There’s just one planet that we all know of that hosts life – Earth. So what makes all the opposite planets so inhospitable? Which one is the worst? And would it not be potential to make a good much less hospitable world than any scientists have found to date? These are the questions that our hosts Leah Crane and Chelsea Whyte got down to reply.
This particular episode of Useless Planets Society was recorded at New Scientist Reside – New Scientist’s annual pageant of concepts – in London on 8 October. Leah and Chelsea have been joined by Lewis Dartnell, who’s an astrobiologist on the College of Westminster within the UK, and Vincent Van Eylen, who research exoplanets at College Faculty London.
There are lots of candidates for the least-habitable identified planet, and a few are very near dwelling. For instance, Mercury has one facet that reaches temperatures of as much as 430°C, whereas the opposite facet stays round -180°C. Different horrible worlds are rather more distant, resembling the recent super-Jupiter known as HAT-P-7b, which is greater than 1000 mild years from our photo voltaic system and solely takes two Earth days to orbit its star – it’s so scorching and dense within the environment that it’d rain sapphires. There are even planets which can be slowly disintegrating and frigid worlds with no star in any respect the place nothing ever adjustments.
However to make the worst of all potential worlds, our intrepid hosts and their company determined to mix as many of those disagreeable properties as potential into one horrible planet stuffed with intense radiation, acid rain, extraordinary winds, excessive temperatures and seas of lava. And so they discover that this terrible world is surprisingly acquainted…
Useless Planets Society is a podcast that takes outlandish concepts about find out how to tinker with the cosmos – from placing out the solar to inflicting a gravitational wave apocalypse – and topics them to the legal guidelines of physics to see how they fare.
To pay attention, subscribe to New Scientist Weekly or go to our podcast web page right here.
Subjects:
