If it has oceans, imagine the tides it must get with a 15 earth mass planet between it and it's sun. With this planet only having a 13 day year there would be hardly spittin' distance between it and the 15 masser...
...If there is life there it may only be able to survive near the twilight zones.
Imagine that, Neptune 'like' planet in the sky without the need to peer thru a scope and Marron season only days away, again! All those suns out there and only us? I think not.
With a half magnitude of variability and the risk of flares from the star, I don't think Goldilocks or anyone else from Earth would find it a very comfortable place to live... maybe in a cave for protection!
I was playing with input of known orbital elements into Celestia...
This is what the planet system should look like from 1.1 AU distance (FOV is 30 degrees) :-)
And the second image is component B transit viewed from the vicinity of component C.
I included the modified file with companion definitions (the original from Celestia website still does not contain components C and D), it should be unzipped on drive C (the unzipped files should be placed in \Celestia\extras\NearbyStars subdirectory)
It is not known if inclination of any of those planets is small enough to enable transits... the values used here are defaults
Last edited by bojan; 29-04-2007 at 12:22 PM.
Reason: typos
Does anyone know the SAO or HD catalog #, for Gliese 581 ?
I am trying to find it in Cartes Du Ciel, I am sure i will be asked to point it out at the next observing night !
but the HO Lib position in Guide does not correspond to these, in fact there is no star there at all, the above being about 70" away, but variable star positions are often wrong, so I'm pretty sure the above is it. Surely you must have one of those catalogues?
Below is a map showing Gliese 581 in a yellow square.
It is 1d 46m from bet Lib in pa 20 and transits about 1:30 am here.
The map and the following data are from SkyMapPro.
Visual magnitude: 10.57
Spectral type: M5
Distance: 20.4 +/- 0.3 light years
Luminosity: 0.0019 +/- 0.00005 x Sun's luminosity
Hipparcos number: HIP 74995
Hipparcos Catalog Data
Equatorial coordinates (epoch J2000.0, ICRS)
RA: 15h 19m 26.8251s
Dec: -7° 43' 20.208"
Main Mission Variability
Observed magnitude at maximum and minimum luminosities:
Mag at max, Hp: 10.49 (5th percentile)
Mag at min, Hp: 10.60 (95th percentile)
Type of variability: the entry could not be classified as variable or constant with any degree of certainty (eg due to the presence of one or more outliers in the epoch photometry).
