Mathematically perfect' star system discovered 105 light-years from Earth may still be in its infancy. Could that change its prospects for life?

[Admin]

Once thought to be 8 billion years old, the star HD 110067 — famous for its six synchronized exoplanets — may be only 2.5 billion years old, new research suggests.

Mathematically perfect' star system discovered 105 light-years from Earth may still be in its infancy. Could that change its prospects for life? : Read more

 

[tmain.colorado]

I'm not clear on why the youth of this system might reduce the chances for life to have formed. I'm not talking about intelligent life: just life. The only comparison we have, of course, is Earth, which formed something like 100-200 million years after the sun. The earliest life here has been estimated to have emerged 400-600 million years after that. So, less than 1 billion years after the formation of the sun. In cosmic (or even geologic) time frames, life emerged here practically the moment that the earth cooled enough for water to pool. So a 2.5 billion year old system could in theory have a planet teeming with single celled life...

Note, I'm just a guy, not a scientist, so pardon my oversimplification, and hopefully pardon my using Earth as a comparison. In my defense, I don't have anything else to compare to.

 

[Unclear Engineer]

First, my take on these studies is that the star is probably somewhere between 2.5 and 8 billion years old. And I only say probably. We really are just guessing on the basis of some theories about how stars evolve. I don't think we really have enough data on the variability of those processes, so that we know how far off the predictions some of the population really is.

Second, with the detected planets so close to their star, the idea that extraterrestrial life would have developed into highly advanced civilizations there is just hype being attached to the initial thinking that they planets were very old. The planets' environments are the first step in looking for life at all. If they don't appear to be conducive to life, then intelligent life, and highly technologically advanced life, is simply not to be expected, either.

I am glad they are looking. But, not finding anything is not proving or disproving anything.