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TagCold planets

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Planets and exoplanets of unexplored galaxies. Sci-Fi. New worlds to discover. Colonization and exploration of nebulae and galaxies

Some Cold Giant Planets May Be Habitable, Researchers Say

Life could exist outside the expected habitable zone if a massive planet can hang onto insulating gases in its atmosphere

Rocky exoplanets with an atmosphere of hydrogen and helium gases could have liquid water on the surface, like Jupiter’s moon Europa, and could thus host life. The question is whether the surface water sticks around long on “cold super-Earths,” that are ten times the mass of our planet: Now, new calculations described in a paper published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy suggest that the surface conditions of these worlds could have been temperate for more than enough time for life—for 5 billion to 8 billion years. Earth is only about 4.5 billion years old, by comparison, and life emerged here about 3.7 billion years ago. Eva Botkin-Kowacki, “We may be underestimating how many cold, giant planets are habitable” at Read More ›

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Researchers: There Are Cold Planets Throughout Our Galaxy

They report that there are even cold planets in the Galactic bulge, where it was not certain they would exist

Researchers from Osaka University, using gravitational microlensing, have determined that there are cold planets throughout our galaxy. Cold planets would have average temperatures below the freezing point. The results show that the planetary distribution is not strongly dependent on the distance from the Galactic center. Instead, cold planets orbiting far from their stars seem to exist universally in the Milky Way. This includes the Galactic bulge, which has a very different environment to the solar neighborhood, and where the presence of planets has long been uncertain. “Stars in the bulge region are older and are located much closer to each other than stars in the solar neighborhood,” explains lead author of the study Naoki Koshimoto. “Our finding that planets reside Read More ›