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Hubble Discovers a Hundred New Planets
Spudley writes "The BBC is reporting that the Hubble Telescope has discovered over a hundred new exoplanets - a number which almost doubles the total known. Apparently they are also expecting to be able to analyse the atmospheres of up to 20% of them. The discovery will be confirmed within the next seven days."
Too bad Congress is pretty much convinced to let the Hubble die...
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Hate to say it; I'm with the folks who would prefer to explore by robot and orbiting camera first. That buys us time to do a a nanotube 'beanstalk' right.
What a shame that the only thing that has frequently motivated us to look to the skies and spend the money to get there is fear and politics.
RMW
flames > dev/null
As a long time follower of our space exploits, I was dismayed when NASA announced their plans to not service hubble. When the massive outcry came forth, they were smart and decided to do the robotic mission thing. My two cents on this matter: we can learn more from using telescopes such as hubble than we can by going back to the effing moon. This article shows that, even after all these years, hubble is a key part of our space exploration program - and it should stay that way.
Its all fun and games until someone loses an eye... then its just fun.
Yeah, getting kids interested in other planets so they study science is a worthless endevor.
First off if they don't have life, then that would "make" the earth twice as significant as it currently is.
Secondly, seeing as how the ping time between solar systems is in the order of thousands of years, there will never be any meanfull interaction or exchange between planets. I mean we can watch them and they can watch us, but since it will be centuries before a response comes back, there is no real chance for real communications. Transportation is even worse. If you really wanted to, you could travel across the universe and end up in a place completely different than it was when you left, and every one you left has been dead for centuries. So it would be the most awesome retirement ever, but you can throw out any concept of trade or diplomicy between planets.
It's one of those cruel ironies, that after years of dreaming about space creatures, we found out nearly simultaneously that statistically they are certain to exist, and physically they are certain to never play any role in our lives.
Unless we find some big loophole that allows us to get around relativity, the earth really is an island to itself, and while it may be one of millions, it is the only one that will ever have any significance whatsoever to us. That makes it pretty darn important in my eyes.
-jackson (don't have my password to 'pavon' at the moment)
If nobody had ever worked on areas that have no immediate practical purpose, we'd still be focused on optimizing the designs of pointed sticks and stone hammers.
NASA focused the Hubble on very long exposure deep lookback shots for quite a while, with single exposures that took 3 days or so, to get images of very faint galaxies early in time. As fundamental gains in cosmology kept resulting, the program went with its successes, and other projects to look at stuff nearer by were pushed to the back burner, many of them repeatedly. When it was first announced that the shuttle could not be used safely to sustain the HST, NASA found itself with a lot of astronomers who had been promised they would get a turn later, and were now being told there might be no later.
You certainly can argue that planet searches are less significant than the origin problem for the whole universe, but then, what isn't? NASA being reluctant to break promises to researchers or go to further extremes in favoring one type of research over all others is a sign they are considering their mandate to serve the public properly. I don't want my state university to stop awarding PhD's in astronomy to anyone who isn't working on cosmology related projects, I dont want other tools, like the Keck scopes on Mauna Loa, to be scrambling to fit in a load of projects, all considered NASA rejects, and so I don't want NASA thinking like the only astronomy worth doing is cosmology.
Who is John Cabal?