Scattered¹ around the Milky² Way are stars that resemble（类似） our own sun -- but a new study is finding that any planets orbiting those stars may very well be hotter and more dynamic than Earth. That's because the interiors of any terrestrial planets in these systems are likely warmer than Earth -- up to 25 percent warmer, which would make them more geologically active and more likely to retain enough liquid water to support life, at least in its microbial form.

 

The preliminary finding comes from geologists³ and astronomers⁴ at Ohio State University who have teamed up to search for alien life in a new way.

 

They studied eight "solar twins" of our sun -- stars that very closely match the sun in size, age, and overall composition -- in order to measure the amounts of radioactive elements they contain. Those stars came from a dataset recorded by the High Accuracy Radial Velocity⁵ Planet Searcher spectrometer at the European Southern Observatory⁶ in Chile.

 

They searched the solar twins for elements such as thorium and uranium, which are essential to Earth's plate tectonics because they warm our planet's interior. Plate tectonics helps maintain water on the surface of Earth, so the existence of plate tectonics is sometimes taken as an indicator⁷ of a planet's hospitality to life.

 

Of the eight solar twins they've studied so far, seven appear to contain much more thorium than our sun -- which suggests that any planets orbiting those stars probably contain more thorium, too. That, in turn, means that the interior of the planets are probably warmer than ours.

 

For example, one star in the survey contains 2.5 times more thorium than our sun, said Ohio State doctoral student Cayman Unterborn. According to his measurements, terrestrial planets that formed around that star probably generate 25 percent more internal heat than Earth does, allowing for plate tectonics to persist longer through a planet's history, giving more time for live to arise.

 

"If it turns out that these planets are warmer than we previously⁸ thought, then we can effectively increase the size of the habitable zone around these stars by pushing the habitable zone farther from the host star, and consider more of those planets hospitable⁹ to microbial life," said Unterborn, who presented the results at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco this week.

 

"At this point, all we can say for sure is that there is some natural variation in the amount of radioactive elements inside stars like ours," he added. "With only nine samples including the sun, we can't say much about the full extent of that variation throughout the galaxy¹⁰. But from what we know about planet formation, we do know that the planets around those stars probably exhibit the same variation, which has implications for the possibility of life."

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