Sunday, March 5, 2023

Fotosíntesis

Spark it up, pendejos: the new habitable-zone. Sadly: not as wide as we'd hope. At least: not around those M stars for which we'd been finding HZ planets so far.

Basically plants' chloroplasts don't drink the infrared wavelengths of light; they drink the visible spectra. We'd already got hints at poor lighting-conditions in those "goldilocks" zones around K stars. Moreover the HZ around red-dwarf suns is so close to those suns that the planets are tidally-locked. So those planets don't get a lot of surface-area for photosynthesis even to start [PACE 3/16 this nonsense].

That rules out those Trappist-1 planets. Looking at these planets' sheer closeness to the star - innermost comparable to Jupiter / Callisto - I'd wondered if the star's magnetic field might be irradiating the planet as well.

So: what's left. Cassandra Hall, P. C. Stancil, J. P. Terry, and C. K. Ellison suggest five Kepler mission planets: 452 b, 1638 b, 1544 b, and 62 e+f. These are transits; in a long field-of-sight.

The first one 452 b is at 1800 ly away. This was just a lucky find, we guess. The planet is also larger than Earth taking about the same irradiant "flux" if not more.

Honestly I prefer closer stars. But as I've noted before here: 1 AU, high-parallax, low-mass... pick two. The nice planets may exist near to us, but we won't see them from here.

No comments:

Post a Comment