Suitable Star Systems
An understanding of planetary habitability begins with stars. While bodies that are generally Earth-like may be plentiful, it is just as important that their larger system be agreeable to life. Under the auspices of SETI's Project Phoenix, scientists Margaret Turnbull and Jill Tarter developed the "HabCat" (or Catalogue of Habitable Stellar Systems) in 2002. The catalogue was formed by winnowing the nearly 120,000 stars of the larger Hipparcos Catalogue into a core group of 17,000 "HabStars," and the selection criteria that were used provide a good starting point for understanding which astrophysical factors are necessary to habitable planets.
Read more about this topic: Planetary Habitability
Famous quotes containing the words suitable, star and/or systems:
“Not one of our mortal gauges is suitable for evaluating non-existence, for making judgments about that which is not a person.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)
“To love someone is to isolate him from the world, wipe out every trace of him, dispossess him of his shadow, drag him into a murderous future. It is to circle around the other like a dead star and absorb him into a black light.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“What avails it that you are a Christian, if you are not purer than the heathen, if you deny yourself no more, if you are not more religious? I know of many systems of religion esteemed heathenish whose precepts fill the reader with shame, and provoke him to new endeavors, though it be to the performance of rites merely.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)