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Comment by dongsheng | Hacker News Reader

Does that mean it's possible to have living creatures on that planet? Looks like a prefect environment to grow bacteria.

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Yes, IF there is water on the planet. So far we're not sure how Earth came to have so much water and it is thought that our water was a relatively recent addition in our planetary formation. The method HARPS uses, which discovered this planet among 50 others announced today, is spectrography on the host star to detect the wiggle as the planet orbits.

This method doesn't give us the density or composition of the planets, which are the other two values of primary concern in evaluating it for whether it could host life or not.

As always Bad Astronomy provides a no BS rundown of this all this news: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/09/12/50...

That would be life as we know it on earth, there could be life that uses different chemistry. But really the life questions seem unanswerable since all we can detect is the wobble of these distant stars.

For transiting exoplanets at least, we should be able to measure spectra pretty soon. That'll mean getting some kind of chemical information, hopefully.

These discoveries are so tantalizing, yet so frustratingly data-poor. We know now that the galaxy around us is teeming with planets, with untold new configurations and environments we can't imagine waiting to be discovered. We need bigger telescopes.

> We need bigger telescopes.

Or faster rockets.

Better yet, faster physics. :)

Am I right in assuming that the stated temperatures are just estimates based on proximity to the star? The Bad Astronomy article suggests this, but doesn't explicitly state this.

Correct given the characteristics of the star and the planets distance from the sun we can deduce the amount of energy reaching the planet. Whether the planet like Earth, Mars or even the moon is however beyond current measurements.

Also for people interested in planet detection there was a Google Tech Talk posted not too long ago about the methods they use. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Av67Ab0tF-8

Perhaps the water on earth became trapped as part of a migrating space biosphere, just one of many oceans floating around in space, insulated by the frozen ice coating the outside and given energy by small collisions with other matter until it collides with a solid body and forms a planet like ours.

Plenty of speculation in that article too. A little more science is all.

The speculation is obvious unlike the OP and couched in the science.

Hm, perhaps the right bacteria could convert the whole planet into cheese :-/ ponders startup idea...

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