Earth, currently, is our only blueprint for planetary habitability.
There may be life elsewhere out there in the big, wide galaxy, but ours is the only world on which we know, for a certainty, that it has emerged.
The problem is that we've found nothing out there that's exactly like our own planet: of the same size and composition, occupying a similar spot in its planetary system, at just the right"Goldilocks" distance from its star for temperatures amenable to life as we know it.we've found to date are, in fact, much closer to their host stars than Earth is to the Sun. Thanks to this proximity, they're not only sizzling, but tidally-locked in place.
A new paper has found that there is a place on closely-orbiting, duel-personality exoplanets that may be habitable: the thin twilit zone where day meets night, known as the"You want a planet that's in the sweet spot of just the right temperature for having liquid water,""This is a planet where the dayside can be scorching hot, well beyond habitability, and the night side is going to be freezing, potentially covered in ice. You could have large glaciers on the night side.
Our search for Earth-like exoplanets is currently somewhat hampered by the limitations of our technology. Our most useful techniques are best at finding worlds that orbit their stars quite closely, whipping round inIf we were only looking at stars like the Sun, this might pose a problem for potential habitability. Yet most of the stars in the galaxy are red dwarfs; smaller, dimmer, and much cooler than our own star.
. This occurs when the gravitational interaction between two bodies"locks" the smaller body's rotation to the same period as its orbit, so that one side is always facing the larger body. It particularly occurs in exoplanets with close orbits, because the gravity of the star stretches the exoplanet in such a way that the distortion applies a braking effect. We see this with Earth and
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