Moon and Antares

The number of known “exoplanets” that might sustain life keeps going up – it’s in the hundreds. Such a planet is in the “habitable zone” of its parent star – the distance where conditions are most comfortable for life. That zone depends on the type of star. It’s close in for small, faint stars, but a long way out for stars that are big and bright. In fact, such stars might not even have a habitable zone. And if they do, it won’t last long.

One example is Antares, the heart of the scorpion, which huddles close to the Moon tonight.

Antares consists of two stars. The star we see is many times bigger and heavier than the Sun. And it’s probably 50,000 to a hundred thousand times brighter than the Sun or more.

For a planet to receive the same amount of energy that Earth gets from the Sun, it would have to be at least 225 times farther out than Earth is. And at that distance, the second star in the system might make the planet’s orbit unstable. It might even kick the planet out of the system.

Even if a planet did exist in the habitable zone, it wouldn’t last long. Antares is likely to explode in the next million years or so – a bad development for any planet.

So if anything inhabits the Antares system, it’s probably just visiting – perhaps some scientists from another star system watching this impressive but unfriendly pair of stars.

Script by Damond Benningfield