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New planet like Earth?
Hinkly Dinkly Reporting
2 AUG 2019
Standby for news!
Astronomers have discovered a potentially habitable 'super-Earth' just 31 light-years away.
The planet, named GJ 357 d, is about six times larger than Earth and orbits a dwarf sun GJ 357, much smaller than our own, every 55.7 days.
Whoa! Hold the fort! What kind of name is GJ 357 d?
Who can remember that? I forgot it already.
If it’s like Earth, lets call it Mirth…There, That’s better.
“In the near future we may pick out signs of life with telescopes that will soon be invented,” said someone from the Carl Sagan Spaced Institute, “If GJ 357 d (Mirth) were to show signs of life, it would be at the top of everyone’s travel list.”
REALLY? She thinks we’re going to go there for a vacation? Not this reporter! She can go to Mirth, I’ll stay here on Earth!
Heck, we’re lucky we got to the Moon.
Let’s look at the facts…
Mirth is 6 times larger than Earth. It orbits a dwarf sun, much smaller than our own, every 55.7 days. Is that their days or our days? If that were their days it would be much longer because one of their days is 144 hours, and since their years are only 55.7 days the days would soon overlap the years?
I’m getting confused. That must be some sort of quantum thing?
Would people there be older than us, or dumber?
Also, If a year were less than 56 days we would have to eliminate some of our months, which would enrage the people who have birthdays in those months, and probably are already irritate over other things.
Mirth is 31 light-years away. To get there tomorrow, we would have to leave 31 years ago…if we could travel at the speed of light.
We cannot.
So we would have to leave sometime before we were born.
Too late for Mirth, stay on Earth.
Hinkly Out,
By George
NoPo8
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All those at Carl Sagan Institute are not necessarily space savvy like he was.
While I found your discussion of Mirth days quite confusing, I believe that those reports are made in Earth day estimates so that most earthbound people would understand.
But you missed the elephant in the room. Six times larger than the Earth! One would have to wear some kind of antigravity de-pressure suit to stand on that planet without being crushed. Or, on the long spaceflight there, morph into something alien Marvel comic creature with far more cojones than you or I possess. I've already had two hernias… No thank you!
There is nothing Earth like or even Mirth like about GJ 357 d (there are a jillion stars out there, so somebody came up with this classifications scheme so that by code only, they could be grouped in some form of similar category… I guess)
Ron