{"id":8,"date":"2007-04-25T05:25:00","date_gmt":"2007-04-25T13:25:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=8"},"modified":"2007-04-25T05:25:00","modified_gmt":"2007-04-25T13:25:00","slug":"its-20-light-years-away-we-can-go-there","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=8","title":{"rendered":""It’s 20 light years away. We can go there.""},"content":{"rendered":"

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Now that’s<\/i> the kind of attitude I like to see coming from a legitimate authority– to wit, Dimitar Sasselov of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, quoted in today’s NY Times<\/a>. He was talking about Gliese 581c, a potentially earth-type planet orbiting a dim red dwarf in the constellation of Libra. 1.5 time Earth’s radius; 5 times the mass. Mean temperature somewhere between 0 and 40\u00b0C, solidly in the Goldilocks Zone for liquid water. A type of planet thought by Sasselov to be not only congenial to life, but more congenial than Earth<\/i>.<\/p>\n

Of course, you probably know this already. It’s on boingboing<\/a>, after all, and Yahoo<\/a>, and Space.com<\/a> and Nature<\/a>, and a thousand other websites. (Science<\/i>, my usual go-to source for this kind of thing, is still asleep at the wheel as of this posting.) What you probably don’t know, however, is that there’s a pretty specific real-world connection between Gliese 581c and Blindsight<\/i>.<\/p>\n

You see, we don’t really know all that much about 581c yet. We got a mass, and we got a distance-from-primary, and we got an orbital period (11 days), and we got all of that by watching Gliese 581 wobbling slightly as its planets tugged gravitationally on its sleeve. We don’t even know if 581c has an atmosphere, and if so, whether it’s closer to ours or Venus’s.<\/p>\n

But there are plans to find out, and they involve the use of a suitcase-sized Canadian satellite called MOST<\/a> (also known as “The Humble”, by virtue of its teensy dinner-plate of a mirror). Despite its small physical size, MOST is well-suited for picking up the atmospheric signatures of extrasolar planets, and it’ll be turning its glassy eye towards Libra in the near future. The Principle Investigator behind the MOST is a guy name of Jaymie Matthews<\/a>, who acted as my unpaid astrophysics consultant (well, paid in pizza and beer, I guess) for Blindsight<\/i>.<\/p>\n

And now, after helping me chase aliens through my own brainstem, he’s gonna be looking for real ones at Gliese 581. How cool is that<\/i>?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Now that’s the kind of attitude I like to see coming from a legitimate authority– to wit, Dimitar Sasselov of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, quoted in today’s NY Times. He was talking about Gliese 581c, a potentially earth-type planet orbiting a dim red dwarf in the constellation of Libra. 1.5 time Earth’s radius; 5 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,9,7,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-astronomycosmology","category-blindsight","category-extraterrestrial-life","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}