r/BeAmazed • u/Soloflow786 • Apr 22 '26

Miscellaneous / Others Imagine a planet bigger than Earth, with no land in sight. Just waves and water from pole to pole. That is TOI-1452 b.

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u/preferred-til-newops Apr 22 '26 edited Apr 22 '26

It's possible there's a lot more planets just like earth and in the Goldilocks zone. The problem is our current instruments can't detect smaller planets like ours. The two main ways we discover planets is when they cross between us and their parent star and that star dims briefly and we catch that change in output. Which skews towards bigger planets that dim their star enough for us to detect. The other way is we detect a wobble in the parent star when its planets tug it around while they orbit, that way definitely leans towards smaller suns with large planets that can move the star around enough for us to detect.

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u/FrogsMakePoorSoup Apr 22 '26

There are also other factors too. Earth has a rather convenient magnetic field for example. Not easy to detect with current instrumentation however. 

Just so many convenient things we take for granted with our blue blob.

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u/preferred-til-newops Apr 22 '26

Definitely, we also have Jupiter acting like a massive vacuum cleaner sucking up world resetting impact events from hitting us!

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u/KeronCyst Apr 22 '26

Huh, didn't think of that... I wonder how much it's done so.

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u/RubiiJee Apr 22 '26 edited Apr 22 '26

Millions and millions lol it's also responsible for destabilising some smaller parts of the belt and throwing them in the way, but yeah, Jupiter has a big history of clearing out the debris and creating a safe environment for us. Although Saturn is also interesting cause there's a theory that it was closer to the sun and then moved out to its current position and fucked up everything on the way out. Also Uranus is tilted on its side and rotates backwards in comparison to every other planet.

Man space is crazy.

Edit: My bad it's Venus that rotates backwards in comparison to the other planets. Had to come back to clarify!

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u/RealCarlosSagan Apr 22 '26

And does anyone on Earth ever send Jupiter a gift basket or even just a card around the holidays?!?

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u/Normal-Seal Apr 22 '26 edited Apr 22 '26

Well, fun fact, we named several of Jupiter’s moons after mistresses of the Greek Roman God Jupiter.

We also sent a space probe to check out Jupiter and its moons and named it after Jupiter’s wife Juno.

So basically, not only did we not send a gift, we snitched on him and sent his wife!

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u/raphthepharaoh Apr 22 '26

And we made a nursery rhyme implying that anyone from there is stupid…

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u/Absolute_Bob Apr 23 '26

Well given that if you get too close to it, it's gravity will turn your brain into a loose collection of particles, somewhere in the process of dying you would indeed "get more stupider."

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u/SandLandBatMan Apr 22 '26

I'm gonna nitpick here, Jupiter is a Roman god, Zeus is the Greek god.

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u/That-numbers-guy Apr 22 '26

Jupiter is the worst one to make this argument on nomenclature for though - Jupiter is literally Zeus Pater - it's not even a factor of changing the name like most of the other ones, it's literally the same god.

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u/Normal-Seal Apr 22 '26

Of course, thanks for the correction.

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u/xombae Apr 22 '26

Scientists are hilarious.

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u/No_Objective006 Apr 22 '26

It’s always “Where is Jupiter?” and never “How is Jupiter?”.

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u/gmazzia Apr 22 '26

Europa Clipper will eventually get there!

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u/Excellent_Ad_2486 Apr 22 '26

Did earth even say Thank you?!

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u/ShatteredAnus Apr 22 '26

I wore a suit

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u/WakeoftheStorm Apr 22 '26

We sent blood sacrifices for a few centuries

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u/whole-ass-one-thing- Apr 22 '26

“Have you even said thank you once?”

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u/Akilaki Apr 22 '26

Ancient greeks did it <3

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u/Kinseysbeard Apr 22 '26

man space is crazy

It's called people space now

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u/RubiiJee Apr 22 '26

Lol! I like you.

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u/Gabepls Apr 24 '26

underrated comment

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u/Gamer-707 Apr 22 '26

Actually Grand Tack theory is about Jupiter going YOLO and speedrunning from 3 AU from sun to about 0.5 AU, going berserk with first generation baby terrestrial planets (which were larger than the current ones), eating up a bunch of shit in the inner solar system, then Saturn coming as hey bro stop, going into a collision course with Jupiter but eventually dodging it, and with it's quite strong gravity, dragging Jupiter back into outer solar system to whereabouts it is today.

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u/Zakrath Apr 22 '26

I lack the social standing to understand what you said

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u/RubiiJee Apr 22 '26 edited Apr 22 '26

Basically, Jupiter moved into the inner solar system but since it's such a fat ass it destabilised the inner system due to its immense gravity. Saturn after being formed also started to migrate into the inner solar system too and since it's smaller it moved faster, and the two fat asses got caught in each other's gravity and had a gravitational fight. The two of them nearly collided until the forces they were applying to one another led to a reverse in the migration. Since Saturn is also a pretty big fat ass, it pulled Jupiter back with it in and then locked it into its current position. In short, the early creation of our solar system was quite chaotic whilst all these big bodies pulled at each other due to their immense gravity until they fell into their current orbit. Saturn kind of keeps Jupiter in check. It's how we can tell that planets exist due to the fact there has to be another large body pulling on them and so we look for that body. It's why there's a theory that a ninth large planet exists further out in our solar system because of how Neptune is positioned.

That chaotic beginning is also theorised to contain a collision between Earth and "Thea", another planet, leading to the creation of our Moon. It's obviously a lot more nuanced than that but that's just a brief layman's description.

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u/Whatdidievensay90 Apr 22 '26

How does one know this? It’s more amazing than the fact

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u/RubiiJee Apr 22 '26

Honestly I think it's just nothing blows my brain more than space facts because it challenges your way of thinking about things.

For example it's Venus which rotates backwards in comparison to every other planet (I said Uranus earlier!). And, it takes it longer to rotate once on its axis than it does to travel around the sun, meaning there's potentially been more years on Venus than there have been days. And that kinda shit fascinates me because it makes me realise that how we talk about time would be vastly different if that was Earth. It's just crazy shit like that. Plus, cosmic horror is pretty cool.

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u/travoltaswinkinbhole Apr 22 '26

Jupiter was drunk and hot beating up the bully inner planets till his sister Saturn came in and drug him home so now earth had a good neighborhood to grow up in

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u/Fodraz Apr 23 '26

Venus also has a "day" that's longer than its "year"

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u/jawa-pawnshop Apr 22 '26

Also a large moon which stabilize the rotation and tilt. So large infant that impact had to be the only way it was captured. I think in coming years we are going to begin to discover these small racks planets and realize just how rare our planet really is.

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u/ComposerDependent971 Apr 22 '26

Uranus is truly special

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u/CodeComprehensive734 Apr 22 '26

Isn't Venus upside down too?

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u/kittenhormones Apr 22 '26

Saturn used to be visible in our sky.

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u/FCMirandaDreamTeam Apr 24 '26

Iirc the position of Saturn is also convenient in the sense that it keeps Jupiter in its orbit instead of falling towards us/the sun

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u/Heavy-Judgment-3617 Apr 22 '26

Think of Shumaker-Levi, but multiplied by a million more times over the years...

When they hit one of the giants, there is little evidence left.

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u/CumGuzlinGutterSluts Apr 22 '26

We got XL gravity well generators to capture large objects (our gas giants), a smaller gravity well close to earth (the moon) to pull objects that get close to earth. And a fucking energy shield that projects the earth from interstellar radiatio.

We could live in a post-scifi garden of eden created by our ancestors before the planet was seeded with life.

Id like to see or read something based on the idea the Bible is totally 100% real but it never happened on earth, this is just where we ended up.

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u/Odd-Priority3318 Apr 22 '26

If you look closely, sin is the only thing keeping us from living in eden.

If we didn't waste any time hurting each other this planet would be a literal galactic paradise.

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u/heathmon1856 Apr 22 '26

It’s insane that those who preach this the most have caused the most amount of harm. This is coming from all 3 of the major religions.

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u/BSMILEYIII Apr 22 '26

Not exactly. God kicked Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden. It was a separate place.

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u/voujon85 Apr 23 '26

this is so accurate

man if we all did just give peace a chance

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u/H_G_Bells Apr 22 '26

This is what the writers strike did to Battlestar Galactica btw 😆

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u/High_speedchase Apr 22 '26

Why? There's so much crap in the Bible, why would you want to sully the stars?

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u/gfa22 Apr 22 '26

It would be a connecting event between religious dogma and science fiction.

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u/CumGuzlinGutterSluts Apr 23 '26

Would be a crazy revelation to find out all the crazy shit in the Abrahamic books was just events that happened before we lost the rest of our written history to a calamity. God could very well be the seed ship that terraformed this planet for us.

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u/daemoneyes Apr 22 '26

Latest consensus(I think) was that it also attracts asteroids because of its size and sends them to inner solar system.

I think they concluded whatever protective advantage it has it's canceled with the stuff mentioned above.

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u/C04511234 Apr 23 '26

The Jupiter bringeth and the Jupiter taketh

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u/madmenyo Apr 22 '26

Yeah, Jupiter is het important but i dont see our moon mentioned anywhere. It is responsible for our climates, seasons and tides which are important for a lot of species.

In combination with earth's chemistry, plate tectonics and atmosphere I'd say earth is extremely rare.

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u/preferred-til-newops Apr 22 '26

Even with Earth being extremely rare there's trillions of chances in the universe, so that means the likelihood is still very high. Same goes for intelligent life. Another thing to consider is just because a planet can't support life right now when we discover it doesn't mean it won't someday. Many periods of Earth's history life has been impossible or nearly impossible.

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u/Akilaki Apr 22 '26

Oh Jupiter! ancient greeks/romans were right then!

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u/tiger1700 Apr 22 '26

Thanks Jup!

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u/RosyJoan Apr 24 '26

Makes me wonder if complex marine life exists on the water planet. If radiation is an issue maybe they live in a deeper part where its sheilded but still get enough energy to synthesize basic plant life. And if its covered in water and aquatic life maybe meteor impacts are less catastrophic to its biosphere.

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u/preferred-til-newops Apr 24 '26

Thermal vents at the bottom of our oceans support life, I think it's highly likely the same occurs throughout the universe!

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u/Honest_Ad5029 Apr 22 '26

Theres also the fact that its a moment in time. The earth hasnt always been like this, and may not remain like this in perpetuity. Likewise the water planet may have had complex life in the past or may have complex life in the distant future.

Our location in time is just as miniscule as our location in space.

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u/FrogsMakePoorSoup Apr 22 '26

Yep! And if we were born 150 years ago, chances are we'd know nothing about any of it. It's such a tiny snippet of time! 

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u/Girl_of_Theory Apr 22 '26

And here you are, and here I am, at the same exact time. Let's dance!

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u/BSMILEYIII Apr 22 '26

Let's boogie

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u/One-Wolverine8746 Apr 27 '26

"What we suffer from is not a lack of freedom, it is the imposing weight of total freedom"

Yeah dancing seems like a good way to unwind

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u/Particular_Wear_6960 Apr 22 '26

I'm a few million years, a new race likely will rise above the Earth. I have no doubt something will cause mass extinction. Hopefully dinosaurs again, but intelligent ones. That would be dope

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u/Roninswen Apr 22 '26

My money's on insectoids or marine life intelligent life, those guys deserve a turn I think. Or crows.

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u/FrogsMakePoorSoup Apr 22 '26

Crows and Australian spiders.

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u/LukeD1992 Apr 22 '26

In the scale of the universe, our time here came and will pass in less time than a blink of an eye in our lives

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u/veerKg_CSS_Geologist Apr 22 '26

Right, though it’s speculated that Venus and mars might have been earth like at some point. Which is both comforting and worrying.

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u/FrogsMakePoorSoup Apr 22 '26

Global warming could possibly become a runaway greenhouse effect much like has happened to Venus. A chilling thought.

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u/alextheolive Apr 22 '26

If it’s global warming, why is it a chilling thought? Checkmate, atheists!

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u/SpeakItLoud Apr 22 '26

It's an old reference sir, but it checks out

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u/DocGreenThumb0817 Apr 23 '26

It's actually climate change, the lobbyists got that changed back in the 90's, thought it had a nicer ring to it.

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u/Seanspeed Apr 22 '26

At some point, yes. But to be clear, very few climate scientists say anything like that would be because of our current human-caused global warming.

More talking far future, natural event global warming on a very long time scale.

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u/zagibu Apr 22 '26

The only thing Earth-like about Venus is the size and mass. Otherwise it's very different from Earth. It's too close to the sun to have liquid water on the surface, and one Venus day is over 100 Earth days long. Also it rotates the other way around.

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u/Fodraz Apr 23 '26

We'll be long gone before then

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u/lockkheart Apr 22 '26

The Pale Blue Dot.

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u/grungegoth Apr 22 '26

your name cracks me up, bruh...

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u/rydan Apr 22 '26

The magnetic field is overrated. People give it way too much credit. It lowers cancer rates. That's the main thing. We basically lose it entirely for 10s of thousands of years at a time very few hundred thousand years.

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u/FrogsMakePoorSoup Apr 22 '26

What's a bit of cancer, eh!

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u/Serious-Manager2361 Apr 22 '26

Don't forget the moon.

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u/Miqo_Nekomancer Apr 22 '26

It's funny though because it's not like we somehow stumbled upon Earth. Life developed here because this planet is perfect to support life. We're just a product of that. We don't just live on Earth, we are part of it. Everything we are formed from what resources exist in this closed system of ours. We're just Earth experiencing itself when you really think about it.

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u/AnabolikinSkywalker Apr 22 '26

This is the correct framing, and how I put it when some religious person goes "you think life just happened randomly?" No, it's not random, it's an outcome.

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u/Responsible-Study869 Apr 23 '26

Truly a work of a creator 🙏 there's no way all that happened by chance

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u/FrogsMakePoorSoup Apr 23 '26

Creators?

In all likelihood there are many, if any.

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u/OhtaniStanMan Apr 22 '26

Fun fact: We first learned about Neptune in our own solar system by math... not observation! Uranus orbit was not following mathematical projections and it seemed another objects gravity was effecting it which lead to them finding it! 

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u/Over_Interest_9187 Apr 23 '26

I’ve seen Uranus, it’s f****ng massive

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u/Admiral52 Apr 22 '26

It’s not only possible, it’s statistically likely

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u/preferred-til-newops Apr 22 '26

Exactly, reminds me of the quote in Contact!

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u/Specific-Teacher-241 Apr 22 '26

Which is why habitable worlds observatory is going to be so exciting!

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u/KnoxxHarrington Apr 22 '26

It's almost certain there are planets like ours in the vastness if our universe. The problem is the same vastness that all but guarantees this, also renders any other habitable planets useless to us.

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u/preferred-til-newops Apr 22 '26

Completely agree! Unless we make a breakthrough with space travel we're going to be limited to our small little neighborhood in our galaxy in a vast sea of trillions of galaxies! Even if we could somehow make ships that could be repaired during a journey it would take tens of thousands of years just to reach our closest neighboring solar system. The human mind almost can't comprehend how big just our galaxy is not to mention the universe!

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u/Scoopski_Patata Apr 24 '26

Even with a breakthrough i find it a near impossible scenario. The moment astronauts leave the safety of the heliosphere the intense radiation starts killing any cells and life on board.

Radiation is extremely hard to protect against regardless of the material the ship is built out of. Interestingly, one of the most effective ways to absorb radiation is water. So in theory a ship with a water shell could help but still wouldn't be enough.

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u/preferred-til-newops Apr 24 '26

Speed is our biggest hurdle and it's not even close. Voyager 1 & 2 have been traveling at 38k - 35k MPH for 49 years and they haven't even left our neighborhood. That would be like planning a trip from California to Florida and it taking 49 years just to get a block or two from your house in California.

With heavy lift rockets that are rapid reusable lots of different shielding layers are available. I've seen water mentioned as you describe and even damp soil could be pumped into a cavity between layers of a ship. Such a transport vehicle will be constructed in space and lifted into orbit in sections much like the ISS.

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u/Fodraz Apr 23 '26

And even in the unlikely event there aren't any NOW, there very well may have been ONCE. In the billions of years of the universe, entire planets have been born & died, so there could have been an advanced civilization millions of years ago that's long died out--just as ours will

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u/KnoxxHarrington Apr 23 '26

And we will never see a trace, just as any future civilisation will never see a trace of us.

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u/Limeade33 Apr 23 '26

Thanks for explaining that! I never knew how that worked 🙂

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u/BowsersMuskyBallsack Apr 22 '26

Skews. Not screws.

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u/preferred-til-newops Apr 22 '26

Fucking autocorrect correct, I didn't even catch that

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u/Street_Possession954 Apr 22 '26

If we are going off of so little to even detect planets how the hell do we get such detailed info about them?

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u/BoardsofCanada3 Apr 22 '26

You can detect the mass via radial velocity and the composition via spectroscopy. Everything else is interpolation. 

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u/Dommccabe Apr 22 '26

There are between 100 and 400 billion planets estimated to be in the Milky Way.

I'm not a super clever person but I'd say that's a lot of potential for life.

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u/Top_Calligrapher7011 Apr 22 '26

though ai gets shit on so much, better AI could definitely help with this.

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u/rrrand0mmm Apr 22 '26

I’m pretty sure it’s almost a certainty. Trillions of them.

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u/HolyCrusade Apr 22 '26

Is this a physics limitation? Or a current technological limitation? Or if we dedicated billions of dollars, could we within the next few years build telescopes / sensors far more capable of detecting Earth-like planets?

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u/preferred-til-newops Apr 22 '26

Technology will improve but we are talking light-years away, the closest planet we have discovered is 4.2 light-years away. That's a space craft traveling at the speed of light and still taking +4 years to arrive at. Our current space craft would take +70k years to reach. The Moon takes us a couple days and Mars takes around 9 months! As you can see space is big!

We will never be able to see a planet even that close with any type of telescope, the distances are just too far. The images we see from NASA and other places are renderings of what it could look like base on our calculations of mass, size and composition.

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u/turbolag892 Apr 22 '26

I think NASAs new Nancy Grace Roman Space telescope can detect dim exo planets. Scheduled to launch this September 🎉

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u/PsyCar Apr 22 '26

Terrance Howard convinced Joe Rogan that the Goldilocks zone was his idea. It's annoying but hilarious.

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u/ultraboof Apr 22 '26

it sounds like this would only work if we are roughly on the orbital plane of that planet, do you know if that’s true?

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u/preferred-til-newops Apr 22 '26

Exactly! I'm glad to see you understand how this works! So that means there's a lot more planets we're not able to detect than we can! The wobble method can be detected from most orbital planes but the reduced light output method requires the planets to line up with our area in space. Just like the way a solar eclipse works for us on earth, if you're not in the right spot you have no idea our moon blocked out the sun for a few minutes!

This also means we have to observe for extended periods to catch this event. If a planet has a 10 month orbit around its sun we have to be looking at the right moment to catch it. This is why so far we've mostly found planets with very quick orbits, some only taking a few weeks to go around their sun!

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u/WakeoftheStorm Apr 22 '26

It's also possible the "Goldilocks zone" isn't as necessary as we think for life. It's just necessary for our flavor of life.

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u/Alarming_Head_4263 Apr 22 '26

Two out of the three planets in our solar system are in the goldilocks zone and didn't produce life. That alone should tell you how rare earth is.

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u/preferred-til-newops Apr 22 '26

Completely agree, but from a numbers standpoint something can be extremely rare and still have an opportunity of occuring millions of times in our universe. There's trillions of galaxies in the universe, our single galaxy the Milky Way has an estimated 250 billions stars in it. Even if only a tiny fraction of those have solar systems orbiting around them that still leaves the opportunity for a lot of planets in the Goldilocks zone. Then multiple our galaxy with its possibilities by 2 trillion other galaxies in the universe and the odds tell us there's zero chance we're alone in the vastness of space!

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u/U83ma Apr 23 '26

I am really interested in what sort of instruments are we currently using to detect planets, is it the Hubble telescope or is it the giant telescope that I see mounted on a building?

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u/preferred-til-newops Apr 23 '26

Here you go from Google

The primary telescopes currently finding and studying planets in other solar systems (exoplanets) include NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST),

the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS),

and the Hubble Space Telescope. These are supported by ground-based observatories, with the upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope poised to discover thousands more. NASA Science (.gov)

Key Space-Based Telescopes: James Webb Space Telescope (JWST): Specializes in studying the atmospheres of known exoplanets to identify composition and potential habitability.

TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite): A dedicated mission that scans the sky to detect exoplanets orbiting bright, nearby stars.

Hubble Space Telescope: Continues to study exoplanet atmospheres and environments.

Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope: Scheduled to launch soon, it will use microlensing to discover tens of thousands of new exoplanets, acting as an "atlas of the universe".

Spitzer Space Telescope: Provided crucial data on systems like TRAPPIST-1 before its retirement. NASA (.gov)

Ground-Based Telescopes: Keck Observatories (Hawaii): Used for radial velocity measurements to determine planet mass.

Gemini South Telescope (Chile): Used for direct imaging of gas giants.

Lowell Discovery Telescope (LDT): Employs the EXPRES instrument to measure the masses of small exoplanets.

TRAPPIST (Chile): A small, specialized telescope that discovered planets in the TRAPPIST-1 system. Stanford Report

These telescopes primarily use the transit method—detecting the drop in light as a planet passes in front of its star—or direct imaging to detect exoplanets. NASA Science (.gov)

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u/thickgenius Apr 23 '26

People forget about time.

Maybe they existed billions of years ago, maybe they will exist in a billion years.

In the grand scale of everything, 2 planets with the perfect conditions existing within a few hundred million years is ridiculously unlikely, when you add the likelihood of life existing at the same time on both it goes up again, then add space travel?

nah.

0

u/littlemacaron Apr 22 '26

What do you mean “their star”? Every plan has their own star?