News

New study: Saturn’s orbit keeps Earth in the circumstellar habitable zone

9 Comments
Circumstellar Habitable Zone
Circumstellar Habitable Zone

What do you need in order to have a planet that supports complex life? First, you need liquid water at the surface of the planet. But there is only a narrow range of temperatures that can support liquid water. It turns out that the size of the star that your planet orbits around has a lot to do with whether you get liquid water or not.

A heavy, metal-rich star allows you to have a habitable planet far enough from the star so  the planet can support liquid water on the planet’s surface while still being able to spin on its axis. The zone where a planet can have liquid water at the surface is called the circumstellar habitable zone (CHZ). A metal-rich star like our Sun is very massive, which moves the habitable zone out further away from the star.

If our star were smaller, we would have to orbit much closer to the star in order to have liquid water at the surface. Unfortunately, if you go too close to the star, then your planet becomes tidally locked, like the moon is tidally locked to Earth. Tidally locked planets are inhospitable to life. So we need a star massive enough to give us a nice wide habitable zone far away from the Sun itself.

But even with the right size star, which we have in our solar sytem, we still have CHZ problems. Just because a planet starts off in the circumstellar habitable zone, it doesn’t mean that it will stay there.

Jay Richards tweeted about this new article from the New Scientist, which talks about that very problem.

Excerpt: (links removed)

Earth’s comfortable temperatures may be thanks to Saturn’s good behaviour. If the ringed giant’s orbit had been slightly different, Earth’s orbit could have been wildly elongated, like that of a long-period comet.

Our solar system is a tidy sort of place: planetary orbits here tend to be circular and lie in the same plane, unlike the highly eccentric orbits of many exoplanets. Elke Pilat-Lohinger of the University of Vienna, Austria, was interested in the idea that the combined influence of Jupiter and Saturn – the solar system’s heavyweights – could have shaped other planets’ orbits. She used computer models to study how changing the orbits of these two giant planets might affect the Earth.

Earth’s orbit is so nearly circular that its distance from the sun only varies between 147 and 152 million kilometres, or around 2 per cent about the average. Moving Saturn’s orbit just 10 percent closer in would disrupt that by creating a resonance – essentially a periodic tug – that would stretch out the Earth’s orbit by tens of millions of kilometres. That would result in the Earth spending part of each year outside the habitable zone, the ring around the sun where temperatures are right for liquid water.

Tilting Saturn’s orbit would also stretch out Earth’s orbit. According to a simple model that did not include other inner planets, the greater the tilt, the more the elongation increased. Adding Venus and Mars to the model stabilised the orbits of all three planets, but the elongation nonetheless rose as Saturn’s orbit got more tilted. Pilat-Lohinger says a 20-degree tilt would bring the innermost part of Earth’s orbit closer to the sun than Venus.

So the evidence for a out solar system being fine-tuned for life keeps piling up. It’s just another factor that has to be just right so that complex, embodied life could exist here. All of these factors need to be just right, not just the orbits of any other massive planets. And you need at least one massive planet to attract comets and other such unwelcome intruders away from the life-permitting planets.

Here’s a good clip explaining the circumstellar habitable zone:

The factor I blogged about today is just one of the things you need in order to get a planet that supports life.

Here are a few of the more well-known ones:

  • a solar system with a single massive Sun than can serve as a long-lived, stable source of energy
  • a terrestrial planet (non-gaseous)
  • the planet must be the right distance from the sun in order to preserve liquid water at the surface – if it’s too close, the water is burnt off in a runaway greenhouse effect, if it’s too far, the water is permanently frozen in a runaway glaciation
  • the solar system must be placed at the right place in the galaxy – not too near dangerous radiation, but close enough to other stars to be able to absorb heavy elements after neighboring stars die
  • a moon of sufficient mass to stabilize the tilt of the planet’s rotation
  • plate tectonics
  • an oxygen-rich atmosphere
  • a sweeper planet to deflect comets, etc.
  • planetary neighbors must have non-eccentric orbits

Here is a study that I wrote about recently about galactic habitable zones.

Commentary

Woman invents hunky man character for her book, then leaves her husband for him

10 Comments

My good friend Dina sent me this article about a very crazy, irrational woman who does not value marriage at all.

Excerpt:

Her steamy, bestselling novels and strong male characters have seduced hundreds of thousands of female readers worldwide.

But Jodi Ellen Malpas has revealed she has split from her own Mr Right – because he no longer lives up to the fantasy she created.

The 34-year-old, whose This Man trilogy has sold more than 500,000 copies, has left her husband of ten years after ‘falling in love’ with one of her characters.

Ms Malpas, from Northampton, says: ‘All my fictional men are strong, successful, sophisticated and enigmatic. I guess it’s hard for any living, breathing man to live up to such a fantasy.

‘In This Man I created Jesse Ward, whose forceful personality was appealing to me. There is no denying I fell in love with him.

‘After all, I created him and I made him the way he is for a reason. Every woman needs some fantasy lover to spice up the dull reality of her real life. I wanted to create my perfect love story.

‘But the success of my books and the popularity of my male character led to the breakdown of my marriage. Sadly it was not solid enough to withstand the changes success has brought to my life.’

The mother of two, whom many believe is the new E. L. James, the housewife who wrote the Fifty Shades Of Grey trilogy, became a self-publishing sensation last year, swiftly rising to the top of the New York Times Best Seller List.

The This Man trilogy explores the love affair between young interior designer Ava O’Shea and playboy Jesse Ward. The second part of her new trilogy, One Night, has just been published by Orion.

‘I was 23 when Aaron and I got married, so we were both very young,’ she says. ‘I didn’t really know who I was. I got on with being a wife and mother.

‘But over time I started to feel that something was missing – my normal everyday life had become a routine. I was bored. I guess that is what couples mean when they say they’ve grown apart. Aaron couldn’t understand why I wanted to write my fiction and I couldn’t understand why he didn’t understand.’

The couple have two children, Alfie, 14, and Patrick, ten. But although they divorced in August last year, Ms Malpas says their relationship remains amicable. She is currently single and insists that she has no time to get involved in a relationship.

‘My children and my writing are enough for the moment,’ she adds. ‘In any case, I suspect some men might be a little intimidated by my independence and my success.’

And she insists she has no regrets. ‘It’s been crazy, but I’m loving the stronger more liberated me,’ she says.

They are “her” children. Not her husband’s and hers. And they don’t need a father – because children don’t have needs distinct from her own needs. Her husband doesn’t have needs distinct from her own needs.

In her own mind, men are intimidated by her success. But that’s not true – they are intimidated because she is insane and irrational and self-centered. They are intimidated because she divorced her husband of 10 years (with children) for a fictional character!!!!!  She doesn’t have any genuine love for a man – only for herself. And her husband must have been a dafty for marrying her. What a terrible thing to inflict on your own children by marrying a woman who was only ever interested in herself – her needs, her adventures, her thrills. Men, when you hear a woman who does not take steps toward marrying and building a family together, run away. Run away before she divorces you and destroys your children with her selfishness.

Good Lord. What have women come to under the influence of feminism? The feministy ones seem to place no value on what a married couple can do together. They place no value on the needs of children. Everything is about getting their own fulfillment through worldy “success” and experiences; traveling, feeling good and taking pointless risks. When I think of the men that these feministy women seem to really want (at least when they are in their teens, 20s and 30s) it really scares me. I used to think that most young, unmarried women were sensible and thought that being a wife and mother was a good way to make a difference. Now so many of them are influenced by feminism and they seem to be avoiding it in favor of making lots of money. As if that were an end in itself.

And remember – LOTS OF WOMEN are buying books like hers, and Fifty Shades of Gray and Eat. Pray, Love and so on. What is so boring about marriage that women no longer find it fulfilling? I go to work every day and damned if I think that is more fulfilling that loving a wife and fathering children. I don’t think any man would think that. We work because that’s how we relate to our wives and children, by providing for them and leading them. And work is not meant to be fun or fulfilling. It’s WORK.

News

Who is paying for Obama’s executive order amnesty vote buying scheme?

1 Comment

The Daily Caller reports.

Excerpt:

Illegal immigrants will receive huge payments from American taxpayers under rules now being imposed by President Barack Obama’s unilateral amnesty.

The illegals will get work-permits and Social Security cards, and will be required to pay taxes, according to Cecilia Munoz, the former immigration lobbyist who is now a top Obama aide.

That means they’re part of the tax system, she said, when she was asked if the illegals would get annual payments under the Earned Income Tax Credit program.

“They are subject to our tax law,” she said, carefully.

Most households of illegals have very low income, and pay little in taxes. For example, in 2011, roughly 22 percent of immigrant households — both legal and illegal — were classified as living in poverty. In contrast, only 13 percent of American households were in poverty.

However, once illegal immigrants are enrolled in the tax system, they would be entitled to EITC payments.

The payments may be huge, and will rise each year.

According to the Internal Revenue Service, two parents with three or more children would receive up to $6,143 in 2014 if they earn less than $46,997.

A family with two kids, and an income of $20,000, would receive $14,590 in taxpayer funds this year alone.

Parents who earn less than the threshold would get $3,305 if they have one child, and $5,460 if they have two children.

The EITC program is already poorly monitored and may be subject to large amounts of fraud, according to critics.

Who is Cecilia Munoz? She used to work for “La Raza” for 20 years. La Raza means “The Race” in Spanish. They are a pro-amnesty group.

You would think that the Democrats would use their own money to bribe people to vote Democrat, but they would rather use yours. That’s what Obama was talking about when he talked about how society is better when he spreads the wealth around. You didn’t need that money you earned for anything, did you? Obama needs to spread it around to people who haven’t worked for it.

It all sounds so compassionate until somebody loses their job or can’t afford to provide for their own families with money they earned.