When we finally begin to probe beyond the solar system in the millennia to come, unless mankind magics up an FTL device, we will find that the variety and diversity of planets is far greater than we have imagined, according to a new study by MIT, NASA and Carnegie.
In the Star Wars movies fictional planets are covered with forests,
oceans, deserts, and volcanoes. But new models from a team of MIT,
NASA, and Carnegie scientists begin to describe an even wider range of
Earth-size planets that astronomers might actually be able to find in
the near future.
Sara Seager, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Mass.;
Marc Kuchner, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.;
Catherine Hier-Majumder, Carnegie Institution of Washington,
(deceased); and Burkhard Militzer, Carnegie, have created models for 14
different types of solid planets that might exist in our galaxy. The 14
types have various compositions, and the team calculated how large each
planet would be for a given mass. Some are pure water ice, carbon,
iron, silicate, carbon monoxide, and silicon carbide; others are
mixtures of these various compounds.
"We're thinking seriously about the different kinds of roughly
Earth-size planets that might be out there, like George Lucas, but for
real," says Kuchner.