There’s just one planet that we all know of that hosts life – Earth. So what makes all the different planets so inhospitable? Which one is the worst? And would it be attainable to make a fair much less hospitable world than any scientists have found to this point? These are the questions that our hosts Leah Crane and Chelsea Whyte set out to reply.
This particular episode of Dead Planets Society was recorded at New Scientist Live – New Scientist’s annual pageant of concepts – in London on 8 October. Leah and Chelsea have been joined by Lewis Dartnell, who’s an astrobiologist at the University of Westminster in the UK, and Vincent Van Eylen, who research exoplanets at University College London.
There are many candidates for the least-habitable identified planet, and a few are very shut to house. For instance, Mercury has one facet that reaches temperatures of up to 430°C, whereas the different facet stays round -180°C. Other horrible worlds are way more distant, equivalent to the scorching super-Jupiter referred to as HAT-P-7b, which is greater than 1000 mild years from our photo voltaic system and solely takes two Earth days to orbit its star – it’s so scorching and dense in the environment that it would possibly rain sapphires. There are even planets which can be slowly disintegrating and frigid worlds with no star in any respect the place nothing ever adjustments.
But to make the worst of all attainable worlds, our intrepid hosts and their friends determined to mix as many of those disagreeable properties as attainable into one horrible planet filled with intense radiation, acid rain, extraordinary winds, excessive temperatures and seas of lava. And they discover that this terrible world is surprisingly acquainted…
Dead Planets Society is a podcast that takes outlandish concepts about how to tinker with the cosmos – from placing out the solar to inflicting a gravitational wave apocalypse – and topics them to the legal guidelines of physics to see how they fare.
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