42 Worlds in 32 Days

Odie writes: "Since the first discovery of a planet around another star in 1995, some 60+ planetary systems have been discovered. That's about one every two month, most of them uninhabitable Jupiter-sized heavyweights. Not much statistics to put in the Drake equation. Recently though, the OGLE team has come up with more than 42 new candidates. Nice in itself, but what is spectacular is that they spent only 32 days finding them! At that rate COROT should soon find plenty of worlds to explore for you budding Starfleet sailors! "

Comments

42....

[Anonymous Coward]

Come on, need I say more?

Good first step.

[Restil]

We need to get all the stars that have large planets identified as such, and hopefully all of the large planets in such solar systems. Then as our equipment gets better we'll be able to focus on even smaller changes, which will allow us to pick up earth sized planets or smaller.

Also of interest are planets in habitable zones, even large ones. Moons around larger planets could work as well as earth does in the right orbit. Of course, being in such close proximity to a massive planet could present other problems, as massive bodies are more likely to attract other significantly sized rocks, as well as a LOT of radiation if there is a significant magnetic field.

-Restil

Re:Good first step.

[Captn Pepe]

We need to get all the stars that have large planets identified as such, and hopefully all of the large planets in such solar systems. Then as our equipment gets better we'll be able to focus on even smaller changes, which will allow us to pick up earth sized planets or smaller.

I assume that, by "smaller changes", you are referring to the detection of extrasolar planets by spectroscopic searching for the periodic velocity signature of an orbiting body. Unfortunately, this method will probably never be sensitive enough to detect an earthlike planet at earthlike distances; the smallest planets detected so far are roughly Jupiter-mass.

On the other hand, direct optical observation of earthlike planets is possible using large interferometers. Note that this is probably only possible with free-flying space-based telescopes, but it might just be doable using terrestrial interferometric telescopes with advanced adaptive optics. What's more, interferometers can not only detect such planets, but should be able to resolve spectra for them, telling us immediately whether or not they are likely to be habitable or hosting life of their own. For instance, since starlight breaks down ozone, an ozone signature in a planet's spectrum would be an almost certain indicator of biological or exotic chemical processes at work producing large quantities of oxygen. And so on.

drake equation = retarded.

[drik00]

Every time i hear about "inhabitable" planets, or "signs of extraterrestrial life," i laugh my ass off, and i laugh harder the more educated that the idiot that mentions these things.

I'm in no way a scientist, hell, I'm a Comm. Studies major, i have had a lot of biology classes, so i'm not totally ignorant either. However, it just seems that if we're really looking for life on other planets/celestial bodies, we need to quit thinking so close-mindedly.

Let's say, for argument's sake, that life evolved much the way some scientists say it did, the whole Darwinian macroEvolution of the many species. What does that teach us when trying to look for other signs of life out there? well, i can tell you it definitely DOES NOT mean that we need to look for other earth-like planets with water and it DOES NOT mean we should say "well, there is an abundance of molecules that could form into DNA" or the presence of carbon means anything.

What we need to look at is the *effects* of otherworldly life, and i'm not talking about the "face of Mars"...i'm talking about other signs, real signs of unnatural form/structure in space. We need to quit anthropomorphizing possible alien life and we need to quit looking for life "as we know it."

Even in a time when new terrestrial life forms are being found in places where these educated scientists said no life could ever exist (undersea thermal vents, etc), the science community tends to want to look like life like us (not human, DNA/carbon based life).

As far as we know, we're the exception, and there are interstellar races 10^6 times larger than we are that exist in the fusion reactors inside stars. I'm citing an extreme example, but my point is this: If there was life so extreme, how would we ever notice them? How would we ever contact them? With radio signals embedded with decodable messages? You could broadcast a voice talking over FM radio into space, and when it reaches an alien race, they never notice it because either they've moved so far past that technology or never had the need to use radio-type waves for communication purposes.

IMHO, the only point in looking for "inhabitable" planets is for future colonization. All else is simply pointless.

damn, that was my last $0.02...

Re:drake equation = retarded.

[s20451]

Although I agree that the Drake equation is flaky science, I can't agree with most of what else you've said. For example:

Even in a time when new terrestrial life forms are being found in places where these educated scientists said no life could ever exist (undersea thermal vents, etc), the science community tends to want to look like life like us (not human, DNA/carbon based life).

Yes, the scientists found organisms that exist in places where they were previously unexpected. However, these forms of life were easily recognizable as such, because they act much like already known life forms -- they exploit chemical energy sources, grow, and (most importantly) reproduce.

I'm citing an extreme example, but my point is this: If there was life so extreme, how would we ever notice them?

We probably wouldn't. But we also have no reason to expect that earthbound life is so terribly unusual, either. There might exist bizarre forms of life, but based on the single data point available concerning life in the universe (ourselves), it's not necessarily ridiculous to start looking for life "as we know it".

How would we ever contact them? With radio signals embedded with decodable messages? You could broadcast a voice talking over FM radio into space, and when it reaches an alien race, they never notice it because either they've moved so far past that technology or never had the need to use radio-type waves for communication purposes.

We might never be able to contact them in any meaningful way. However, that doesn't mean that we can have no knowledge that they exist. Even a highly advanced race would realise that RF technology is simple and robust for many applications, in much the same way that we on Earth still use lighthouses even though GPS is far superior and far more advanced.

IMHO, the only point in looking for "inhabitable" planets is for future colonization. All else is simply pointless.

I don't accept that it's "pointless" to do something simply because it's more complicated that we might first assume -- that's frankly a defeatist attitude. We have to start somewhere, and if life is not unusual, then our form of life is probably not unusual, so it makes perfect sense to look for what we understand as life. Furthermore, the importance of extraterrestrial life is such that finding it would probably have world-changing implications. Then we could start looking for the bizarre forms of life.

Multiply 42 by several thousand

[Alsee]

They were detecting these planets by watching for "transits", in other words eclipses. If you look at a star&planet from a random direction there is a VERY small chance that it will happen to line up exactly right to see an eclipse. I would estimate the chances as several thousand to one.

With further analysis they can get a pretty solid multiplier for the number of unseen planets. These other planets must exist, and you now know something about them. In a sense they have indirectly measured many thousands of planets.

Even without seeing them, the indirect knowledge about the other planets has scientific weight. This indirect measurement will be very useful in our understanding of other solar systems, how they are structured, and how they form.

The scientific value of the 42 measurements carries a large multiplier.

-

David Spergel's new telescope lens

[juju2112]

I read an article in the last issue of Discover magazine about a breakthrough telescope design that could let NASA see much smaller planets.

The best part about it is that it's a cheap solution -- you just add this weird "cat's-eye" type lens onto a normal telescope. This deflects all the light from the center of the frame away, but allows the light on the side of from to come in. This way, the light of the much brighter nearby star won't block out the smaller planet.

The Discovery article was pretty cool. This is the only equivalent I could find online.. Unfortunately it doesn't go into as much detail.

http://www.princeton.edu/pr/pwb/01/0416/6a.shtml

Re:Gattaca

[kesuki]

The radius of the milky way is 100,000 light years with an average thickness of 10,000 light years. There is a 30,000 light year thick bulge at the center of the galaxy where many of the hundred billion stars in this galaxy reside. I'm basing this on this page. at this rate of planetary discovery it seems that a high rate of stars may have jovian size gas giants. Until we have more data though it's a difficult number to determine. However jovian planets are largely hydrogen and helium gas. Potentially they could form anywhere a star could, while earth type planetoids would require enough dense matter to form into solid planets.
these planets also have to form within the stars habitable zone. Still with roughly 4 billion cubic light years of milky way galaxy on average there are 25 stars within one cubic light year of each other. Meanwhile we're at a density rate of about 0.1 stars per cubic light year, meaning that even with an optimistic calcualtion the nearest earth like planet would be 50 light years. The nearest earth like planet in a habitable zone 150 light years away the nearest life inhabited earth like word 450 light years away and the nearest civilization some 1,350 light years away. That means SETI is a worth while project, but that unless we defy physics by coming up with a FTL drive there isn't any way we're meeting any alien races.
Note these are Highly optimistic numbers and assume that every star system with as many jovian planets as ours would have as many solid planetoids like our system.

Is anyone really surprised by this?

[Beautyon]

Its amazing that anyone is surprised by the "discovery" of planets around other stars.

Direct obersrervation of these bodies is interesting and exiting, but only because we are finally getting to see directly what most intelligent people already knew was there with absolute certainty, and not because its actually sometheing unexpected.

It would be utterly incredible if there were NO planetary bodies orbiting other stars; now THAT would be a scoop.

The fact that they are finding them so quickly is merely a funciton of having better equipment. You would expect to find more planets with better telescopes, and when they finally put a very big telescope on the dark side of the moon, or launch some other new excellent device, all the smaller bodies will suddely resolve out of the glare.

What I find truely beautiful is the range of unimagined objects that the hubble keeps uncovering week upon week. Like this stuff.