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A research team led by the recipient of a U.S. National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development grant used computer simulations to determine that white dwarf stars have greater potential to host habitable planets than previously realized. The team concluded that many more stars in the Milky Way galaxy might be home to planets that could support life.
There are approximately 10 billion white dwarf stars in the Milky Way. Because such stars are colder than others, scientists have thought they likely would not support habitable exoplanets. Led by Aomawa Shields, a University of California, Irvine professor of physics and astronomy, researchers used a supercomputer provided by the NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, to simulate conditions on a theoretical rocky planet orbiting a white dwarf. Using data from real exoplanets orbiting the non-white dwarf star Kepler-62, the researchers found that their simulated rocky planet could have liquid water if it closely orbited a white dwarf and had certain rotational characteristics. Their findings were published in The Astrophysical Journal.
“Not much consideration has been given to these stars’ ability to host habitable exoplanets,” says Shields. “Our computer simulations suggest that if rocky planets exist in their orbits, these planets could have more habitable real estate on their surfaces than previously thought.”
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Synopsis
Materials Innovation Platforms (MIP) is a mid-scale infrastructure program in the Division of Materials Research (DMR) designed to accelerate advances in materials research. MIPs respond to the increasing complexity of materials research that requires close collaboration of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary teams and access to cutting edge tools. These tools in a user facility benefit both a user program and in-house research, which focus on addressing grand challenges of fundamental science and meet national needs. MIPs embrace the paradigm set forth by the Materials Genome Initiative (MGI), which strives to “discover, manufacture, and deploy advanced materials twice as fast, at a fraction of the cost,” and conduct research through iterative “closed-loop” efforts among the areas of materials synthesis/processing, materials characterization, and theory/modeling/simulation. In addition, they are expected to engage the emerging field of data science in materials research. Each MIP is a scientific ecosystem,
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