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"."

Comments

How dose he know?

[red5]

How the hell could he know that we are "very close" to discovering anything?
Did miss cleo tell him?

Re:How dose he know?

[seizer]

He "knows" he's very close, because he *knows* his research budget might be cut soon ;-)

(just conjecture, btw)

Re:How dose he know?

[mshurpik]

For all we know we will have nanites in 100 years (or less) contructing a radio telescope antenna of astronomical proportions from bucky tubes with the information collected examined by a worldwide distributed computing system. You have to look at the entire sphere of the advancement of science.

I'd love to, but my boss keeps telling me, "Put the grill-side of the hamburger FACE-UP on the bun."

He doesn't care about space telescopes, neither do the customers. But at $6/hr, I will eventually save up for a linux cluster and programming classes, which will help the distributed computing effort quite a bit.

Microlensing transit events

[Cally]

People have been looking for microlensing events caused by IIRC the transit that yielded the first atmosheric compostition numbers, last year, had already been found by the parallax ("wobbly star") method used to find 99% of other known extra-solar planets. The orbital plane was already known to be in line with us, and indeed the event's timing was predicted using the wobbling parent star. The point is that this technique (which is really a hack in the original sense) is only any use in those rare cases where the orbital plane intersects line of sight from the parent star to earth. Calculation of the percentage of orbits for which this is true is left as an exercise for the reader (cos I haven't the maths ;) [Source: Astronomy magazine.)

Why we haven't found them yet

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Close, but not that close

[Pedrito]

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.

Astronomers very close?

[mccalli]

David Charbonneau is looking for another planet just like Earth, and claims that astronomers are "very close"."

That's true. Astronomers are very close. However, where the hell all these planets are is quite another matter...

Cheers,
Ian

Re:egotistic...

[Fyndo]

What else, besides carbon are you going to base life on? Silicon is the only other thing that has a chemistry even a fraction as varied as carbon, but forms oxides too readily. We haven't ever seen large-scale organization of nuclear matter (and have pretty good theoretical arguments, why not), so it seems unlikely that there's life based on anything sub-molecular. Don't see how you'd get a stable plasma-based life form.

if you have any plausible suggestions, by all means, make them. But till then, the only way I can see to get life is carbon-based life forms. Yeah, I could be wrong, but I'm betting on other life forms also being carbon-based. Not proof, but strikes me as a good bet.

Re:How does he know?

[CrazyDwarf]

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.