Since its discovery in 1995, exoplanet WASP-12b, a “hot Jupiter,” has been spiraling towards its doom. Located 600 light-years away in the constellation Auriga, a Princeton-led team of astrophysicists has shown that the exoplanet is spiraling in toward its host star, heading toward certain destruction with less than a thousandth of that of Earth’s end, a mere 3 million years, before it meets its fiery demise.
“Cheops will take exoplanet science to a whole new level,” said Günther Hasinger, the European Space Agency’s director of science about the world’s newest orbiting telescope whose name stands for CHaracterising ExOPlanet Satellite that launched early on Wednesday morning aboard a Soyuz-Fregat rocket from the European spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana. It was the second try after Tuesday’s first launch attempt was delayed and some equipment was replaced.
“They’re out there,” goes the common quip about extraterrestrials. It would seem more likely to be true in light of a new study by astrophysicists at the Georgia Institute of Technology on planetary axis tilts that modeled a theoretical twin of Earth into other star systems called binary systems because they have two stars. They concluded that 87% of exo-Earths one might find in binary systems should have axis tilts similarly steady to Earth’s, an important ingredient for climate stability that favors the evolution of complex life.
“For most of human history, the question of whether or not life exists elsewhere has belonged only within the philosophical realm. It’s only in recent years that we have had the modeling tools and observational technology to address this question,” said Northwestern’s Howard Chen, future investigator in NASA Earth & Space Science & Technology and first author of the research team that is the first to combine 3D climate modeling with atmospheric chemistry to explore the habitability of planets around M dwarf stars, which comprise about 70% of the total galactic population.
“In science fiction, there is a lot of effort put into searching for signs of life like plants, animals and organisms that look like us. But there is a higher probability that alien life will be at the microscopic level,” says Rutgers University geochemist, Nathan Yee, co-investigator at the NASA-funded ENIGMA project that’s researching how proteins, “sophisticated nanomachines,” evolved to create life on earth. “That fact is so much more interesting when you consider what the earliest lifeforms on Earth were capable of doing.”
“I do indeed suspect there are other intelligent civilizations in the galaxy – we just need to look!” said astrophysicist Andrew Siemion, principal investigator for the Breakthrough Listen program and director of the Berkeley SETI Research Center, in an email to dailygalaxy.com.