, possibly, support life and one of them is considered in the goldilocks zone where our planet orbits. But the orbits of the planets are very, very close to the sun. If I read the article correctly, all 9 planets are closer to that sun that Mercury is to ours.

It’s quite a discovery. OK it’s 39 light years away. But, equally, should we manage to generate a true star drive, it’s viable for colonisation for our “teeming billions”.

Either way they looked somewhere planets should not be and found loads of them. They will, now, be looking at these kinds of stars much more closely. Perhaps they will find many, many, more like it.

It is news and it should be followed up. Or we’ll just wind up running backwards instead of forwards.

There was a time when I never missed The Sky at Night so this sort of thing has been with me for a long time.

There are three planets orbiting Trappist-1 in its habitable zone and if conditions are right one or all could hold water. However, that is where facts end speculation begins until further observations are made. We will probably have to wait for the James Webb space telescope to come online before they happen.

What has been really interesting over the past five years or so is the number of solar systems discovered. The more main sequence stars, of all types, we look at the more systems we see. Where it was once thought that our solar system was unique or a rarity it now appears that solar systems are almost normal.

However, and I agree with Aggers, it is all academic and of very little practical use to us today. It could well be that it is possible to come up with some sort of workable spacecraft able to zoom through wormholes and cover great distances in the blink of an eye, but it will not be built by humankind. We will have done ourselves in long before we get anywhere near meaningful space travel.