Life, as we know, may require lightning, since it is one of the few energy sources that a planet has available to create complex chemical compounds. Now, a new investigation has found that the rays, although they are not very common, can occur in closed tidal exoplanets as our neighbor, next B. But the peculiar nature of the rays on the planets blocked from the tides raises some challenges for their ability to organize life.
Typical lightning can reach temperatures of up to 30,000 Kelvins (more than 50,000 degrees Fahrenheit). That is more than powerful enough to destroy common atmospheric gases and tear them into new compounds. In the modern earth, lightning breaks down molecular nitrogen and oxygen and creates nitrogen oxides.
However, in the early earth, before the increase in atmospheric oxygen due to photosynthesis, the rays may have played a crucial role in the creation of many prebiotic compounds, which are molecules that form the preins construction blocks.
We do not know if any exoplanet houses life. We still have to find a twin from the earth with the right orbit around a star of the sun, but we have approached. Take next B, an exoplanet that orbits the star closest to the solar system. Next B is approximately the size of the earth and orbits its star, next centauri, at the right distance to support the liquid water potentially.
But next Centauri is a red dwarf star, with just a fraction of brightness and sun size. Next B has an incredible tight orbit, with a whole year that lasts only 11 days. Due to its proximity to its main star, next B is almost certain that it is blocked by the tide, which means that it always shows a face towards the star, just like the moon always shows a face towards the earth.
Due to its rotation, our planet houses a rich weather system. This meteorological system makes ray storms very common, with approximately 100 rays that occur somewhere in the world every second. But can a planet blocked of tides create ray storms?
To answer this question, a team of researchers led by Denis Sergeev at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom created atmospheric simulations of a simulated simulated planet, using the same types of simulations as the climatologist Wather’s. In April, they presented their document for publication in the Mounthly Magazine Notes of the Royal Astronomical Society.
The researchers discovered that the closed tidal planet could produce significant ray storms, but that the storms were very different from those of the earth.
These planets around small stars organized less significant rays, only a handful of strikes per second, showed the simulations. And that was for planets with much thinner atmospheres than the atmosphere of the Earth, approximately a quarter of the atmospheric pressure of our planet. The atmospheres of greater pressure suppressed the formation of convection cells that could boost cloud formation and generate the friction necessary to produce lightning. Atmospheres with pressures 10 times larger than those on Earth could produce only one lightning every few minutes.
Unlike Earth, all the heat of the star is poured into a closed planet. That heat then flows through powerful jet currents that run from permanent days to the side of the night.
The researchers found that this strong climate driven mainly on the side of the days, with rays are grouped into a circular area. However, in some cases, the rays occurred mainly on the side of the night, it only fits the Terminator line of the night of the night. It was only where there was enough atmospheric activity to generate the necessary conditions for the rays.
But that does not mean that this ray could necessarily be guaranteed to help produce life. On the one hand, the rays are much less common there than on earth and, therefore, may not be enough to generate enough prebiotic compounds. Another challenge is that strikes are not distributed the same worldwide. They tend to concentrate on the day room, which can be too hot to support life.
Even so, the history of life in exoplanets, even blocked tides, is not over. And nature has shown again and again that life … finds a way.
