Kepler-10c, dubbed the "Godzilla" planet by top international boffins, has a mass 17 times that of our planet - it has emerged this week - and orbits a star 560 lightyears away in the constellation Draco - the Dragon. The Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics (CfA) announcement here has set reporters afire with the idea …

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Tuesday 3rd June 2014 01:37 GMT Trevor_Pott

Don't buy the solar storms = doom thing one bit. Earth has organisms that withstand high levels of ionizing radiation...and organisms on a tidally locked planetary body would be living on the terminus anyways; no direct "brunt force stellar trauma."

Natural selection can do amazing things, we'd be fools to write off red dwarf stars as potential sources for habitable life. Especially when you consider that exomoons won't have many of these problems. Heck, you could even get a little farther out from the star if the planetary parent were big enough to be emitting substantial infrared.

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1. Tuesday 3rd June 2014 05:51 GMT Stoneshop
  
  Don't buy the solar storms = doom thing one bit.
  
  Except that, akin to the Jatravartids, they will invent wireless power and communication before the telegraph, as it would catch on fire as soon as it's hooked up.
  
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2. Tuesday 3rd June 2014 11:03 GMT Brewster's Angle Grinder
  
  But if the environment disrupts life before it can get started, then D. radiodurans. will never be able to evolve. And with hurricane force winds scouring the ground under the terminator, life may be impossible, even there.
  
  This is a necessary corollary to some wildly optimistic definitions of the habitable zone. At the same time, confining life to a star's habitable zone may be pessimistic - given that Jupiter's moons lay outside our habitable zone and yet are the most likely location for non-terrestrial life in our solar system.
  
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3. Tuesday 3rd June 2014 15:47 GMT Anonymous Coward
  
  Say what?
  
  ZMy rading came to a screeching halt when I read that. Extremophiles do exist in the damnedest places here on Earth and aren't dependent on life in more temperate conditions. Some of them are in many of our bodies. If anything, those conditions are extremely like to radically accelerate adaptation. When/if we ever do find such life, it'll be one hardy SOB and I'd think really hard before I landed there. It'll probably eat anything. Fast!
  
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Tuesday 3rd June 2014 04:14 GMT Anonymous Coward

Intelligent life on an ancient mega Earth

would be quite interesting, because it would probably be a very different world and thus very different life from ours. So different, in fact, that if they looked out and saw what they'd consider "new mini Earths" like ours, they might ignore us, considering us unable to support life as they know it. And they might be right.

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Tuesday 3rd June 2014 11:29 GMT Bunbury

“It must have formed the way we see it now.”

Disappointing to see the word "must" there from a scientist. It seems unlikely from our knowledge of gas giants that it formed as such then lost it's atmosphere. But that may have happened. Also, there could have been a number of lower mass rocky bodies that combined to form this big rock - after all our own moon is thought to be he remnant of a collision.

But why say "we don't think it's A so it must be B!" when you don't actually know it wasn't A and there are other letters in the alphabet?

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Tuesday 3rd June 2014 19:24 GMT mr.K

Increase tidal force?

Gongjie Li [...] says: first, the expanding star will heat the planets, boiling off their atmospheres, while increasing solar tides will stretch the planets into egg-shapes.

I really don't get this. Tidal force is a result of gravitational force. Gravitational force is not in any way affected by the radius of the body that exerts it. The only two factors that matter is the mass of the body and the distance you are from it's center of mass. If you are moving into something that can be considered uniformly distributed along each distance to the center. As you can when you dig into an actual body or as you progress towards the center of a spiral galaxy. You can discard all the mass that is further out than yourself and only consider the mass that is closer than yourself to the center to calculate the net gravitational force you are experiencing. It does not matter whether all the matter on the inside of yourself is condensed into a perfect hollow sphere* you are a millimeter away from or that if all of the matter is condensed into a point in the center. The gravitational force you experience is the same.

Since tidal force is something you experience since a body actually has volume and thus parts of it will be further away from the center of mass of another close by body. This means the gravitational force on the particles it is made up of will be slightly different and this is in effect the tidal forces.** But again, as long as there is space*** between the bodies and the mass remains the same the gravitational force will remain equal on each of those particles with regard to the volume of the both of them and thus the tidal forces will remain equal.

Please enlighten me if you see the flaw in my reasoning or what I didn't get from what Gongjie said.

*Assume a theoretical hollow sphere that has the same mass as the theoretical body we started with and that is infinitely thin. If you are unable to, assume it to be 1 mm thick. Both are equally impossible.

**Almost, but not exactly.

***geddit?

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1. Wednesday 4th June 2014 08:46 GMT Bunbury
  
  Re: Increase tidal force?
  
  Yes unclear why the force would increase. The planet's reaction to the force could change of course - e.g. if it was heated to a more pliable state?
  
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  1. Thursday 5th June 2014 20:15 GMT mr.K
    
    Re: Increase tidal force?
    
    I did consider that briefly and now I have considered in a little more. I actually think it doesn't matter.
    
    Consider Earth. Disregard the fact that most of it is liquid, because it is too viscous to follow the tide. Look rather at the rather the water on top. It is has a low viscosity or is pliable if you want. Still, the tidal force isn't enough to increase it more than a few meters. And it doesn't matter which part of the mass that bulges as long as there is enough left of the pliable mass. So if Earth was instead made up of a perfect liquid with the same density as the Earth has now it would not have higher tides. Gravitational force will reach an equilibrium against the tidal forces and the centripetal force from the spin.
    
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Tuesday 3rd June 2014 20:25 GMT Graham Marsden

Red Dwarf Plant...

... is that the Planet Smeg?

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