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Re:Seven earth-sized planets discovered circling a star 39 l... by jerf on Wednesday February 22, 2017 @02:03PM (#13708193)
The debate rages. The problem is that one side of the planet is essentially exposed to space and thus tends to be at cosmic background temperature, and the other side exposed to the star. It is thought by a lot of people that anything volatile enough to be a gas, ever (so, including water), would rapidly end up migrating over to the frozen side, so even if the planet started with the right mix of water and whatever other volatiles are needed it would shortly not have any in the temperate range. Some have objected that the planet could wobble and periodically unfreeze some of that stuff, and maybe life could exist in a resulting narrow temperate zone. My personal feeling is that it would still far-too-rapidly simply freeze out again, this time out of reach of the wobble, so the parched zone would simply grow to include everything ever touched by the sun rather than forming a stable temperate zone.

But we won't really know until we go look at a planet like this, because we don't have one locally to look at. (Plenty of tidally-locked bodies, plenty of bodies with volatiles and enough energy to keep them moving, I'm pretty sure nothing in the Solar system with both.)

Re:Seven earth-sized planets discovered circling a star 39 l... by Retric on Wednesday February 22, 2017 @02:29PM (#13708425)
Oceans can move a lot of heat around a planet, so the cold side could stay well above freezing. Remember it's T^4 so cold areas radiate far less heat.

That said, if there where minimal atmosphere then the effects your talking about become a larger issue. Atmosphere is largely a function of solar wind and volcanic activity which relates to the isotopes in a planets core making this hard to predict.

Re:Seven earth-sized planets discovered circling a star 39 l... by CWuestefeld on Wednesday February 22, 2017 @02:44PM (#13708551)
But the planets are close enough to interact gravitationally. Perhaps that would accomplish more than just a slight wobble.
Re:Seven earth-sized planets discovered circling a star 39 l... by nabla9 on Wednesday February 22, 2017 @03:17PM (#13708796)
If water freezes on the dark side, moisture in the atmosphere would probably move from warm to dark side and fall down permanently as a snow gradually removing liquid water.

If the oxygen and nitrogen freezes and snows down in the dark side (-220 C or so), the warm side can't have atmosphere either.

Unless there is some way tidally locked planet can have stable air or sea convection between the sides. I don't think they have.

Re:Seven earth-sized planets discovered circling a star 39 l... by nickhalfasleep on Wednesday February 22, 2017 @09:32PM (#13711174)
If there is enough gravitational pull, the planet itself might be warmed by geologic flexing like Io.
Re:Seven earth-sized planets discovered circling a star 39 l... by ars on Wednesday February 22, 2017 @03:58PM (#13709090)
I think one idea is large mountains on the dark side and the water slides back down as a glacier that melts, and eventually vaporizes, and back in a circle.

You have to watch out though - make your mountains too high, and you shift your center of gravity, and now your mountains are no longer elevated.

Re:Seven earth-sized planets discovered circling a star 39 l... by sathackr on Wednesday February 22, 2017 @07:07PM (#13710466)
So if the water and gasses migrate to the cold side, I wonder if that would eventually make the cold side heavy enough to be rotated towards the star, causing the planet to periodically(probably over several millenia) reverse the side facing the star.
Re:Seven earth-sized planets discovered circling a star 39 l... by thefifthsetpin on Wednesday February 22, 2017 @11:47PM (#13711722)
You're thinking of Earth, where the polar ice builds up perpendicular to the sun, causing tidal effects to wobble our axis a bit.

In this case, the ice is building up in such a way to make the planet even longer in the direction that tidal locking already had elongated it. The effect of which is that tidal locking would get stronger; not weaker.

I don't think it matters too much that it'd be icy on one side and rocky on the other; I think it matters more that it's oblong. But even supposing it does matter, if your intuition is that the more-dense end would want to fall towards the star, then that'd be the rocky end; not the icy end. Yes, the icy end got heavier supposing you measure from the rocky planet's center. But if you shift your frame of reference to be the planet's center of mass, then both halves of course kept exactly 50% of the mass; the densities are what shifted.

Re:Seven earth-sized planets discovered circling a star 39 l... by pharke on Thursday February 23, 2017 @09:14AM (#13713976)
What about tidal and geological heating? or a greenhouse effect similar to Venus?
Re:Seven earth-sized planets discovered circling a star 39 l... by jerf on Thursday February 23, 2017 @09:31AM (#13714090)
Any heat source exposed to space has the basic problem of its volatiles running away and not coming back. On geological time frames, this effect is probably nearly instant, so it isn't very helpful that maybe a new volcano could pop up somewhere and melt lots of stuff or something, because all that does is put a hole in the permanently frozen layer. Any heat source not exposed to space might harbor life, but that's not particularly true of these planets; we already have things like Europa locally with the same possibility.

The issues with valuable resources running away and not coming back is a serious one even for Earth, which I think might surprise some people. The geological carbon cycle [1] in particular is one that may surprise people who have not encountered it before, or not thought about it in terms of extraterrestrial life. On geological time scales it's surprisingly easy for entire important elements to go find themselves a low-energy configuration they like and disappear from any putative biosphere. The issues with a tidally-locked planet providing such solutions to "all gasses liquids" is merely an extreme example of the case, and really makes one wonder how it would be possible for such a planet to stay "stirred" enough for life to have access to what it needs to develop.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_cycle#Geological_carbon...

Re:Seven earth-sized planets discovered circling a star 39 l... by pharke on Thursday February 23, 2017 @11:55AM (#13715391)
The link you provided suggests that one of the main ways for carbon to enter the atmosphere or ocean is through volcanic eruptions and geological hot spots. Isn't increased geological activity one of the results of orbital resonance?

If the 'central' planet has 6 close neighbours of equivalent size in resonant orbits would this not provide a very large amount of 'stirring'? These planets are also much more massive than Europa which is only 0.008 times the mass of the Earth compared to ~.6 and ~1.3 Earth masses for the ones in the habitable zone. They may have a more substantial mantle and core, possibly global magnetic fields and definitely more gravity to hold on to any fugitive gasses.

Considering geological timescales, this system is also billions of years younger than our own, potentially only a little over 500 million years old. The processes you draw concern to may simply not have had time to play out yet.

I'm also not convinced that the atmosphere would be cold enough to freeze out gasses on the night side if there were significant oceans or enough atmospheric circulation to transfer heat from the day side.

Re:Seven earth-sized planets discovered circling a star 39 l... by fudged71 on Wednesday February 22, 2017 @07:14PM (#13710512)
That sounds like a fun simulation to run
Re:Seven earth-sized planets discovered circling a star 39 l... by jerf on Wednesday February 22, 2017 @08:01PM (#13710750)
I know people have tried. I believe you can get both results if you put the right numbers in. Personally I consider this one of the canonical examples of where a simulation is a waste of time; with absolutely no ability to validate the model against reality, the model is in my humble-but-strong opinion utterly useless, which I mean in the strongest metaphysical sense possible. There's more ways to be wrong than to detect that you're wrong. (That's not just a flippant cute turn of phrase; I mean that as a rather fundamental issue with the entire idea.)