Local Professor Searches for Habitable Worlds

I was pleased to read in this morning’s Ft. Worth Star Telegram that a University of Texas at Arlington (UTA) professor is searching the cosmos for habitable worlds.  Manfred Cuntz (and no, I’m not making his name up), UTA’s associate professor of physics and co-director of astronomy, was on a four man team that contends that the third planet of Gliese 581, a red dwarf star approximately twenty light years away from Earth, is likely too hot to sustain life. However, the fourth planet, previously thought to be just outside of the habitable zone, might have a surface temperature that cycles around the freezing point of water.  (We’ve actually already discussed the star system that is being studied in an earlier article presented here.)

Don’t get too excited, however. A red dwarf star is much smaller than our own sun and is in a completely different phase of the star life cycle. Our sun is considered to be a G2-type star, while Gliese is an M2.5-type star. Light from this star would be reddish-orange (depending on atmospheric scattering) and would be much less intense than our own star. For a planet to be in the habitable range of the star, it’s year would be less than 90 days (assuming a roughly circular orbit). Planets are also likely to be tidally locked, which means that one side of the planet will always face the star.

(I’m amazed how at how much information we can obtain by a little bit of reflected light and some spectrographic analysis.)

My hat is off to Professor Cuntz and his colleagues! Keep up the good work.

UPDATE

The Geochemical News has an excellent article about what planetary conditions might be like in the Gliese system. This is well worth the read.