Earth Likes Around Neutron Stars?

[drkaii]

Hi,

Hoping to open a bit of a more scientific discussion on the topic. I found an Earth-like around a neutron star. It seemed pretty inhabitable from it's direct stats. I'lll share them soon but regardless of the stats themselves, what is the real likelihood of there being an inhabited earth world around a neutron star?



Let's hear some scientific speculation on the topic. I am inclined to think that even a neutron star has a Goldilocks zone, heat wise.

The real question is the other forms of radiation, the magnetism, the long term stability. The implications for energy like photosynthesis.


So many factors to consider from so many branches of science. I'd like to see what the community comes up with.


Or someone could just say outright impossible because neutron stars have too much x y or z. I'm prepared to be shut down in the most humiliating fashion possible (I'll take the stellar forge with me!)

 

[Whiterose]

I found an earth like that was orbiting an M0 that was orbiting a Neutron, I also am not clear on the physics or biology of this. I just took a piccy and ran away.

 

[drkaii]

In the words of someone in the Post your weird systems! thread:

go home stellar forge, you're drunk

 

[Zeeman]

I've found a few - there is some epic o-zone layer action going down on those planets.

Z...

 

[drkaii]

I guess there has to be. What kind of radiation do Neutron stars give off?

I know that whatever radiation it is, it will behave weirdly due to the massive gravitational lensing going on around the star. Radiation from behind it will be coming in the forward direction too

 

[Varrag]

I am not sure that the Earth-like planets with life (as we know it) are realistically possible around neutron stars: such planets are bathed in powerful UV, X, and gamma ray radiation. Surface would be literally sterilized, and the atmosphere similar to ours could not exist to begin with.

 

[InMemoriamSirocco]

Even earthlikes around M-Dwarfs are not possible... at least not the way they are depicted in the game, with blue oceans and green plant life.

Plant life living off the light of a red star would be completely black in order to absorb as much energy as possible from the spectrum of light reaching the planet surface. Oceans would most likely not be blue, but rather pink or lilac.

 

[CMDR AKIRA MASAKARI]

In a documentary (yeah super confirmed font!!!!!!), Prof Philickenko or something from UCLA (horrible shirt included), was explaining they are puzzled by finding rocky planets orbiting neutron stars. He said that, beeing a neutron star a stellar remnant, and beeing not possible that something survives a supernova bang, those planets must have formed after the nova. So now they have to reconsider all planetary formation, beeing obvious that our solar system is a bad model to explain everything.

He said that those rocky planets must not be funny: near absolute 0 cold, they recieve a massive X-RAY burst xxx times per second. (He was wearing sunglasses and ski equipment to show how unfriendly enviroment would be).

Now i don't know much about astronomy, but i'm graduated in medicine and i can tell you that no living beeing that uses low weight elements to store data (like DNA), would survive that X-ray radiation. Not even sporified bacteria. In fact X and Gamma rays are continuously used to sterilize the food you eat.

So, from a logical point of wiev, around a neutron star there's not enough energy (they are cold) and too much radiation for an ELW to form. And if an ELW would be magically trasported near a NS that rotates on itself generating massive elctromagnetical field (magnetar) and x rays of death (pulsar), would not keep an atmosphere and liquid oceans and carbon base life for long.

Also probably neutron stars, beeing cold, don't have a goldilock zone at all.

Problem is that nature is that silly that in many occasions refuses to follow our predictions. Blame nature!!!!

EDIT: grammar but i give up.

 

[drkaii]

Rep all round for the thoughtful answers. Lots of extremely useful info there CMDR Akira.

My only remaining question is is it possible for there to be a quiet, abnormal, warm, stable neutron star? I already think I know the answer that neutron stars are highly invariable as they are all produced in the exact same way under a very tight set of conditions, but here's me hoping.

As for "nature is silly and in many occasions refuses to follow our predictions" is TRUE. I just hope it's as flexible as I imagine.

 

[iain666]

He said that those rocky planets must not be funny: near absolute 0 cold, they recieve a massive X-RAY burst xxx times per second. (He was wearing sunglasses and ski equipment to show how unfriendly enviroment would be).
...
Also probably neutron stars, beeing cold, don't have a goldilock zone at all.

Not all neutron stars are pulsars, and even with a pulsar the massive x ray burst is quite tightly focused and comes out of the poles - close by and on the equatorial plane may be the safest place to be...

They're also not really all that cold - surface temperatures of ~60,000K. They are small though, so you need to be close to feel the benefit.

There will be a goldilocks zone but it will be narrow and close in and life could even evolve there but it won't be anything like us and it certainly won't be a nice place for people to live. ELW's do feel a bit wrong to me.

It will also either have had to somehow come through a supernova or been captured by the star afterwards - in either case a rocky ice planet with a load of organics that thaws out and then something evolves is more likely than life surviving the supernova and carrying on.

 

[Varrag]

Yeah temperature is also a problem: neutron stars do have their Goldilocks zone too, and they tend to be very, very hot; but they are also super tiny - so the total amount of thermal radiation they are releasing into the space from that small surface is relatively minuscule: planet should be pretty close to neutron star to pickup its heat. Which brings us back to horrendous amounts of x and gamma radiation, which only gets worse as you come closer to it.

Even earthlikes around M-Dwarfs are not possible... at least not the way they are depicted in the game, with blue oceans and green plant life.

Plant life living off the light of a red star would be completely black in order to absorb as much energy as possible from the spectrum of light reaching the planet surface. Oceans would most likely not be blue, but rather pink or lilac.

It's interesting, though, that the plants on Earth aren't black as well: they "decided" not to use the green'ish part of the spectrum, thus cutting themselves off from the theoretically most efficient use of the Sun's light. I am not sure why and how this happened.

 

[drkaii]

Possible mechanisms for it existing past the nova could include it forming from the nova dust itself? Or would it have too much momentum to acrete? What about a much larger planet being shred to a smaller size?

Remember neutron stars can exist for pretty long so take into account the time scales.

 

[Kancro Vantas]

Two things here...Neutron stars are EXTREMELY hot....not thousands, but millions of degree....6,000,000 K give or take....in comparison, our Sun is about 6,000 K....So we are talking about a minuscule star but a thousand times hotter...not even O or A stars get that hot...so make no mistake, they could warm more than a few planets orbiting it a quite a distance....

Temp is not an issue I would think, but all the rays that we are mentioning here.

The other thing would be time...Neutron Stars have to come from very big stars, the like that last only Millions of years, oppose to Billions...what that means is that even if a planet survived any Nova explosion and could stand the X rays and the gamma rays and the laser beams and the Hiroshima bomb several times a second....problem is that life took billions of years, at least one, to show up in Earth...

So. add that to the bucket of reasons why is not realistic to expect ELP orbiting NS....

 

[Ender]

Yeah temperature is also a problem: neutron stars do have their Goldilocks zone too, and they tend to be very, very hot; but they are also super tiny - so the total amount of thermal radiation they are releasing into the space from that small surface is relatively minuscule: planet should be pretty close to neutron star to pickup its heat. Which brings us back to horrendous amounts of x and gamma radiation, which only gets worse as you come closer to it.

Even earthlikes around M-Dwarfs are not possible... at least not the way they are depicted in the game, with blue oceans and green plant life.

Plant life living off the light of a red star would be completely black in order to absorb as much energy as possible from the spectrum of light reaching the planet surface. Oceans would most likely not be blue, but rather pink or lilac.

It's interesting, though, that the plants on Earth aren't black as well: they "decided" not to use the green'ish part of the spectrum, thus cutting themselves off from the theoretically most efficient use of the Sun's light. I am not sure why and how this happened.

Plants "decided" to not use "the green'ish part of the spectrum" and if they did then it had to be most efficient for them - if your theory predicts otherwise then it has to be flawed eg. not taking under consideration energy that has to be invested to create and maintain an additional molecular machinery. However, being green on Earth is not always most efficient for photosynthesis, as you could see in case of red algae. So, plants adapted to B-type star's light will probably be reddish, and to red dwarf's light - bluish (using reddish and bluish part of the spectrum is less efficient for them so they will tend to reflect much more of it).

This is irrelevant, though, as far as considering what an Earth-like is because Earth was an Earth-like (in our current meaning) long before its landmasses were colonized by plants so it doesn't have to look much green from orbit even under G-type star's light. How they are depicted in the game CURRENTLY is a different matter and it is going to change, probably many times, before we are able to land on them. Their physical parameters is what matters.

I don't see why you demonize X/Gamma radiation from neutron stars in this context when it forms beams along their magnetic poles - why would that be detrimental to life when a planet is in another direction? If planets can form after supernova (and it looks like they can) then we should rather be afraid that a planet won't get enough radiation to become an Earth-like. Improbable? Yes, but impossible? Nothing is impossible! At least when we forget about Earth-likes around lone black holes

 

[Surly_Badger]

what is the real likelihood of there being an inhabited earth world around a neutron star?

Neutron stars are hot in, what, the X-ray spectrum? And lead blocks X-rays. So we could imagine plant life based on a chlorophyll-like molecule that is lead-based instead of magnesium-based. X-rays are more energetic than the spectrum of light we have here on Earth so maybe there'd be enough energy transfer to run a cell. Once you've got plant life then you can get life that evolves to eat the plants.

I could be utterly wrong about that, by the way. I'm mostly thinking that there are some pretty amazing archaea out there - there are bacteria on Earth that get their energy from the heat differential that results from radioactive decay. They "eat" the heat from radon. Craaaazy!

If such life had something like DNA or RNA it might be a different arrangement that contained error-correcting codes; our DNA isn't particularly robust in high-energy spectrums (we get mutations) but for life to exist around a neutron star it'd have to be some tough stuff, by our terms.

 

[Andromalius]

Plants "decided" to not use "the green'ish part of the spectrum" and if they did then it had to be most efficient for them - if your theory predicts otherwise then it has to be flawed

Evolution doesn't work that way. Being green doesn't have to be the most efficient way, it just has to be efficient enough. Birds would fly faster if they processed light to power organic turbo reactors, but this is not needed to fly, catch food, reproduce and avoid enough predators so the next generation survives. so if a species ever mutates to have those turboreactors, it won't be a competitive advantage and won't become a dominant trait leading to a new species through selective breeding.

 

[Ender]

Evolution doesn't work that way. Being green doesn't have to be the most efficient way, it just has to be efficient enough. Birds would fly faster if they processed light to power organic turbo reactors, but this is not needed to fly, catch food, reproduce and avoid enough predators so the next generation survives. so if a species ever mutates to have those turboreactors, it won't be a competitive advantage and won't become a dominant trait leading to a new species through selective breeding.

And how your "it just has to be efficient enough" is different from my "it had to be most efficient for them" in meaning? Don't you think that if there was really advantage in using the greenish parts of the spectrum on the surface of Earth then some descendants of red algae would have colonized lands instead of staying deep under surface? Take under consideration that solutions that evolution favors for billions years have to be almost perfect when all things are taken into account - we are not talking about a single species here where tolerances for enough are much larger.

 

[iain666]

Plants "decided" to not use "the green'ish part of the spectrum" and if they did then it had to be most efficient for them - if your theory predicts otherwise then it has to be flawed

Nope, evolution just finds solutions that are good enough in the space made available to it.

Just look at the laryngeal nerve that connects your larynx (in your throat) to you brain by looping around the top of your heart. Does the same in giraffes, all the way down all of that neck and back up again. Not really efficient but good enough...

(Edit, should've looked at page 2 first...)