Has anyone done any research on the planets that orbit the HIP102152? Since that star is similar to ours and older, I postulate that it’s likely those planets are most worthwhile searching for advanced civilizations.
2 Answers
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No planets have been detected in orbit around HIP 102152.
That does not mean that no planets exist, but that our current techniques are no able to detect them. Most planet are detected by the transit method. This observes the very small dip in light when a planet goes in front of the star. However if the planet's orbit doesn't line up exactly with Earth, then the planet will not be detected.
Other methods can detect large planets that orbit close to the star, or very large planets in orbit very var from the star. Solar systems like ours are harder to detect.
Given what we know about the abundance of planets, it is likely that HIP 102152 has a planetary system. But actual detection might no be possible with current technology.
Moreover there is no obvious reason to think that life or intelligent life is particularly likely just because the star is similar to the sun. The nature of the star may rule out intelligent life. But as far as we know, life just needs a reasonally stable energy source and a lot of luck. It doesn't need a solar twin.
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$\begingroup$ I think that intelligent life requires that their solar system has a sun as old or older than ours assuming the speed of intelligent life evolution was the same on their planet. Is a star’s age correlated with the orbiting planet’s age? It’d be really useless to go to an exoplanet and find only non intelligent as humans life. It’d be only practical for increasing our food supply if we found another planet with only livestock and then there’s the problem of galactic food and livestock farming and transportations $\endgroup$– user31880Commented Feb 27, 2020 at 20:25
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$\begingroup$ Planets form at the same time as their star, so planets are the same age. For the rest of the comment, I don't think you've really understood how big space is. Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. $\endgroup$– James KCommented Feb 27, 2020 at 20:37
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1$\begingroup$ @Numbers Note that posts and comments about life on other planets are just wild speculation from the point of view of Astronomy SE and we try not to encourage wild speculation on this real science based SE. SE is a Q&A site, not really for discussing or speculating. We have essentially no idea what is required to develop intelligence on Earth (or even a widely agreed definition of intelligence), let alone elsewhere in completely unknown biochemical environments. $\endgroup$ Commented Feb 28, 2020 at 8:51
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If you look up the star on SIMBAD and view the references, you will come across some papers about a project called the Solar Twin Planet Search, which as the name implies is a project searching for planets around solar twins. The first paper in the series, Ramírez et al. (2014) "The Solar Twin Planet Search. I. Fundamental parameters of the stellar sample" lists HIP 102152 as one of the target stars for the project, which measures radial velocities using the HARPS spectrograph.
So far, nothing's shown up. If you search the exoplanet catalogues, e.g. the NASA Exoplanet Archive or the Extrasolar Planets Encyclopaedia, there are no known planets around HIP 102152. Data collected during the Solar Twin Planet Search has been used to put upper limits on the masses of planets around the star, see Figure 4 in Monroe et al. (2013) "High Precision Abundances of the Old Solar Twin HIP 102152: Insights on Li Depletion from the Oldest Sun": the limit ranges from a few Earth masses for 1-day orbits to roughly Saturn-mass planets at 1000 days. The abundances of various elements in the star do suggest that there may well be terrestrial planets orbiting the star, but they would be well below the detection limits for all but the shortest orbits.