Habitable Zones "Goldilocks zone"
So before I said what habitable zones are. You are probably going to ask, "Om, why are you going to write ANOTHER BLOG about habitable zones if you have already told me what exoplanets are?" There is a simple answer to that question: we are going even deeper into the topic of habitable zones. By the way, the correct scientific term is 'Circumstellar Habitable Zones' or CHZ in short, but I like the 'Goldilocks Zone' much better! (Circumstellar means 'around the star' or 'surrounding the star', which is to say, orbiting)
So before you read about the "Goldilocks Zone", or the habitable zone, I will discuss what I said last blog (exoplanets) about habitable zones, if you happen to have not seen it. I basically said that it is just the right temperature for water to exist, and that 1 out of 5 exoplanets are in the habitable zone. That is saying a LOT, because there are 3,518 exoplanets, and 3,518 exoplanets * 1/5 or the amount of them known so far in the habitable zone is 703 known exoplanets, which each are a lot to explore!
The main reason we are looking for habitable zones is because we want to look for possible extraterrestrial life. Extraterrestrial life is very important to explore because it can help us figure out if there are other (other than us) intelligent species out there in the universe. Another reason we are looking for habitable zones is to look for planets we can ourselves live on when Earth becomes too densely populated. The picture at the top of this blog mentions a new phrase 'Astrobiology'. I will talk about that topic in a future blog. For now, all I can say is that it is the science that studies about extraterrestrial life, i.e., what might make life possible outside of our solar system.
Yet another question I will explore in the future blog is, how fast can we travel in space? This is important because let's say we found an exoplanet that is almost exactly like Earth - similar atmosphere, similar temperature, similar chemical composition etc, and we want to go visit it, or live on it. For example, what if Proxima Centauri, the nearest exoplanet were to be earth-like and habitable. How long would it take for us to travel there? Will we have the technology to make interstellar (i.e., between different solar systems) space travel possible? Interstellar distances are HUGE - Light travels at a speed of about 300,000 km/second (that is about 186,000 miles/ second) and it takes LIGHT about 4+ years to travel from that nearest exoplanet to the Earth (that's what it means when we say it is 4.2 light years away)! And I don't know much about this but Albert Einstein had something to say about what happens if we travel at speeds similar to speed of light!!!!
The rest of what I was going to talk about has been already said in the previous blog, so I guess this is the end of talking about habitable zones. My next blog will be about SETI - Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence (whose office happens to be in Mountain View, close to where we live!).
Update on 10/3/16: A really interesting article on exoplanets appeared today on Wired.com. In fact they have a whole page that talks about exoplanets.