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Microlensing Uncovers Earth-Like Planet
smooth wombat writes "Using a new technique called gravitational microlensing, a team of astronomers have discovered the smallest Earth-like planet circling a star 20,000 light years away in the constellation Sagittarius. Unfortunately the planet takes ten years to circle the red dwarf and has a surface temperature estimated at -220 C which means it's just a larger version of Pluto so the chance of finding life on this planet is essentially zero."
Unfortunately the planet takes ten years to circle the red dwarf and has a surface temperature estimated at -220 C which means it's just a larger version of Pluto so the chance of finding life on this planet is essentially zero.
So it's earth-like how?
Sorry to carp, but it's stuff like this, especially in 'science' articles, that drives me to distraction.
From TFA (boldface mine):Umm...wouldn't that be the textbook definition of solid ? In the absence of any information as to the composition of the 'frozen liquid, the term 'frozen liquid' could apply equally well to any terrestrial planet.
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Cold...inhospitable...sounds like Earth to me.
The more novel thing (to me) would be discovering the ruins of ancient (chronologically speaking) civilization on a planet like that.
So its earthlike in the fact that it is a planet, earth sized, and orbitting a sun? Thats like saying I'm hung like Ron Jeremy, in the fact that we both have a penis and are ugly as sin.
I tend to think the chances of us finding life on anything 20,000 life years away is essentially zero.
Unfortunately the planet takes ten years to circle the red dwarf and has a surface temperature estimated at -220 C which means it's just a larger version of Pluto so the chance of finding life on this planet is essentially zero.
It's especially unfortunate given the ease of a mission requiring us to travel 20,000 light years from Earth, then survive 57.3 Kelvin temperatutes.
Unlike all the gas-giant, Jupiter-like planets we've seen so far. It's very difficult to spot tiny, Earth-sized objects from so far away. We may not find this new planet very hospitable but it's still an important discovery.
Until now.. they hadn't found a planet in another star system that was
A) terrestrial (solid, with a rocky surface) B) farther than 0.15 AU from its star.
This planet is 2.5 AU from it's star and it is not a gas giant. That's what makes it "earth-like".. in the way that mercury, venus, mars, and pluto are "earth-like".
Until now.. no such planet had been observed in another star system.
All of this is in TFA.
"I have as much authority as the pope, I just
don't have as many people who believe it" - George Carlin
Quote:
So, by all means, let's just stop looking then. That's the easy solution. Seriously though, I hate when people think like this. Maybe by looking out into deep space, we'll discover some new method for easily detecting life which we can then apply to Mars. That is unlikely, but still, science is about exploring, not just throwing down the hat at something silly like a problem that we can't quite answer yet.
Whomever said that hopefully isn't a scientist and/or working on this project.
-Jesse
Nothing says "unprofessional job" like wrinkles in your duct tape.
It's small. Most every planet discovered so far has been an object with very large mass - enough to perturb the host star. Gravitational lensing allowed these scientists to detect a planet with much smaller mass. The cool thing is that these astronomers are finding new ways with current land-based technology to image distant small planets around stars. With these advances, some day we may well find a planet giving off a telltale spectroscopic oxygen signature - a real indicator of life. So, baby steps first I guess.
it must be "mostly harmless"
Come on, read a few posts on Slashdot on Intelligent Design and you will know that there is no chance involved here. Absense or precense of life is by design and only those not graced by Kansas education falsly believes otherwise.
...Proxima Centauri is our neighbour and humans only recently diverged from the other apes. Earth-like is really just a literal translation of the Latin elements of the technically correct word which is "terrestrial".
-- SIGFPE
This style of reporting is beyond annoying. I'd much rather have this story presented like it is "Using the microlensing technique first predicted by Albert Einstein in 1912, a team of astronomers have discovered a rocky planet about 5 times the mass of the earth some 25,000 light years away. It orbits a red dwarf....." Personally I was more intriqued by Albert Einsteins' involvement than the idiotic claims of the planet being "Earth-like" but.....not.
www.brownsauce.org
Since I am related to the guy interviewed for the ESO Press Release I feel obliged to link to it.
0 3-06.html
:)
http://www.eso.org/outreach/press-rel/pr-2006/pr-
I have not read the BBC article. But this is the official PR document. It's nice having relatives in the field. I had this news days ago.
----------------- Oink. Moo. rarr! -----------------
Well, if you mean life, as in Jessica Alba, you're correct.
But that's a tad provincial, limited, humdrum, some might say. We know very little about chemistry at 50 degrees Kelvin. Maybe there are some chemical reactions that don't go at all at our room temperature, but run just fine at 50K.
Might be a tad slow, but who says life has to run at our speed?
" . . .has a surface temperature estimated at -220 C which means . . . the chance of finding life on this planet is essentially zero."
Obviously these researchers have never met my ex-wife.
What?
"surface temperature estimated at -220 C ... so the chance of finding life on this planet is essentially zero"
I am sure the little green men on that planet are saying the same thing about our 32 C planet. "There is no way anything could live on a planet above -100 C."
Is there a non-chronological context for the word "ancient?"
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
Uh, melting point varies with pressure and a couple other factors that depend on your PVT model. You can melt pretty much any material if you set the conditions correctly, regardless of wether the decomposition temperature is below the MP at 1 atm or not. The liquid phase may not be very accessible, but it's always there.
Also, you need a better example, since Sucrose (the molecule people mean when they say 'sugar' without a qualifier) has a MP of 191 degrees centigrade at 1 atm, i.e. it has a viable liquid phase pre-decomposition. Perhaps you're thinking of Glucose or Ribose?
You could make an argument that 'frozen liquid' would refer to an amorphous (non-crystalline/glassy) structured solid only, as these result from a skipping of the phase formation bit of solidification to just lock the structure of the liquid into solid form. However, I think it's more likely that the writers of the article just skipped the materials phase of their education, locking the structure of their brains into a void-filled physics-oriented glass. Or they just, you know, made the intellectual equivalent of a typo. Whichever.
...it's really a sad day for America when we require a goddamn ACT OF CONGRESS to make our DVD players work properly. ~
I can't believe most everyone here is up in arms because the term "earthlike" was used. That basically refers to mass, and is technically correct in it's field. Remember, astronomers refer to anything above helium as "metals." But it leads so many to say "Nothing to see here, there's no giant trees or sea monsters on that planet." How jaded do you have to be to have ridiculous expectations like that?
That astronomers can detect that planet at all is a phenomenal acheivement. Before this, the only extrasolar planets that could be detected had large masses in close orbits, a rather extreme situation. But here's something quite outside that class. So its parameters aren't inside the "habitable zone." It's the first discovery of its kind. The attitude I'm seeing here is like someone claiming poker is no fun because they haven't been dealt a royal flush on their first hand. It's the process, more than this particular result, that should inspire amazement.
And it was seen at 20,000 light years away. That really, really far, a galactic distance! That means there are a lot of stars potentially obnservable using this technique. Even if the alignment is relatively rare, with billions of stars to try, perhaps sooner or later one or two will prove themselves to be more interesting to this unreasonably demanding crowd. But then I'm sure the discovery will be discounted if the alien civilization hasn't developed Linux.
In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.
Imagine finding a huge ball of Mercury in space - that would be cool.
Despite all these posts from people bitching about how this planet isn't exactly the same as our own, it's the closed we've found so far, and is much more Earth-like than the rest. It is not a huge, hot gas giant like most of the other extrasolar planets discovered. It has a solid rocky surface, and is relatively small.
If they can detect planets like this now (especially at 25,000 light years! wow), it is only a matter of time before a planet that is truly Earth-like is discovered.
sudo eat my shorts
Anyone should know that each planet takes only one year to orbit it's star. It may take more or less earth years. But that's beside the point.
Man is the lowest-cost, 150-pound, nonlinear, all-purpose computer system which can be mass-produced by unskilled labor.
It takes ten years for the planet to orbit its parent star, a common-or-garden red dwarf that lies about 28,000 light years from Earth, close to the centre of our Galaxy. P.S. I submitted this news today at 4 a.m. : 2006-01-25 04:10:30 Discovery of the smallest yet Earth-like planet (Science,Space) (rejected)
sensors indicate a Class-M planet, with breathable air and humanoid lifeforms that speak English, having some kind of problem that can be solved in the next 45 minutes.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Back in about 1995, I was in Auckland finishing up my Princeton PhD, and travelled to the MOA telescope (a pre-existing .6m telescope) when they were setting up their new camera. I installed Linux on about 3 desktop computers in the dome. They had a rack-mounted Sun machine controlling the camera, and there was a pre-existing DOS computer which controlled telescope pointing.
A few points of interest/weirdnessess
MOA is a collaboration with Japanese, so all the Linux installs included Japanese language support, including Japanese xterm windows.
Communication between the Linux boxen and the DOS box was purely by creating/deleting files on a shared drive. E.g. the Linux box would put a file on the drive saying where to point, and then would busy-wait looking at the file until it disappeared, at which point it knew the telescope was now tracking the required location.
The camera would do 30 second exposures. The Sun box ran a little script to do an exposure, which would send commands to open the shutter, wait, close the shutter, and read the data. The exposure timing was done with a "sleep 30" command! I was *not* happy with that, but didn't convince people to change it.
Since then, they have built their own new 1.8m telescope, and likely replaced the camera, so the above information is out of date. I haven't had any involvement in the project other than that one trip.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
he was referring to Microsoft employees.
Not exactly
This is a really neat demonstration of the power of microlensing for planet finding. Though it's not the first, nor even the second, planet to be found this way (see for example http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/astro-ph/0505451 and http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/astro-ph/0505451), it really does show how microlensing can find small planets pretty far away from their host stars. It'll be a very good technique for determining the frequency of planets as small as the Earth. As for finding life on the microlensing discovered planets (using the future Terrestrial Planet Finder mission [http://planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov/TPF/tpf_index.cfm ] for example to search for biosignatures in their spectra), it'll be very difficult. The majority of these planets are going to be very far away from us (where there is the highest probability of finding a lens) and, by selection, they're going to have a second bright star very close by on the sky that will be difficult to coronagraph out. The microlensing planets are really all going to be one-shot deals where you have no hope of following them up in the foreseeable future. I think planets found by transits (the upcoming Kepler mission [http://kepler.nasa.gov/]) or by astrometry (the upcoming Space Interferometry Mission [http://sim.jpl.nasa.gov/]) will be much better bets for searching for life.
Handwave all you want, but the laws of physics and chemistry say that life is not possible in liquid lead or liquid methane.
There is really no evidence either for- or against it. The objective standpoint is that we just don't know. It may be scary to have nothing to hold on to, but we should grow more comfortable with it since it will benefit us in the longer run. The wise man knows he don't know.
There are indications that with our present knowledge, we can't model life to fit those conditions, but we also know scientists have been surprised before, to find life in the most harsh conditions on earth. However, we have nothing to conclude with. Since history has shown science to be wrong on all accounts, it's not likely to be all right now either. In all of science there is always room for progress of understanding and developing from our current crude models in all areas of science.
Likely, our very fundamental models will have to change, and this will broaden understanding even more. Just like the relativity model and quantuum mechanics have revolutionized hi-tech science and manufacturing in the last decades.
As everything else argued over, it depends of your definition of life. Are viruses life, or just self-replicating molecules?
The "laws of physics" are not some laws constraining our universe, it's a model used by humans as an attempt to understand what's going on. To use it to litterally mean "laws", then dogma is created. This will only serve to hinder our progress of knowledge and discovery since it is constraining our consciousness.
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/