The 5 Most Earth-Like Planets We've Found (So Far) | Answers With Joe

this video is supported by brilliant earth is the only planet that we know of that has life especially advanced multicellular life whether or not it has intelligent life on it is becoming more questionable every day and you would think that with life being so rare that earth would maybe you know take better care of it but actually mother earth has a bad habit of kind of extincting things that's one bad mama in the history of life on this planet there have been five major extinction events most of them caused by some kind of asteroid strike many say that we're going through a sixth one right now caused by us humans the miley cyrus of species the references in this channel super recent so if we want to survive ourselves we're going to need a second place to call home and while there are some options here in our solar system they're fixer-uppers to say the least luckily we're finding new exoplanets all the time like like it doesn't even make news anymore when we find an exoplanet unless it's super earth-like and we have found some earth-like planets out there in the vastness of space whether or not we would ever actually be able to get to them that's another question [Music] the fastest object humanity has ever launched into space is the juno probe which did an elliptical orbit around jupiter gaining speed each time and eventually reaching a mind-blowing 165 thousand miles an hour and in 2025 the parker solar probe is expected to blow past that eventually reaching 430 000 miles an hour if you were on a plane going that speed from new york to la it would take 23 seconds theoretically you actually would never get there you would vaporize immediately with the force of a two megaton bomb it would wipe out everything in a five mile radius and one of the most densely populated centers in the world it would kill millions of people and here's the thing that's only point zero six four percent the speed of light the closest star to us is four point three light years away it would take six thousand seven hundred and eleven years to get there at that speed damn space why you gotta be so big just wanna see things suffice it to say it's it's going to be a minute before we have the technology to get to a place like that we don't have any hyper drives or warp drives or slip streams or wormholes no going plaid for the expanse fans out there no epstein drive that's a name that didn't age well so the obvious question becomes why even look for these exoplanets if there's no chance that we would ever actually get there my first thought is you never know we might eventually develop the technology to go faster than light but the second thing is finding life on another planet in the universe would be the biggest discovery in the history of our species it would completely make us rethink everything about our place in the universe as long as there is a question mark on whether or not there's life in the universe we will continue to fill that gap with the belief that we're special in some way and this whole thing was made for us so that we're living in a simulation or something like that and yeah finding out that we're not really special might be a bummer but the flip side is that also means that we're part of something bigger much bigger so yes we search for life on other planets and because we only know of one kind of life we look for planets that are as close to the type of planet that created that life as possible and to do so scientists have gotten super nerdy about it enter the earth similarity index this is actually a thing the esi is a mathematical model determining how closely a planet resembles planet earth with one being completely earth-like so we're trying to find a planet as close to 1 as possible mars for example is considered to be an esi of 0.697 not good not terrible but still no life on it at least no life we've been able to find and it's not for lack of trying the number one feature we're looking for here is size a rocky planet roughly the size of earth would probably have a similar atmosphere similar composition lots of things and there's actually an easy equation to determine a planet's esi value when it comes to size it looks like this yes this is actually known as the easy index because i mean look at it it's it's it's so simple so in 2007 some astronomers applied this formula to the planets and the large bodies in our solar system large bodies being anything with a radius of 100 kilometers and they picked 47 of them and they applied this formula to the known exoplanets at the time which is 258 which is adorable because there's well over 4 000 now and they plotted the distribution of planets across the esi index and they got a chart that looks like this so the yellow in this chart is the predicted percentage the orange one is for the planets in our solar system and the blue line is for the exoplanets that were discovered by 2007 and as you can see the number of exoplanets drops precipitously as you get closer to one although i'm going to say it i do have a problem with this graph because it was done in 2007 and there was such a small number of exoplanets that we discovered at that time and earlier on most of the planets that we were finding were large you know super jupiters that you know we've only recently been able to start finding the smaller rocky planets so i think a current version of this would look quite a bit different or not i don't know i don't trust it but i couldn't find a newer graph than this so then why even show us this joe well i don't know except to maybe just make the point that people are looking at it like this but still even if it is right and there's only what like four percent of planets out there that are you know in the higher tier of the esi index that's still a lot of potentially habitable planets out there using kepler space telescope data scientists have assumed that there's around 50 billion planets in our galaxy with about 500 million of them in the habitable zone of their stars that's 20 million potential cradles of life of course that's just taking sides into account there's a lot of other variables that you have to consider and as for how we find these planets the two most popular ways of doing it are the radial velocity method and the transit photometry method which i've talked about before so i'm not really going to go into detail on that but there are several other ways of doing it which i'm not going to go down that rabbit hole you guys can go look it up yourself i'll put a link down the description if you want to know more but there's many different ways that we have gone about finding planets over time but moving on since scientists have gotten so nerdy about how to classify these planets it only makes sense that they would have all that together in a catalog somewhere which they do it's called the habitable exoplanets catalog and the exoplanets here are categorized into three groups based on size subterrane which is smaller than earth something like mars terran which is very earth-like and super terrain which are basically super earths that can be up to 2.5 times the radius of the earth and 10 times earth's mass there are some planets out there beyond the size of super earth like this beefy boy which has more than nine times the mass of jupiter obviously something like that would not make its way into the habitable exoplanets catalog but for the ones that do they mean a very strict criteria be roughly the size of earth be near a bright and stable star have a rocky composition but with some water features a warm planet that's in the range of 255 kelvin a planet with an average radius which means it's spherical and an exoplanet that isn't too far away so now that we've explained what qualifies a planet to be earth-like let's look at a few standout examples shall we first on the list is tea garden b t garden b was found just last year in june 2019 and it's 12 light years away orbiting an inactive m-type red dwarf star that's around 8 billion years old the fact that it's an inactive red dwarf star is good because the active ones tend to kind of rip away atmospheres it's really close to the same size as earth at 1.05 earth masses and it's really close in temperature at 267 kelvin earth's average temperature is 288 kelvin but it orbits way closer to its star with only a five day orbital period meaning its year lasts five days and the star emits primarily infrared light so life on this planet would be very different especially plant life but all in all it scores a 0.93 on the esi index and has about a 60 chance of having similar conditions to earth and it's only 12 light years away so in cosmic terms not too bad so maybe someday you'll be able to have tea on tea garden i'm kidding that's never going to happen but hey if you're not into that tea garden life you might like k272 and no that's not the name of elon musk's next child k272e is actually considered a super earth at 2.21 earth masses it was found in 2016 orbiting around an m-type star and has a 24.2 day orbit making their year about a month long for us it orbits really close to the star only one tenth as far away as we are from the sun which would create some spectacular sunrises except for the fact that it's probably an eyeball planet it's tidally locked with its star so you would never actually see the sun rise i've done a whole video on eyeball planets they're super interesting i'll link it down below but if you would like to get close to k272e you might want to leave early because it's 227 light years away gj3323b was found by the harps telescope in 2017. it's a rocky world with 2.02 times the mass on earth which means that sylvester stallone is twice as big there get it because rocky that's so funny the downside to this one is that we don't think it has any water on it and we don't really know that much else about it it's it's an earth-sized planet in the habitable zone of its star and that's that's about it i'm sure there'll be more info coming in on it as we examine it in the future and that brings us to one of our favorites the trappist system this is another one i've covered many times on this channel before but the trappist-1 system is a system of seven planets that are all earth-like and three of them are in the habitable zone of its star but the most promising one probably is trappist-1d it's a little bit smaller than earth at 0.41 earth mass so you'll feel a little lighter on your feet it won't be that hard to explore the entire planet what you will find again is a tidally lodged planet meaning one side of the planet will face the star at all times in other words and the cool thing is like i said there's a couple of other planets that are in the habitable zone that star uh they're not quite as promising as trappist-1d but they're interesting as well but if you wanted to get there you might want to get a move on it is about 40 light years away and last but not least there's another planet that we don't know a whole lot about but it does rank really high in the esi index and that's gj 1061c this planet has a massive 1.74 earth so a little on the chunky side it also orbits an m-type star but it's pretty close with an orbital period of only 6.7 days and this is easily the newest planet that's on this list it was just found earlier this year now you might notice that none of these are perfect and there's some really short orbital periods meaning these are planets that are really close to their stars now there's a lot of reasons for this one is that if we're looking for earth-sized planets and we're trying to find them based on how they're affecting their stars then it's the planets that are really close to their stars that are going to affect them the most and also with the transit method you have to watch the star for long enough to see the planet go across it so somebody was watching us they'd have to wait for a whole year now if we're looking out there and there's planets that are crossing every few days or a few weeks that's just more opportunities to see it happen and that's just what we're going to wind up with with the current technology that we use to detect them but that technology is changing we all know about the james webb space telescope and how that's going to open up the universe to us but nasa's working on a lot more than that the nancy grace roman space telescope previously known as wfirst it got a new name earlier this year should go up in 2025 and will be a huge leap forward in exoplanet discovery because not only will it be able to view with the same clarity as hubble it'll be able to do so over a hundred times larger area and it will have a coronagraph on board to directly image planets around distant stars this will complement jwst and the test satellite to give us more eyes on exoplanets than ever before and beyond the roman telescope nasa's been working on a concept called luvvar the large uv optical ir telescope this wouldn't go up for 10 to 15 years after the roman telescope but this is basically jwst on steroids this is still in development so there's still a lot of speculation here but the mirror on luvar is expected to be between 8 and 15 meters jwst is 6.5 meters the abilities of this telescope are enormous from seeing the earliest moments of our universe to galaxy formation even planet formation and it's going to open up a whole new category of exoplanet detection another nasa project on the horizon is called hab x and it's specifically designed to directly image earth-like planets around sun-like stars habex's main goal is to not just directly image or size exoplanets but also determine the composition of their atmospheres it'll do this by measuring the spectra of the light coming off of the atmospheres and look for signs of life like oxygen or ozone and looking as far out as 2050 nasa has something called the exo earth interferometer telescope this is a whole new way of detecting exoplanets interferometers are devices that split light waves and then use the alignment or misalignment of the light waves when they come back together again to measure things to nanometer accuracy the leica and virgo gravitational wave detectors are good examples of this well the exo-earth interferometer would use that same idea across either a couple or an array of telescopes to image things to a greater detail than say an optical telescope could this is known as angular resolution and i would explain the details of how this works but i can't do it i'm not that smart but if this works an array like this would not only be able to directly image exoplanets and ascertain what's in their atmospheres you might actually be able to map the planet's surface so yeah in the next 50 years we're going to be getting closer to exoplanets than ever before even if we can't quite actually get close to them it's really amazing what scientists have been able to think up when it comes to you 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Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 421,296

Keywords: answers with joe, joe scott, exoplanets, kepler satellite, nancy grace roman satellite, first, hubble telescope, james webb space telescope, LUVIOR telescope, Trappist-1 system, earth-like planets

Id: vqNW1ybwTVk

Length: 15min 51sec (951 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 07 2020