Could a 'super-Earth' be even more habitable than our own planet?

[Night Hunter]

There's reason to believe that other planets might be better for supporting life as we know it, and they might not even be that far off, cosmically speaking.

 

 

   

It's popular to talk about how wonderful, beautiful and rare a treasure our planet is; I certainly say such things all the time, and many satellite, Instagram and Pinterest photos testify to this truism. But let's be real for a minute, my fellow humans and A.I. beings -- we don't really have firsthand experience with an adequate sample size of habitable planets to say this for sure.

 

In fact, a pair of scientists have been looking into the possibility that there might be a distant planet (or a couple of them or maybe 3 billion) out there more suitable to supporting life as we know it. They even describe what such a "superhabitable" planet might look like -- a super-Earth with a mass double or triple that of our planet, orbiting in the habitable zone around a K-type dwarf star several billion years older than our sun.

 

The basic explanation for why such a planet would make a "better Earth" is that it might have a long-lasting magnetic field, which protects the planet from the abundant radiation of space and stars, and plate tectonics activity, which keeps some of the key life-supporting elements in balance. Also, a planet with double or triple the mass of Earth would mean more surface gravity, likely forming more shallow lakes and oceans, more archipelago-like land masses and fewer deserts. More shallow waters might mean more biodiversity, as they typically do here on our planet.

 

Source http://www.cnet.com/