[ INTRO ]
Astronomers have confirmed thousands of planets beyond our solar system,
but they’ve yet to identify a definite Earth 2.0.
Sure, they’ve found some rocks that are about the size and mass of the Earth,
but that doesn’t mean they have an Earth-like climate.
After all, Venus has about the same mass and size,
but it’s also the definition of “a bad place to visit, and you wouldn’t want to live there.”
So when we try to look at a planet that’s light years away from us,
how can we tell if it’s another Earth, or another Venus?
It turns out, scientists can get hints about a planet’s climate
without having to send a probe across those vast interstellar distances.
And it involves figuring out how fast a planet spins.
Earth rotates, or spins, around its axis roughly once every 24 hours.
And the speed of that rotation affects how fluids
like our air and water move around the planet.
It’s a phenomenon called the Coriolis effect.
It helps to create weather systems like the trade winds and Gulf Stream,
which help to redistribute heat from the equator to higher latitudes.
And it can also help create powerful storms like cyclones.
The Coriolis effect arises because different parts of the Earth
move at different speeds while the whole planet spins.
Over the course of 24 hours,
stuff at Earth’s equator has to travel way faster
to get back to its starting point than anything near the poles.
We’re talking 1,600 kilometers an hour compared to effectively standing still!
If a planet is spinning faster, then the Coriolis effect is stronger.
We can see this on Jupiter, which has a day that’s only 9.8 hours long.
The effect is so powerful it interrupts winds traveling from the equator to Jupiter’s poles.
Instead, these winds are forced to travel horizontally,
and some reach speeds greater than 600 kilometers per hour.
Venus, on the other hand,
takes over 5,800 hours to complete just one full rotation!
With almost no Coriolis effect on the planet at all,
it has much simpler atmospheric circulation.
And according to some climate simulations of Venus-like exoplanets,
that might contribute to a runaway greenhouse effect.
So if we’re looking to find a planet with an Earth-like climate,
we’ll want to check how fast it’s spinning.
And that requires getting around the pesky fact
that distant planets look like single points in our telescope data.
It’s kinda hard to see a planet rotating if you can’t make out any actual features!
But back in 2014, one team of scientists found a way around that.
They targeted a young gas giant, bigger than Jupiter, named Beta Pictoris b.
And they looked specifically at the planet’s overall spectrum,
the combination of colors found in that single point of light as the planet spins.
When an object moves away from us,
the wavelengths of the light it emits get stretched out.
In terms of color, that means that object looks redder to us.
And when the object is moving towards us, the waves are compressed,
causing it to look bluer.
The redder or bluer the light is,
compared to what the colors would be for a stationary object,
the faster that object is moving.
And when you’re looking at a spinning planet, one edge is moving toward you,
while the other moves away.
So astronomers can measure how much the color gets shifted
to figure out how long a day on that planet is.
When the team looked at Beta Pictoris b,
they found its day is only 8 hours long!
But Earth, you may have noticed, is not a gas giant.
It’s a lot smaller and dimmer,
so astronomers need to find a method that’s better for getting the spins of possible Earth 2.0’s.
To figure out how fast a small rocky planet spins,
some scientists have proposed measuring reflected star light.
Yeah. Nothing fancy, just the light from the star that bounces off the planet.
If the planet is covered in different features,
from oceans to glaciers to mountain ranges,
those regions could reflect different colors and amounts of light.
So as they rotate in and out view, the light that our telescopes pick up would change.
Astronomers could figure out how long the day is based
on how frequently that light pattern repeats itself,
because the same features would keep coming back around, and around.~~
So in the near future, to find an Earth-like world,
we may be able to look not just for a body that’s the same size, mass,
and right distance from its star,
but also one that spins at just the right speed so its climate could be like our own.
The next generation of bigger and better telescopes,
such as the European Southern Observatory’s upcoming
Extremely Large Telescope,
will make it way easier for astronomers to use these methods
and track the spin of planets out there.
And maybe one day we’ll get a sort of galactic weather report,
for worlds that are still too far to visit.
But for now, we visit those worlds on the internet through videos
like this one!
Thank you for exploring the galaxy with SciShow Space.
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And we’ll see you in the discord!
[ outro ]