Nope. Further from the host star than Venus from Sol, and that star is far less luminous to begin with. (Source)

The amount of CO2 or any other plausible greenhouse gas you’d need to pump a place like that up to lead-melting temperatures means you’d need, what, two planets’ worth of available volatiles? You’d probably also need a seriously disturbed spin for that, like Venus does. I think we can safely start with the assumption that this place (if we can confirm it’s real) is pretty cold.

Well. This is quite a pearl.

I don’t have time to read a 16-page paper in detail, but I did want to know how the host star compares to everyone’s favourite local solitary K-type dwarf, Epsilon Eridani. It’s slightly less massive (~0.7 solar mass versus 0.8 for ε Eri) and quite a bit less bright (difference of about 0.1 solar luminosity), but I especially wanted to know about the age of the star. ε Eri is quite young and frothy, but the investigators here infer from the star’s motion that it belongs to the thin disk, up to a whopping 10 billion years old.

So we are definitely not talking about an ε Eri-type system. So that should be mean no dust disks, no crazy activity from the star, and no newish planets still carving out their places through the system.

You’ve really got to wonder about such an old planet, however cold and quiescent it may be. The potential paths for climatic evolution on such a world boggle the mind, however cold it is. You could get an episodically or formerly active world like Mars, a beautifully unstable oscillatory world like Earth, or something completely different. Assuming any atmosphere, of course (safe assumption?). And that’s without considering whether there are any other planets in the system.

I really wouldn’t spend too much time thinking about this candidate detection, as we have literally seen just the one transit, and we will need to observe this fellow for a while to confirm the discovery, learn about other planets in the system, and so on. The investigators themselves note that the transit was shallow (meaning difficult to detect), but the good news is that the host star is fairly bright, well within reach of amateur equipment. I wonder if citizen scientists will be able to follow the transits.

Exciting times.

photos of people getting arrested and harassed, possibly the worst moments of their life sold for profit

I was in full agreement with your entire comment until I read this.

Tell us - how is the photographer supposed to support himself in this work if not via his images? Do you suppose this person is making vast wealth from this? You yourself acknowledge the danger of documenting what is going on in Minneapolis. Shouldn’t we be encouraging people in this - or at the least, not work to discourage it? By this logic, filmmakers who make documentaries about the victims of war shouldn’t be able to make a wage from their work, either. How about whistleblowers who expose abuse from within, are they allowed to make money from writing books about their experience? If you can provide me with evidence that this kind of photojournalism is leading to vast and exploitative profit-making schemes, I’ll reconsider your argument, but short of that…

If you want to talk about the worst moments of a subject’s life, consider Phan Thi Kim Phúc. At the age of 9, her village was hit by freaking napalm, and she was severely burned - her clothes literally burned away, and she was photographed running naked from the smoking ruins of her village. This image won the Pulitzer Prize, which undoubtedly aided the photographer in his career… and the victim herself hated the photo at first. I strongly urge you to read the article, however, because it shows how her thinking on this subject evolved.

The important thing is that these images are being broadly disseminated. And you don’t even have to pay to see them, or form your own opinion on them. What more can we ask for?