How stars' magnetic fields could impact the chance for life on orbiting planets

[Admin]

Habitability depends on more than just a planet's distance from its host star. New research looks at the impact stellar magnetism has on exoplanets.

How stars' magnetic fields could impact the chance for life on orbiting planets : Read more

 

[Unclear Engineer]

Interesting that "super Earth" K2-3 d, with a mass 2.2 times Earth's and a diameter 1.5 times Earth's should produce a surface gravity about the same as Earth's.

I wonder how good we are at detecting planets about the mass of Earth that are orbiting stars that are about the mass of our Sun at a distance of about 1 AU. It seems like we are better at detecting more massive planets that are closer to less massive stars.

So, maybe there are more planets out there that we are not yet detecting that fit these life-supporting criteria?

 

[rod]

FYI, this exoplanet is updated today showing 7033 exoplanets now, https://exoplanet.eu/home/

I updated my MS ACCESS DB copy and ran my MS SQL queries. 5190 have orbital periods 370 days or less and average mass 4.18 Mjup. We have plenty of exoplanet data now to proclaim to the public if any have life on them and ET phoning home, IMO I am still waiting to see Charles Darwin warm little pond from his 1871 letter confirmed (life from non-living matter), here on earth and among the many exoplanets now

 

[Unclear Engineer]

Rod, that "warm little pond" may really have been a hot hydrothermal vent in the bottom of an ocean along a mid-ocean ridge. So, maybe tectonics are required along with the water.

There are some recent articles on looking for early life chemistries on Earth, before ATP, and the Mars rover just found a rock that looks like it had biological activity billions of years ago.

So, I expect that we will relatively soon have a pretty good idea about how life began here and might also have begun on Mars.

If the persistence of water requires a magnetic planetary field that is decoupled from the star's magnetic field, and plate tectonics requires water, that has some interesting effects on the parameters for the Drake Equation.

 

[alfmagne]

Rod, that "warm little pond" may really have been a hot hydrothermal vent in the bottom of an ocean along a mid-ocean ridge. So, maybe tectonics are required along with the water.

There are some recent articles on looking for early life chemistries on Earth, before ATP, and the Mars rover just found a rock that looks like it had biological activity billions of years ago.

So, I expect that we will relatively soon have a pretty good idea about how life began here and might also have begun on Mars.

If the persistence of water requires a magnetic planetary field that is decoupled from the star's magnetic field, and plate tectonics requires water, that has some interesting effects on the parameters for the Drake Equation.

The Drake equation should add a new factor ‘fm’ for magnetic field protecting the planet.

 

[Catastrophe]

The Influence of Magnetic Fields, Including the Planetary Magnetic Field, on Complex Life Forms: How Do Biological Systems Function in This Field and in Electromagnetic Fields?

Life on Earth evolved to accommodate the biochemical and biophysical boundary conditions of the planet millions of years ago. The former includes nutrients, water, and the ability to synthesize other needed chemicals. The latter includes the 1 g gravity of the planet, radiation, and the...

www.mdpi.com

it remains somewhat unclear if Homo sapiens use exogenous magnetic fields to regulate function and what can happen if the boundary condition of the GMF no longer exerts an effect. Proposed deep space flights to destinations such as Mars will provide some insights, as space flight could not have been anticipated by evolution. The results of such space flight “experiments” will provide new insights into the role of magnetic fields on human functioning.


Cat

 

[Torbjorn Larsson]

This is very speculative work. The effects of geodynamo fields are unclear since the atmospheric erosion is simply concentrated to the poles, and e.g. Venus show that thick atmospheres can exist on Earth massed terrestrial planets closer than the habitable zone.

It seems like we are better at detecting more massive planets that are closer to less massive stars.

That is in general true, more so for the radial velocity method but also to some degree for the transit method as a closer planet covers more spatial angle and so can be more easily seen from afar.

 

[Torbjorn Larsson]

I am still waiting to see Charles Darwin warm little pond from his 1871 letter confirmed (life from non-living matter), here on earth and among the many exoplanets now

Early Earth was sterile and now it is not, so the general idea has been tested. If you mean Darwin's hypothesis specifically, as Unclear Engineer mentions the current data confirms that a deep ocean hydrothermal vent was the geology involved in the split between biology and geology - those vents seems to be our ancestors. [
https://www.nature.com/articles/nmicrobiol2016116]

it remains somewhat unclear if Homo sapiens use exogenous magnetic fields

That is unlikely, and MDPI is not a reputable scientific source that should be cited for science.

MDPI's business model is based on establishing entirely open access broad-discipline journals, with fast processing times from submission to publication and article processing charges paid by the author, their institutions or funders.[6] MDPI's business practices have attracted controversy,[23][24] with critics suggesting it sacrifices editorial and academic rigor in favor of operational speed and business interests.[4][8][25] MDPI was included on Jeffrey Beall's list of predatory open access publishing companies in 2014[26][27] but was removed in 2015 following a successful appeal[24][26] while applying pressure on Beall's employer.[28] Some journals published by MDPI have also been noted by the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Norwegian Scientific Index for lack of rigor and possible predatory practices.[29][30][31]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDPI#Controversies

It is unknown whether humans can sense magnetic fields.[77] The ethmoid bone in the nose contains magnetic materials.[78] Magnetosensitive cryptochrome 2 (cry2) is present in the human retina.[79] Human alpha brain waves are affected by magnetic fields, but it is not known whether behaviour is affected.[77][79]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetoreception

 

[rod]

Well, some interesting discussion Charles Darwin warm little pond in his 1871 letter, he did acknowledge that looking for non-living matter evolving into life on earth today in a warm little pond, some other living organism(s) would come along and eat it so you could not see this take place in nature today. Whatever tests are used to *confirm* this view of the origin of biological life presented to the public, a complete and accurate database should show all the tests conducted, those that *confirmed* and all those that *failed* to the public. Meteorite ALH84001 during Clinton Admin was praised because it may have had little Martians in it. That test failed. So far, confirming life on exoplanets has failed as well as other locations in our solar system outside of planet Earth showing biological life.

TESS now shows 543 confirmed exoplanets. Mean period = 15.14 days with min 0.32 day, max about 483 days. Mean radii size 5.845 earth radii.

NASA Exoplanet Archive

exoplanetarchive.ipac.caltech.edu

TESS has not shown an exoplanet confirmed with biological life on it.

 

[Unclear Engineer]

We aren't really going to be able to "confirm" life on another celestial body until we can see a sample in a lab. The closest we are now is that rock that the Mars rover just imaged. See https://www.space.com/nasa-perseverance-mars-rover-rock-ancient-life . There are just too many unknown unknowns to be able to conclusively say that life exists on another planet orbiting another star based only on remote sensing of chemicals in their atmospheres. (Of course receiving a transmission from an intelligent species would leapfrog all of that.)

As for unraveling how life arose from abiotic chemistry on Earth, the research has been stymied on the fact that life uses the chemical ATP for energy processing, and the reactions that we know of that make ATP all require ATP to be used in their processes. So, the question is how did the first life work without ATP and how did it manage to make the first ATP? Some insights on how that might have happened are here: https://www.tec5usa.com/decoding-life-s-origins-with-lost-biochemical-clues/ .

 

[rod]

We aren't really going to be able to "confirm" life on another celestial body until we can see a sample in a lab. The closest we are now is that rock that the Mars rover just imaged. See https://www.space.com/nasa-perseverance-mars-rover-rock-ancient-life . There are just too many unknown unknowns to be able to conclusively say that life exists on another planet orbiting another star based only on remote sensing of chemicals in their atmospheres. (Of course receiving a transmission from an intelligent species would leapfrog all of that.)

As for unraveling how life arose from abiotic chemistry on Earth, the research has been stymied on the fact that life uses the chemical ATP for energy processing, and the reactions that we know of that make ATP all require ATP to be used in their processes. So, the question is how did the first life work without ATP and how did it manage to make the first ATP? Some insights on how that might have happened are here: https://www.tec5usa.com/decoding-life-s-origins-with-lost-biochemical-clues/ .

Does this ATP model show how DNA and RNA arose in the first cell and then the genetic code appears, allowing life to change onwards and upwards into what we see today, like plants and trees? Life on other exoplanets is indeed challenging to show.

 

[Unclear Engineer]

Rod, please read the links to spare me a lot of typing.

Regarding the ATP issue, that is a "blockage" in the logical path of evolution that occurs later in the process than the development of basic genetic material precursors.

The process for making ATP is encoded in the genetic material. So the question is basically how life could have used energy before ATP evolved. The link I provided describes research into that question, with a postulated answer being that before ATP, the inorganic compound polyphosphate may have provided the needed chemical functions to sustain the earliest forms of life.

But, that is not the whole answer to the question about how life arose from abiotic chemistry. There are other unexplained parts of the process still being researched.