Slashdot Mirror
11 New Extra-Solar Planets Announced
Shooter6947 writes: "The European planet hunting team, including Mayor and Queloz who first found 51 Pegasus b in 1995, have just announced
the discovery of 11 new extrasolar planets. The new list includes 2 multiple planet systems, one planet with an orbital eccentricity of .93, and another in a nearly circular orbit near its star's habitable zone. Kickass!"
Given the last item -- "a giant planet moving in an orbit around its Sun-like central star that is very similar to the one of the Earth and whose potential satellites (in theory, at least) might be "habitable"" -- I wonder not about how we humans might live there, but how life might evolve there.
In particular, I wonder if advanced space travel might develop at a faster evolutionary rate given several habitable planet-sized moons in close proximity. After all, great advances in technology are usually composed of thousands of small steps and an occasional leap. Starting from Earth, there are no close-by habitable locations, so we focus on making one great leap after another. Our drive to explore overrides reasons to return to the same spots again and again. That's not very efficient or productive in terms of developing travel technology. If the Moon, Mars, and Venus were all habitable, the amount of repetitive space travel we'd be engaged in would result in rapid incremental improvement in travel technology.
Racetrack demons start by going really fast around the block when they're little kids, and speeding up with every step. But here we are, stuck in a celestial backwater with nowhere to go nearby, so our first toddling steps involve building and driving the equivalent of a long-haul truck. I'd lay my money on us being visited far sooner than us finding/visiting another travel-capable race.
I think not...(*poof*)
well, i can answer the first question. scientists find planets by studying an effect called "red shift" in a star's motion in our sky. by studying this, we can determine if there is a planet acting with gravitational force on the star. Basically a star with a large enough planet orbiting around it will make the star appear to wobble. Unfortunately, this techinique is only useful for finding planets the size of jupiter (at least), because smaller planets don't "pull" on the star enough to cause a noticable wobble.
The naming planets after Greek Gods thing has been done to death. I say we adapt it to modern times and start naming planets after modern Gods. Planet Carmack, anyone?
I'm still waiting for the new, better detection methods that will allow us to actually find Earth-sized planets in their normal orbits. Not only that, but future missions will be able to tell the composition of the atmosphere around these planets - and if they find an atmosphere a lot like ours, that would be the first concrete evidence towards extrasolar life.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
Take a look at Geoff Marcy's website at exoplanets.org. Marcy is a professor here at Berkeley who leads one of the two teams which has done most of the planet finding thus far. This most recent announcement is by Michel Mayor, a Swiss astronomer who leads the other major extrasolar planet hunt. I think the two teams have a fairly friendly rivalry going on, and often both end up observing/discovering the same planets. One of Geoff's graduate students (who I think reads /.; Jason, you reading this?) told me that this latest batch was all discovered by using southern hemisphere telescopes, so none of these were discovered by Marcy et al's search, since that is conducted solely with Northern hemisphere telescopes.
Right now, we're finding Jupiter-sized planets around roughly 5% of the stars we've looked at - 60-ish planets around about a thousand stars. It's expected that the actual numbers of stars with planets is much higher than that, potentially as much as 50% or so, but smaller planets or ones further from their parent star are much harder to detect, so we have not yet identified any.