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Earth to...Earth? Are you there?
jasamaman writes "So far all the planets found outside our solar system have been gas giants. So they are not habitable, and couldn't really hold life as we know it. But "planet hunter" David Charbonneau is looking for another planet just like Earth, and claims that astronomers are "very close"."
Fuck Earth. Even better, fuck Uranus!
"Why did they cancel my favorite Sci-Fi show? I downloaded ALL the episodes!"
All your planets are belong to us.
I smelled the air, ridden with the smell of garbage, as I eased my way into the EZSECURE golf cart with Robert, careful not to spill the hot coffee that I'd obtained at the McDonald's only minutes earlier. "This is my first time driving one of these things," he said with a slight hint of nervousness in his voice. "It's okay, Robert," I assured him. "These aren't much different than a car. Make it quick, I want to get away from this dumpster." Unfortunately for my coffee and I, my new recruit had never obtained a driver's license nor driven anything other than a bicycle. I had just one of the most critical errors in the business: misinterpreting a potential threat to the well-being of Walmart's patrons as benign!
Just as Robert was attempting to enable the golf cart's electric motor, we received an urgent message via our walkie-talkie. "Peter! Somebody just left and didn't pay! Stop them!" It was the distress call of Vickie, the night cashier for register five. There wasn't a moment to lose. Our entire livelihood was at stake! I leapt into action without hesitation; this is what I was trained to do. "Robert, get in on the other side!" I exclaimed. The trainee, realizing that our situation was urgent, quickly transferred to the opposite side of the golf cart. In no time flat, we were dashing to the front door of our beloved Walmart. When we arrived, a man, presumably the suspect, was walking rapidly to his car. We pulled up along side of him. I would estimate that he was approximately 6'1" and 280 pounds. A bit chubby, but most likely capable of violence. "Stop, criminal!" I drew a can of mace instantaneously. The astonished thief quickly put his hands up and he dropped the bag containing the stolen goods. He knew that he'd been caught in the act. There was nothing he could do in order to gain the advantage in this situation.
The man spoke without any resemblance of a native Jasper citizen's accent. "I'm not a criminal, you old fogey." Sure you aren't, I thought to myself. I'd heard this line hundreds of times prior to this incident. He exhibited a glare that would have intimidated less seasoned veterans into submission. "I was buying DVDs for my son, moron. We're on our way to Louisiana and he was becoming restless, so I thought I'd surprise him with some movies when he awoke from his nap." As the thief futilely attempted to share his alibi, Vickie ran out of the store. Struggling to find her breath, she explained, "It's okay, Peter. Sandra forgot to deactivate the Checkpoint tags. Uh, he's fine... Let him go..." Her embarassment was made obvious by her red cheeks. She'd just dispatched an elite squadron of trained officers to apprehend an innocent man. "Um, I apologize for the inconvenience," I said as I looked in the innocent man's direction. "What is your name, if I may ask?"
"Screw you," he retorted. "You inept, dollar an hour morons just ruined my vacation. I'll be leaving in a moment, once I eat the rest of my Quarter Pounder with Cheese." The three of us then went our opposite ways. Robert and I walked back to the golf cart; he recommended that I teach him how to manuever our patrol cruiser. He started the golf cart and began driving it rather skillfully. "You're doing well," I complimented. He looked over at me, smiling proudly. As he began to focus on driving again, an automobile's headlights blinded both of us. My hand instinctually grabbed the EZSECURE golf cart's hand rail. All I could hear was the twisting and tearing of metal; all I could see was an emblem resembling a silver star (one I'd never before observed), apparently lit by the reflection of the front parking lot's stadium lighting, as everything faded to the darkest of ebony...
Comment without sacrificing karma.
Okay, stop it already, April fool's day is over...
The fact that the strong races of northern Europe did not repudiate this Christian god does little credit to their gift for religion--and not much more to their taste. They ought to have been able to make an end of such a moribund and worn-out product of the decadence. A curse lies upon them because they were not equal to it; they made illness, decrepitude and contradiction a part of their instincts--and since then they have not managed to create any more gods. Two thousand years have come and gone--and not a single new god! Instead, there still exists, and as if by some intrinsic right,--as if he were the ultimatum and maximum of the power to create gods, of the creator spiritus in mankind--this pitiful god of Christian monotono-theism! This hybrid image of decay, conjured up out of emptiness, contradiction and vain imagining, in which all the instincts of decadence, all the cowardices and wearinesses of the soul find their sanction!--
"You're just scared like a little white pussy. I'll fuck you till you love me, you faggot!"
Thats like trying to shoot a fly in the dark, you have no idea how close you are till you hit it....
For my ole meatworm lurking in the grass.
Itll bite ya lad.
and run by celebrities
How the hell could he know that we are "very close" to discovering anything?
Did miss cleo tell him?
I know I'm going to hell, I'm just trying to get good seats.
We need a bigger penis!
Really, we do.
Thanx.
I see the pointy that any further information about space (even out of our solar system) is useful, but what would we do if we found an earth-like planet?
It is expensive and time consuming to send a probe to Mars, would we really want to investigate this far off planet before we properly explore our own solar system? And put the money in when the results may only come back years after we are all dead? Nope.
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
PQ: How long will it be before scientists might be able to study the atmospheres of Earth-like planets around other stars?
Charbonneau: That's much more difficult. We are close to being able to find Earth-like planets. But it may be decades before we are able to study their atmospheres.
Just close. How close? Well, if you're used to measuring distances in parsecs, 'close' can be quite a bit away, especially as the lad seems fairly young yet. He'll have plenty of time to paddle around, swigging brewskis and gazing at the sky. Good luck to him, I say!
Money for nothing, pix for free
Until the launch of "Darwin" by the ESA, (pdf link) it is unlikely that we will be able to detect earth-like planets. We still cannot detect Jupiter sized worlds at this point in time.
Just you're average nitpicker.
Ofcourse he's not trying to read the future from stars (lousy pun intended) here, but as I understood it, he's visioning that the technology in the near future makes it possible to find and analyze Earth-like planets "out there".
At the moment Hubble's visual resolution is great, but way too limited to analyze any distant planets the size of ours very far away.
__
Zarathustra.fi
Modern man has no goal, no aim, no ideals.
The sun of our solar system contains more than 99,9% of its mass. Of the remaining 0,1%, most is of the megaplanets like Jupiter and Saturn. Jupiter alone has around 500 times the mass of Earth. Habitable plants are thus incredibly, incredibly small compared to their suns or compared to gas giants. Given the limited funding (forget space, we need missile defense!) we can be happy that we can detect gas giants.
well, we do need some place to evacuate to if the Vogons come to buildt an interstellar bypass and destroy the earth in the process.
Lets find 42 alternative planets earth
We're close? You can't just ignore the fact that earth like planets are 10000 times harder to find, simply because they're 10000 times smaller than the gas giants. The truth is that our telelscopes just aren't there yet. The only proof they'll find will be inferrable from what they can see. For example, if large planet's movement is regularly affected in such a way as to suggest a smaller planet's interferance. At this point and time we do not have either the tools or the technizques that we'll need to identify distant planets, all we can hope for is that a few shots in the dark will pay off.
Or at least he claims that smaller planets may be discovered through indirect light-blocking means within five years.
HE CLAIMS??! How scientistic (or whatever the words is - help me out here, my native language is not English) is that? I thought science is based on facts. Everybody can claim whatever they want! I can claim that I might become the president of USA in near future.
I believe their instruments may be experiencing interference from what scientists have come to call Die Nüsse Effekt.
You see, I have on my person a rather large satchel, within which I store and transport nuts. The mass of the nuts within this satchel, or "nutsack" is so great, that it interferes with Mr. Charbonneau's equipment. My nutsack is responsible for other astronomical anomalies as well, such as the color of the universe being mistaken as being beige. That particular one is less complicated. You see, I actually just had my nutsack draped over the telescope.
Many phenomena may be explained by my nutsack, but soon, explanation will be unnecessary. All will see.
-------------------
I am a highly intelligent squirrel
have recently determined that amino acids (protein building block molecules) are formed in a vacuum which would perhaps mean that most life would be formed on the same basis as we are, perhaps it would be easier to look for old radio transmissions and TV-signals as SETI does. Have the people at SETI ever done any modelling to see what our old TV-signals would look like 10 light years from earth?
,winds and life in general.
Another thing that might be vital to life on earth might simply be the fact that we have such a large moon acting as both a shield to a lot of asteroidal bombardment and as a planetary motor for tides
PQ: On a personal note, what do you like to do in your spare time?
4 40990534471
Charbonneau: I find home beer-brewing very satisfying.
David this one's on me!
http://beer.trash.net/beerget.php?yourbeer=101783
good luck on your quest buddy.
"It was penguin lust...at its worst." --someone
There are a number of ways Earth-sized planets could be discovered fairly soon (within the next 5-10 years). There are several planet-finding satellites to be launched. The Hubble would also be capable of detecting an Earth-sized planet passing in front of a star.
The real trick is finding the proper conditions. First, we need to find an extra-solar system in which Earth-sized planets exist. It's now believed that these are fairly few and far between. The reason is that a vast majority of the gas giant systems we've discovered so far have their gas giants in either really close orbits to their stars, or are highly eliptical with passes close to their stars. In these situations, Earth-like planets would likely be tossed into their stars, or more likely, tossed into open space, by the gravitational effect of the giants.
So, what you need is giants that live fairly far out (like Jupiter and Saturn). These appear to be about 1 out of 50+ systems. So, out of this 1-2% of systems, we then need to find ones with orbital planes that are parallel to our angle of view of those systems, and catch the Earth-sized planets passing in front of their stars.
Asking for all those conditions to line up is a pretty tall order, so it's unlikely we'll catch such an event in the next 5 years. My personal opinion. A large breakthrough may change that, and that's possible as well. After all, look at the discovery of extra-solar planets. It was a breakthrough idea that led to a sudden discovery of many of these systems, without a real technilogical breakthrough.
I like how he has a Van Gogh in the photo. This guy hasn't advanced his art tastes since his teen years.
Home beer brewing and sea kayaking...ooh. Exciting guy.
Oh yeah, and he works at Caltech.
Was there supposed to be something earth-like in this article? I didn't see it.
> How the hell could he know that we are "very
> close" to discovering anything?
I could have sworn I read an article over a year ago where an Earth-type planet was found.
"All representatives are busy. The estimated hold time is one..hundred..sixty..four..minutes." Detroit Edison, 02/01/02
That's true. Astronomers are very close. However, where the hell all these planets are is quite another matter...
Cheers,
Ian
about a year and two days ago?
In New York, the Committee to Protect Journalists issued a protest letter to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon saying Israel had an obligation to allow journalists to work freely in the West Bank.
"Attempting to prevent journalists from witnessing events on the ground is a flagrant act of censorship," the letter said. The group also expressed alarm at "several incidents in which Israeli troops have fired on working journalists."
The Brussels-based International Federation of Journalists on Tuesday criticized Israel for closing areas to the media. "We oppose this strategy, for it amounts to censorship and will be self-defeating," the group said in a statement. "Censorship will not bring peace but will only lead to more ignorance, rumor and fear."
And just how do you "advance your art taste"?
You decide to like the bullshit modern stuff because your artsy-fartsy friends think expressionism is "so out"?
I wonder if we tuned into another planet's radio wave, if we'd be able to watch their soap operas. I watch soaps for 1/2 a day here on Earth, but wouldn't it be great to watch The Alien and the Cybernetic too? Or maybe we'd get to know them by watching their version of Sally Jesse Rapheal?
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
2) We do not know how non-carbon based life works, develops or even if it is possible. We don't have experimental evidence.
3) Developing a scientific hypothesis requires that you know what you are talking about and have at least some experimental evidence that suggests that we need another hypothesis.
Hence, we cannot speculate on the non-carbon based life -- at least scientifically.
I want my Earth 2 but without those nasty rock creatures!
Well, close but no cigar,
Perhaps the teraforming of venus or mars would be a more practical consideration for the next 100 years.
What the heck does it matter if we find a planet in say , we misses it surrounding Alpha Centarui, our closest stellar neighbor.
We pretty much know there out there , law of averages dictates it. WE (earth), is not an cannot be alone in it planetary type classification, to think so would align you mental reasoning with that of the clergy in the middle ages saying the frigging sun revolved around the earth.
So what dose it matter in the short term if there is another planet even within 20 light years, a very short distance I might add, Propulsion at near the speed of light is fantasy for at least another century. OR until artificial gravity can be harnessed (no not for propulsion but for keeping the people inside from turning to goooo on acceleration a deceleration), add to that the fact space isnt a vacum, a craft travelling at NOV (near optic velocities) well lets say there are more issues than you can imagine if you havent studied the problem.
So, what are we left with ?
Venus and Mars, mars is cold and dry. May be a little watter but its still going to be cold , rocord equator temperatures are not even comfy, there isnt enough CO2 at the caps to produce an atmosphere of enough density for a greenhouse effect to occur.
SO we have venus, wet, HOT as hell and very active. Remeber the percipitation experiments in chemistry class ? How about coming up with a plan to do just tha to the sulfur in the atmosphere ? Man what I wouldnt give to have about 2 liters of venutian atmosphere to play with. Now granted even after it would take some time for the planet to cool even after reduced its atmosphere. And the place would forever smell like rotten eggs, but more habbitable perhaps than mars, at least you have PLENTY of water, albeit bound in sulfuric acids at the moment.
Sooo earth earth where are you ? Does it really matter ? What next drawings of what life may be like on theat planet ? (Remeber the wood carvign of the men on the moon a guy claimed to see with wings and all)
Sig went tro...aahemmm.....fishing........
is very very limited. It is debatable whether we know of even two examples of life. All life on earth appears to have a common ancestor and is largely identical. We might know something about artifical life, but it is very limited and highly questionable. Man, Carl Sagan should be prerequisit reading. 1977, that's when Carl Sagan and Edwin E. Salpeter wrote their famous paper of "floaters", "hunters" and "sinkers". If you havnt read it, you are not a part of the conversation. Go buy a copy of Cosmos and get some humility. We're a speck of sand on a beach of stars and some among us thing we know something about life in the universe?
How we know is more important than what we know.
"Particles, Environments, and Possible Ecologies in the Jovian Atmosphere" by Carl Sagan and Edwin Salpeter, Astrophysical Journal Supplements, vol 32, 737-755, 1976.
The eddy diffusion coefficient is estimated as a function of altitude, separately for the Jovian troposphere and mesosphere. Complex organic molecules produced by the Ly alpha photolysis of methane may possibly be the absorbers in the lower mesosphere which account for the low reflectivity of Jupiter in the near ultraviolet. The optical frequency chromophores are localized at or just below the Jovian tropopause. Candidate chromophore molecules must satisfy the condition that they are produced sufficiently rapidly that convective pyrolysis maintains the observed chromophore optical depth. The condition is satisfied if complex organic chromophores are produced with high quantum yield by NH3 photolysis at less than 2,300 A. Jovian photoautotrophs in the upper troposphere satisfy this condition well, even with fast circulation,
assuming only biochemical properties of comparable terrestrial organisms. An organism in the form of a thin, gas filled balloon can grow fast enough to replicate if (1) it can survive at the low mesospheric temperatures, or if (2) photosynthesis occurs in the troposphere.
If anyone has access to the full paper I would love a copy.
How we know is more important than what we know.
How do we plan a trip to that planet? - Granted let send a Rover to find out what is what but what do we do about the RTT . There are so many what ifs and how dos in this area and finding an Earth like planet is worse than attempting to solve an NP complete problem...you dont know and i hope this dude is more closer to his find, than my brother whos playing golf on a small planet near Alpha Centauri. A2.6k
For some reason, that makes me think of some prominent politicians...
Or some baddies in a SciFi series, "The Attack of the red Gas Giants!!"
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
I just heard the sad news on talk radio. Palestinian terrorist Yasser Arafat was found dead in his West Bank home this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure the Slashdot community will miss him -- even if you weren't suicide bombed by one of his terrorist minions, there's no denying his contribution to international terrorism. Truly an modern-day icon. He will be missed :(
Ah, mouse-over, you've saved my bacon once again!
But the detection of those elusive, small Earth-like worlds may be closer than you think
I've seen lots of Science Fiction movies about aliens that go from planet to planet, soaking up the natural resources of each, conquering and destroying them (making them uninhabitable), and moving on. Anyone else ever think we're the aliens?
I mean, we've already screwed up this one, and now rather than fix it (because wanting to do that makes you a "tree hugger") we're going after another. I can't say I'm against it, but it's just...creepy.
...more often THAN politicians think...
Are you some kind of moron?
I dont see how you can be close to finding anything. Its like my car keys, or that odd sock. I know its in my apt someplace, but i've either found them or i haven't. Maybe i should take a hint from them, look for an exact duplicate of my car keys!
thirsty*i^2
"Ya I finished that last week, it just doesn't work"
Power-law distributions (more smaller stuff) suggest there should be lots of earth-size planets. However the current methods can only see fast-moving larger-than-Jupiter planets. The most popular method is measure faint doppler shifts over months to years. Terrestrial pectroscopic resolution limits this to about 10x Jupiters. Space-based methods may be more sensitive.
.0001% of time the planet is eclipsing,
and (c) you aren't seeing a variable star like
Algol. The US will soon launch a special telescope called Kuiper to watch one splotch of sky for five
years continuously to catch planetary eclipses.
Kuiper is notable for its 350 megapixel camera.
Another method is to look for eclipses of planets across the stars. This presumes (a) you are seeing another solar system edge-on, (b) you are lucky to catch the
A third method is infra-red, which can see earth-size in newly forming planetary system dust-clouds. These would be too young and unstable to have evolved intelligent life on their own, but could be colony sites.
I believe that a infinite possiblity that life does exist elsewhere. However I believe that as Calvin said it best "the surest sign of intellence in the universe is that they have not contacted us"
I think any very serious attempt to look for Earth-like planets (e.g., rocky crust on the planet instead of a gas giant like most of our Outer Planets) will have to wait until future generations of space telescopes become available after 2010.
The problem is that even with advancing telescope technology on ground-based telescopes they still can't completely overcome the refractive effects of the atmosphere, which reduces the quality of any picture taken even at high-altitude locations like Mauna Kea in Hawaii. With NASA working on the Next-Generation Space Telescope (NGST) and the European Space Agency working on something similar, we may just see after 2010 space-based telescopes with much higher resolving power than the Hubble Space Telescope; these might just be able to see fairly clearly the gas giant planet(s) orbiting nearby stars and could help deduce if there are rocky crust planets also orbiting those stars.
What does he mean by Earth-like? A small planet with an atmosphere? With oxygen and carbon dioxide in its atmophere? With a temperature range that might permit life? With oceans and landmasses?
By some definition of Earth-like, it wasn't long ago in geological time that Earth wasn't very Earth-like. And on the same time scale, it won't be Earth-like for long.
The higher purpose of scientific exploration is to find something weird, not something familiar. The more unEarth-like, the better. A discovery that confirms a theory is useful but a discovery that challenges a theory is the name of the game.
I'm glad you posted the section you did here, as I didn't remember his exact words (and I can sometimes be a stickler for comparing what he said to what people think he said.) It says, "We are close to being able to find Earth-like planets." He doesn't say we're close to finding one, just that we're close to being able to find one. That's quite a big difference, especially when you consider that space is mostly empty. It could be 20 years after we are able to find one that we actually do.
Just to kind of explain that to some of our slower readers... and this is in no way accurate, but just an example to help understand... if putting a coke bottle on the end of a telescope enables us to detect Earth-like planets, then we still have to search the skies with that telescope. That could take a long time, with the vastness of space.
It's easy to stand out when the general level of competence is so low.
The closest thing that has been discovered is the two gas giants around 47 Ursa Majoris. This is the planetary system that so far looks most like our own. The two giants have less extreme (more circular) orbits than most of the ca 70 planets found, which also contributes to make it look a lot like ours. Gas giants can be an important contributor for life to appear on a smaller planet, since they act like magnets for asteroids and other debris, sheltering the smaller planets and giving life a chance to evolve.
Opinions stated are mine and do not reflect those of the Illuminati
Actually, he's referring to this older Slashdot article, which you must've not read.
Now whether this formed in a vacuum or not is a technicality. The scientists shone high level of UV light on a chunk of ice containing ammonia and methyl alchohol at a temperature of 4K and found traces of 3 amino acids had formed. The amino acids themselves formed from the surrounding ice slurry which was in a vacuum, ergo "amino acids are formed in a vacuum."
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Actually, the article quotes him as saying "We are close to being able to find Earth-like planets", not that we are close to finding one. The actual quote is a lot easier to make an educated guess about. We can figure out that we need X telescope resolution, Y processing technology, Z other technology and/or techniquest, and we have X-n telescope resolution, etc, and we can more-or-less reasonably project how long it will take us to get to n amount of technology. Thus we can make a reasonably educated guess as to how long it will take us to have the technology to actually find such planets.
It's the planet of Love, and it's in my pants!
Parallax determines the presence of an undetectable massive companion by the sinusoidal proper motion of the star system over a course of a few years. On the ground, you can do this for only a dozen of the closest stars (10 parsecs) or so.
Doppler reflex motion detects the companion by the Doppler shift in spectral lines in the parent star's spectrum as the planet/star orbit about their mutual centre of gravity. You can do this out to 100 parsecs or so.
HD209458 was a candidate from the Butler and Marcy Doppler survey that had a high inclination (edge-on) orbit. Brown and Charbonneau then did photometry to get the transit of the planet across the star's disk. Parallax did not come into it.
Dr Fish
Maybe they just pick who they want to talk to.
Close to discovering a planet sounds very much to me like close to being pregnant. Either you are or you aren't. Either you've discovered such a planet, or you haven't.
Also, note the correct spelling of "does".
Chris Beckenbach
Umm, forgive me if there's something I'm missing, but isn't it just as much shooting in the dark to say that we'll soon have the ability to detect something?
I mean, it's one thing to say that ``We will soon have what -may- allow us to detect Earth-like planets'', but can we really say that technology X will give us that ability until we actually detect such a planet with that specific technology?
While he's not saying that we'll find another habitable planet soon, it's still not a major statement, or really a valid claim. And it won't be until we actually -do- find one.
-- My work here is done. If you need me again, just admit to yourself that you're screwed, and die.
Could it be possible that the planet this guy is talking about, is actually the much famed 12th Planet?
Don't know what I am talking about?
There has been many books written about this planet. A planet which rotates the sun in oval pattern. It comes within range of earth every few thousand years and is due here again in 2012.
The general theory behind this planet is that it is the home of our creators. (Humans are the missing link Monkey - Human - Aliens/Our Creators). The Catholic Church has recent spent about 17 million building a telescope to look in the direction that the planet it supposedly coming from.
Could you imagine the catastrophic impact on the entire notion of religion if the planet came round and the people on it popped in and said "Hey, you guys are an experiment". No Jesus, No Mahammud etc etc...
Anyway, another point about this planet is that one of their "years" is equivalent to about 2 or 3 thousand of ours.
Anyway... There a many people much smarter than I on this subject. Do your own research and make up your own mind.
You can't be a US president unless you were born in the United states, therfore Claming you would be US president would be impossible. His claim, though rediculous is possible.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
I have no problem with people trying to find E.T. life out there. This is cool provided that we are only "listening." I am not sure that it is a good idea to be broadcasting out into space. When sending messages out into space it is like we are saying,
"Attention highly developed races!!! Now hear this!! Are you looking for new world's to conquer? Have you depleted all the natural resources on your homeworld? If so, why not come conquer us? We are very primitive. Still using radio and analog tranismission signals. Just follow this signal back to our homeworld."
Now that I am on the subject. This goes for AI development too. There is a ton of cash spent each year on Articial Intelligence. Didn't anyone watch Terminator or the Matrix? Even if some computer whiz figures out AI, the best he can hope for is that he only coded himself out of a job.
In it Mayor says (my translation) "In 1995 the chances of finding an exoplanet were very small." And still he did. There is no guarantee to find an earth-sized exoplanet ever, but it is quite possible to find one within a year of being able to - or less.
And no, it is absolutely not "shooting in the dark" to say that we'll soon have the ability to detect earth size planets. If these devices work, we can find them if they are there. Just like we were able to find exoplanets in the mid-90's after developing the tools to do so, and just like we actually did.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Sigh.
I did do my own research and I dug up this. Please stop filling the world with crap.
I am not a number! I am a man! And don't you
Could you provide some information on this Catholic telescope and where they state their purpose for building it?
Doing a little math using Kepler's laws, a few thousand year orbit (e.g., 2000 yrs) results in a semi-major distance for the orbit of this planet to be about 158 AU! For it to pass near the Earth would imply that the orbital eccentricity is about 0.9937, which gives a semi-minor distance of this orbit of something like 17 AU. This puts the planet entirely between the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn, meaning that it would have been swept out of the solar system a long time ago!
Yes, the probability of any one system having an edge-on set of orbits for its planets is small. That's why a few groups are monitoring globular clusters with up to 10e6 stars in them, and are also looking toward the bulge of the Galaxy, where you get many stars in a given field of view.
A small probability multiplied by lots of stars all at once = a reasonable chance.
A second selection effect also helps you. All the orbits of the planets in our solar system all lie in a common plane called the ecliptic. It's a result of the conservation of angular momentum.
So the trick is, find a star with transiting hot jupiters, then intensively monitor that system to find the smaller signals of smaller diameter earth-sized planets, as chances are that they will also transit the star's disk!
Dr Fish
I think you meant "your" instead of the contraction of "you are" in your sig!
:)
We've been broadcasting interceptible radio and tv signals out into space for at least 70 years now, and we can't go out and stop those radio waves from continuing on. Any sufficiently advanced aliens living within ~70 light years of earth already knows about us, guaranteed.
Shop Smart, Shop S-mart!
Sagan was a fraud. He is burning in hell this moment with other Atheist pigs.
ground-based planet searches are total crap for finding earth-like planets. (for earth sized planet detection you need to be able to resolve changes in intensity of one part in 10^4... can't be done from the ground). The interesting question is why hasn't Charbonneau found as many large planets as people like Geoff Marcy have.
Joe
graduate student (UCBerkeley)
jhall@astro.berkeley.edu
I'll tell you what discovering other earth-like planets means.
More damn Linux distributions.
Send Jonathan Katz to this alternate planet. Actually ask Katz about it. I'm sure he knows eactly where they all are. He knows practically everything it seems.
shh, this planet here is one of the most habitable in the universe, but also one of the most dangerous, with sharp venomous teeth. now we're just going to sneak up on it.... oh no, it's got life forms! crikey!
I *uh* am *uh**uh* close *uh**uh**uh* to g*uh*etting*uh**uh* pregrnant *uh* *uh* *aaaaaghh*.
- - - - - - - - - - -
I am a programmer. I am paid to produce syntax not grammar. Deal with it.
I mean aren't u ever pissed b/c somebody said the same thing 10 years ago and now u have a problem?
that i need to carry my towel around all the time from now on? man! need a new bag! dang it! what if they come tommorow and i didn't get a chance to buy 1 yet!? OH NO!
If these devices work, we can find them if they are there.
K, I grasp that once the technology is there, it's easily possible that we'd find one that's there to be found relatively quickly. But I guess the point that I was trying to make is, where's that threshold? Without actually detecting one, do we actually know that we're at or near the technology level required to detect one?
-- My work here is done. If you need me again, just admit to yourself that you're screwed, and die.
-future ruler of the world extrodinare visit my site so u can sign up for positions in my gov't! TMP
How can they claim to be very close? If they haven't found anything yet then there is no way they can know when they will, if ever.
Now wait a sec, where is there a respectable scientist out there that insists that all life in the Universe is carbon-based? I don't see any hypotheses that say that. (at least no widely accepted ones!)
Here's an analogy for you: someone earlier said that we only find the really massive, quickly moving extrasolar planets because they are easiest to find. Likewise, the easiest life for us to find would be carbon-based life - we know what chemicals/molecules are required for carbon based life, we know what environments are required. The ONLY "life chemistry" (aka biochemistry) that we know is that of carbon-based lifeforms. In other words, we know the trademark signs of carbon-based life, so we know what to look for.
Example: we know that amino acids are required for (our sort of) carbon-based life. Therefore, we want to see how common these amino acids are in the universe, because we KNOW that amino acids are a trademark of life. So we go out and look for them. Simple as that. Notice here that no statement is being made about silicon-based or any other sort of life form.
We don't know what chemicals/molecules silicon-based life forms require, we don't know what they emit, and we don't know what sort of environments they thrive in - so how the hell are we going to detect their presence?
Statements like "life as we know it" are reasonable comments, because we can only comment on what we know, and we know carbon-based life. By the way, thanks for lumping all scientists into that insult.
I agree, the knowledge that humans have obtained is only a pebble on the cosmic beach of the universe. But to increase the size of that pebble, we have to begin to understand the other pebbles that are conceptually nearby. Silicon-based life is most definitely NOT conceptually nearby - we know nothing about it, and so all we have is speculation. Carbon-based life IS nearby, and so we're going to have to work with that before we can even think about silicon-based life. I think I've exhausted that analogy.
Moral of the story: all of our focus is on searching for carbon-based life because we know what to look for. But there's nothing saying that silicon-based life is impossible.
(Although as a side note, I have heard of studies that indicate that it would be more difficult to create sustainable life based on silicon because silicon compounds [we do agree that life requires chemical compounds, right?] are somewhat less chemically stable. But then again, that's just speculation right now.)
The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
"We are close to being able to find Earth-like planets. But it may be decades before we are able to study their atmospheres."
Studying atmospheres is important because, from what I understand, it has been proven that if there is life on the surface of a planet then the chemical composition of the atmosphere will be far away from thermodynamic equilibrium. The example here is earth--gaseous oxygen is highly reactive and so one would expect to find none of it in the atmosphere, and the reason we do have it is due to living plants. So if we find that the atmosphere of an earth-like planet is far out of equilibrium, then we can deduce that it has life on it (unless someone can come up with another explanation).
(* we then need to find ones with orbital planes that are parallel to our angle of view of those systems, and catch the Earth-sized planets passing in front of their stars......
Asking for all those conditions to line up is a pretty tall order, so it's unlikely we'll catch such an event in the next 5 years. My personal opinion. *)
The hard part seems to be checking enough stars with sensitive equipment. That kind of task sounds like a great application for some automated telescope(s). A bunch of Linixi hooked up to a bunch of scopes?
Sure, it might be one in a million stars, but if you can check a million stars ever few hours or so, then it may be feasible. Multiple stars fit in any given view in most scopes. A computer could check the brightnesses using a few field shots of any given spot.
Table-ized A.I.
Of course, the way we get the government to spend money on searching for these planets and funding research for space travel is to suggest that there are vast oil reserves in space. Bush will be advocating the transgalactic pipeline tomorrow.
If the instrument is only a refinement of existing ones, it's a matter of simple calculations what size/weight planets should be detectable with it. A little Googleing brought me here, with planet-figure.pdf being a diagram of Planet Detection Methods, and planet-paper.pdf being a (longer) paper.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Groovy, thanks for the link. Being quite a bit less well informed, I wasn't sure where to start questing through Google myself.
-- My work here is done. If you need me again, just admit to yourself that you're screwed, and die.