Earth-like planet could harbour life

[Wilse]

Apologies if this has already been posted.

From The Guardian:

The planet, the first detected so far that is enough like Earth for life to develop, orbits a star called mu Arae in the southern constellation Altar. The planet - astronomers call such things exoplanets - is only 14 times the mass of Earth and, like Earth, could be composed of rock and support an atmosphere.
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But the planet that orbits mu Arae every 9.5 days lies at the threshold of the largest possible rocky planets. The discovery, across a distance of 50 light years, was possible only because of the accuracy of an instrument called Harps, a spectrograph on the European Southern Observatory's 3.6m telescope at La Silla in Chile.

[Karlos]

Doesn't sound that earth like to me ;-)

With a 9.5 day orbital period, one expects it has quite a high surface temperature, and at 14 earth masses, should have one mean surface gravity. Unless the atmosphere is relatively thin, it would have quite some surface pressure.

Gravity aside, I'd imagine it was probably more venus like than earth like...

[KennyR]

A planet that has 14 terrestrial Gs isn't really a good candidate for life. It must have an atmosphere with several hundred times our pressure, trapping in a hell of a lot of heat. And perhaps, the fact its not bigger might mean its in the face of some mean solar wind.

Edit: Uhm, Karlos got there first.

[Karlos]

I guess the implication is that the planet is a lot more earth like than the other extrasolar planets so far discovered - particularly those large gas giants that orbit close to their star. Such environments would be alien compared to anything in the solar system.

-edit-

The surface gravity wouldn't necessarily be 14G's, it depends on the planetary radius as well as the mass. But it would surely be a lot higher than it is here :-)

I wonder how old it is? If it is very ancient, it might be the remainder of one of those freaky near orbit gas giants that's had its atmosphere ablated away by the solar wind (although a jupiter like planet would have an awesome magnetic field to sheild it - but at 9.5 days orbital time implies a very close proximity to the star). If it were in a more distant orbit, one would assume such mass would form the solid core of a moderate sized gas giant.