Friday, February 10, 2017

The most Earth-like planet we know about is probably too radioactive for life - The Washington Post

The most Earth-like planet we know about is probably too radioactive for life - The Washington Post:

Kepler-438b is only 12 percent bigger than Earth in diameter, and scientists gave it a 70 percent chance of being rocky like our own world. Scientists were further tantalized by its distance from its host star, Kepler-438. Kepler-438b is a red dwarf chillier than our own sun, but the exoplanet in question is close enough to its star that it boasts a 70 percent chance of holding liquid water -- or having the right temperature to hold it, anyway.

But it turns out that the star is ejecting superflares 10 times as powerful as any solar flare ever recorded in our own system. The flares carry the energy of 100 billion megatons of TNT, and they happen regularly, at least once every few hundred days.

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