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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."
I wonder if one of them is the planet of the apes.....Oh wait staue of libetry AGGGGGGGh that was earth!!!
Too bad Congress is pretty much convinced to let the Hubble die...
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
A hundred new specs of dust on the lens.
http://siokaos.org/
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
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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.
Clearly its just trying to pad its resume now that the axe has fallen. -C
Yes now I definitely see that we need to be rid of this useless piece of space junk. It does nothing apparently but further our knowledge and increase our view of the universe. Worthless piece of junk.
Are they still planning on scrapping this thing? That would be sad.
Der Tod ist der einzige Weg hier raus!
If this doubles the number of known planets, does this make Earth half as significant? I mean, is Earth at all significant in the big scheme of things? I am reminded of that picture from Carl Sagan's book showing Earth as a mere speck against the vastness of space. I think the book was called The Pale Blue Dot. Wow, this makes me feel a lot better about forgetting to pay my phone bill.
Unknown host pong.
None. If you RTFA, you'll see that the method used is to measure a dimming of a star, which can (but doesn't have to) be from a planet passing in front of it. For this to be measurable over the natural fluctuations of a star, the planet will have to be a giant.
Of course, the precense of one or more giant planets in a system increases the chance of habitable planets, as the giants acts like vacuum cleaners, keeping the smaller ones relatively undisturbed.
Regards,
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*Art
The Drake Equation.
So how many of those 200-odd planets that we know of are capable of supporting carbon-based life? You crunch the numbers . . .
The real exciting news is that they've only confirmed 18 Starbucks locations on those 100 new planets...
Viv
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Yeah, getting kids interested in other planets so they study science is a worthless endevor.
The discovery will lend support to the idea that almost every sunlike star in our galaxy, and probably the Universe, is accompanied by planets.
If you've ever read anything about star formation the co-effect of planet formation seems a no-brainer. Just eddies in an accretion disk. It would seem more unlikely to me that an accretion disk would perfectly aggregate into a lone star. In fact, you can apply this to other things, such as ring formation, and more sporadically I would imagine, life. The universe is a BIG place.
It's a good thing that we are going to let the Hubble fall into disrepair. All of these new discoveries mean that we will have to keep revising our Science textbooks and that is an expense that our school systems cannot afford. At least when that damn telescope stops working we will can content that we know all that it is possible to know without the burden of having to keep up with these new "facts."
The Tools Of Ignorance wanna be a tool?
So now all those who have criticised Hubble should be sorry. They have to eat Hubble pie.
This is even beyond Carl Sagan's reasoning of the likleyhood of the existence of life in the Universe. It is hard to imagine the possible abundance of extra terra life, but this theory is reasonable, and this discovery is one step closer to proving it.
I just wish I could be around to witness the presentation of absolute proof that life exists elsewhere in the Universe.
Yep, I teach physics and astronomy at the local community college, and I diffuse such statements at the beginning of each semester. "Are we ever going to use this stuff?" students typically ask physics and math professors at some point during their studies (always at the difficult parts --- no one has objections to learning irrelevant easy stuff). "Nope!" I say, proudly beaming. Teaching astronomy to the general public has no practical value, aside from the (perhaps) 2nd order effect of funding for space missions that help make technological advances. Rather, I hope to teach them how to think critically, expose them to scientific ideas, methods, and principles, and instill some sense of appreciation for the amazing universe we are embedded in. If we stimulate imaginations and a little "shock and awe" at ideas not yet imagined, hopefully that is some slight public service. This is especially important for children, whose romantically large sense of wonder should be occasionally inflated. As Feynman said, "science is like sex; occasionally something practical comes out of it, but that's not the reason we're doing it."
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.
You can also detect planets by watching the way the star dims slightly when it's eclipsed. You can only detect really big planets this way; you wouldn't notice the transit of Venus from that far away.
But once you've found a planet that big, you can look even more closely and see what color changes you observe during the dim period. You can chalk that up to wavelengths of light absorbed by the planet's atmosphere, which you can use to hazard a guess as to what the planet's made of.
In all likelihood it's pretty much the same as Jupiter, which is to say pretty much like the sun itself: mostly hydrogen and some helium. But you might be able to detect faint signals of nitrogen, oxygen, maybe some carbon, and perhaps a bit of ammonia. The ratios of hydrogen to helium will suggest a lot about the way the planet was formed.
No signs of intelligent life, then?
This is incorrect, probably based on a misreading of this quote: "If this is confirmed, in seven days we will have doubled the number of planets known in nine years."
The article states that Kailash Sahu, the astronomer who made the discovery, did so during an observation period of seven days. According to the director of the Space Telescope Science Institute, they don't expect final results until September or October.
That's what I misread this story headline as. I need to start reading some other websites...
A moon-based scope has many advantages and disadvantages which should be considered.
/. assumption that anyone working in any field is an idiot? (Every /. story about any new device or invention leads with the usual "I wonder what they're going to do about X," where X is the blindingly obvious thing that any simian would have thought of first - yes, they've thought about it and actually done a calculation!).
They have considered it, thanks. Also scopes on the Antartic high ice cap, and earth-trailing, and at 5 AU, and at L2.
Why is there always an assumption that the folks at NASA are idiots? Or is that just the usual
It's incredibly expensive to softland devices on the moon, compared to orbiting them in space. There's no solar power for two weeks at a time, so you'd have to use nuclear, which limits the amount of power you can get (and nuclear power generators are heavy, so you can't just launch more). Assuming it's a visible wavelength telescope (IR just seems impossible with the temp variations), when you're in the shade, you have to keep things warmed up to room temp, and when you're in the sun, you have to shield them from the sun without blocking your aperture. Being on the moon severely limits pointing capabilities - you have to point where ever the moon is pointing (L2 satellites have to point anti-sun but that's less restrictive). In fact, when the sun is shining down your aperture, can you observe at all? There's no soft lander infrastructure in place (you can't call up Boeing and order a Delta IV with the moon soft landing option), so you'd have to develop that also. It would include landing a multi-ton very precise, irreplaceable mirror and deploying in a gravity field. Just seems like a design, cost, and risk nightmare. All this is robotic of course, unless you also want to pay for the infrastructure to put humans up there. Which would cost about the same as 5 or 10 Hubble equivalents. That would make the telescope the flea on the elephant's back and the first thing to be cut when the inevitable overruns happened.
Now where are the advantages? Or did you just say that because you think there are some but you really haven't thought about what they are, but hey, Hubble on the moon! That sounds cool! Right up there with "move the Hubble to the ISS" in terms of bad choices.
For those who follow this field, I'll remind you of the OGLE project, which has been doing the same thing from the ground. They found 60 likely planetary candidates (out of a similar number of stars monitored), but only two of those actually look like they could be planets. All the rest are either grazing-incidence binaries or blended binaries. The higher resolution of Hubble may help the blend problem to an extent, but I highly doubt the number of actual planets is anywhere near 100.
They also have little chance of confirming whether these are actually planets, as you need to do extremely high-resolution spectroscopy in order to confirm its existence via the radial velocity method. Even Keck can only do that for stars down to ~16th magnitude, and according to the observing proposal, this survey is going down to 23rd. They might be able to get precise-enough light curves to reject false positives based on color-curve changes, but I'd like to see it before I believe it.
Microsoft delenda est!