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‘Vulnerable’ Earth-Like Planets Could Survive With Friction: Study
Flexible planets: NASA is studying how planets in eccentric orbits flex due to tidal forces. At left is a planet with a thick ice shell, and at right a terrestrial-type planet. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
If you’re a potentially habitable world orbiting in a zone where liquid water can exist — and then a rude gas giant planet happens to disturb your orbit — that could make it difficult or impossible for life to survive.
But even in the newly eccentric state, a new study based on simulations shows that the orbit can be made more circular again quite quickly, taking only a few hundred thousand years to accomplish. The key is the tidal forces the parent star exerts on the planet as it moves in its orbit, flexing the interior and slowing the planet down to a circular orbit.
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Read the rest of ‘Vulnerable’ Earth-Like Planets Could Survive With Friction: Study (268 words)
© Elizabeth Howell for Universe Today, 2014. |
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Post tags: Europa, super earth, tidal heating
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Source: http://www.universetoday.com/113073/vulnerable-earth-like-planets-could-survive-with-friction-study/
