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Looking For Earth-Like Exoplanets
Discover Magazine is running a story detailing the search for planets like Earth orbiting other stars. While we've been able to locate a few "super earths" so far, none of them really compare in size or the potential for habitability with our own world. Fortunately, advances in data analysis and new space-based telescopes — such as Kepler, the James Webb Space Telescope, and the already-launched CoRoT (PDF) — have some astronomers predicting we'll find such an exoplanet by 2010, and a habitable one by 2012. Earth-based telescopes are also in the hunt, though the article notes, "even if a habitable Earth-like world is found first from the ground, it will most likely take a space observatory to search for the chemical signals that tell us what we really want to know: Is anything living out there? If the planet is one that can be observed transiting, it just might be possible to provide a hint of an answer in the next few years."
I for one, will welcome our new earth-like alien overlords.
You mean Amarantin? They already have (had) spaceflight capabilities. Unfortunately for them they activated the Wolf Device near the neutron star close to their homeworld and got their civilization destroyed...
Heh, thought about the same thing when reading GP's post :)
Alastair Reynolds FTW!
Obsessed with the fact we haven't observed something we can't yet detect... This must be some sort of mis-post.
To travel to such a planet will take a ship of multiple generations. We haven't even remotely touched the Oort cloud with the 30 years (quite fast) traveling Voyager 1. ... take your time. People just don't grasp how far this really is.
So
...we've discovered the planet Krypton?
From what I understand from all the latest the tech news on /., we are going to have a super-awesome sci-fi future world in 2012.
Who said that the planets have to be Earth-like to find life on them? I would rather find life on a planet that would have a hard time breathing in out atmosphere than one that could take it over for their parking garage.
You mean Amarantin?
You mean American?
If you quote this signature there'll be 72 copies of Windows ME waiting for you in Heaven.
Increase the rotational speed of the planet so much that the centripetal force counteracts gravity. Then, with giant nets, catch the oil as it floats up from the surface. Then, pump it through a hose and squirt it back to a giant funnel sitting outside earth. I mean, our only other alternative is NON-fossil based fuels, and that's just CRAZY!
Commodore64_love: I don't comprehend people who're so frightened of death that they'll bankrupt themselves to stay alive
If we observe a random star sustem which seems like it could have earthlike planets, it seems to me that observing a transition is unlikely.
Suppose that earth was the only planet revolving around the sun; the chance of observing a transition from some large distance is approximately:
(diameter of sun / diameter of earth) 109
(2 au / diameter of earth) 73686 earth diameters.
The chance of the orbit being oriented correctly seems to be 0.00147986287.
I suppose you could increase the chances by choosing larger stars, but it is still a very long shot. From reading TA it seems that they are indeed hunting for "eclipses" from a planet passing directly in from of it's star, causing dips in a star's luminosity.
Which of my assumptions are wrong? :)
Are you a grammar Nazi? I'm trying to improve my English; please correct my errors!
It will be nice when we find an oxygen planet but still we will only know it as a small blue dot I expect. Anybody have ideas for what kind of telescope could actually take detailed pictures - perhaps enough to even see cities - of exoplanets?
Say 50 light years. I wonder is it possible to run an interferometer across spacecraft far apart in the solar system? The separation is I suppose a matter of trigonometry and optics. Then the question of what do we need to do it and when?
Just in time for the end of the world. Now all we have to do is invent reversible cryostasis, terraforming, and a starship that could support a significant enough portion of the human population to allow for a decent level of diversity in reproduction and carry enough supplies to sustain them, and Holly, our ship's AI with an IQ of 6,000. Not that there'll be any money anywhere in the world by then...
I know that we are always looking for a "Earthlike" planet and hope that it "supports" life like ours, but it is time to question the laws of physics, math, and overall science truthfully.
I always want to comment on these stories, but feel that my ideas would be ridiculed, but I don't care today. What "we" know as "life" could be supported by an entirely different form of environment than we are.
If the laws of Biology are any indication that organisms can adapt to their environments, then who says that life can't start in a pool of methane? Perhaps a pool of liquid nitrogen? There maybe individuals that are supported entirely by no direct sunlight and pressure 100 times greater than our own.
Fact is we don't know if oxygen is dangerous to some other form of life, that we have yet to come into contact with.
Personally I don't ascribe that water supports every form of life out there. It isn't plausible that water exists every were (or hell anywere else, but earth, I don't buy ice on mars having water it could be so many other things other than H2O) in the universe.
Until we finally develop the technology to actually go to another world, we will never know what actually sustains other forms of life. Math and Science can't fully explain everything all the time, theories are consistantly tested and broken, math equations thrown out.
Yes, I know that implies I read TFA. But it was pretty good, I thought it concisely explained that they'll be using transits to look for these exo-planets then hopefully use the Webb space telescope to get an idea of the planet's atmosphere by looking at the spectrum in the infra-red. (That's where Webb is designed to be most sensitive and that's where the star "only" outshines any orbiting earth-like planet by say 10,000:1).
My question is: So does that mean that transit detection has won out over looking for the doppler effect? I thought that there was some advance in making super stable laser "frequency combs" that allowed tiny amounts of stellar radial velocities (like centimeters/sec) to be detected not just the meters/sec that they can do now. This would allow earth-mass objects in earth-like orbits to be detected through stellar "wobbles".
It seems that the doppler detection method would have at least one major advantage, since you don't have to "stare" at the star for months/years on end the telescope doesn't have to be in (deep) space. That implies a really BIG telescope on earth could be used and could visit many targets per night. (On the other hand, having Kepler look at hundreds of thousands of targets simultaneously is pretty darn efficient, Also,observation of transits is not distance dependent). Anyway, maybe it'll be a good way to confirm detection; nothing better than two separate observations using completely different methods, instruments and technology.
You know of course that IF they find a whole bunch of earthlike planets with oxygenated atmospheres they'll be a real desire to try to get better images. Maybe this would be a good use for a REALLY BIG liquid mirror telescope on the far side of the moon! I'm wondering where would it have to be placed in order to cover the same region of the sky as Kepler? I'm wondering if such a telescope could detect any indications of a technological civilization, like fluorocarbons or radionucleotides. How about really big structures (like the great wall of china ;). Also I'm sure that S.E.T.I. will follow up on the list of "earthlike planets" with a targeted radio astronomy listening program. I'm wondering if a dish like Arecibo could detect regular broadcasts or radar that weren't specifically aimed at us over the distances these surveys will be taking place (10K parsecs?). Anyway, exciting things!
The subject kind of says it all. Any planets we find are likely to be as hospitable as mars, not oxygen rich atmospheres that we could just land on and start living. Not that it won't be cool, but mars-like seems more accurate.
..but we need to be like an insect with thousands of eyes, spaced far enough apart. These should be far enough from earth to be able to use interferometry or even triangulation to add data and knowledge about a particular object. It is only with such a system of such sensitivity, precision, and accuracy that we will have the confidence needed to send probes and manned craft beyond this solar system.
No, he means Amarantin, and anyway, ultimately it's the Greenfly that we have to worry about ;/
You know all of those movies about aliens from outer space that come to inhabit earth because they have burned out the resources on their own planets?
Yeah, well, we're the aliens.
I'm sure we'll feel justified in displacing whatever inferior species we find out there.
Well, it seems to me that it's just a matter of perspective. We don't really see absolute values, we see deltas, and the baseline is the present.
Think of, say, dollars. Just saying "in year X you'll earn Y dollars a month" is only saying anything as a comparison. Whether it's in absolute dollar values, or "how much can I buy with it", the comparison only says much compared to your current lot in life. A 1960 standard of living would be luxury for someone from 1912 (think even just having antibiotics for a change), but would be a step back for you from 2008.
Or think of CPU MHz / Gigaflops / Gigabytes / whatever computer metric. "You'll have a computer with a 4 MHz CPU and 48 kilobytes RAM and a CRT" would have sounded like an awesome supercomputer in 1960 (they eventually landed on the moon with a weaker computer than that!) Have it in your home, all yours? Man, that would have sounded so unbelievably cool. Just think of what you'd do with all that raw computer power. But few people would even consider it a usable computer nowadays in 2008.
And I will postulate a _hypothesis_ that there must be a psychological "X times better than today" threshold, which drives those predictions. I don't know what that X might be. But there's a point where the "meh, who cares" factor of, say, predicting something 10% better next month, starts being the "that's awesome" of, say, predicting something 10 times better in 5 years.
E.g., think back when Moore's Law still worked that way, and you had, say, a 100 MHz Pentium. Predicting that you'll have 133 MHz in a few months, is uninteresting. Predicting you'll have a whole 1 GHz of CPU power in 5 years, now that would have gotten your attention.
So depending on which curve you are, and assuming it looks like infinite exponential growth ahead, the future (worth predicting) will always be Y years ahead. As in, "in Y years it'll be X times better than today." If you have the same X you aim for, the future will always be Y years ahead.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
...You know of course that IF they find a whole bunch of earthlike planets...
That is a big IF. Over half of all known stars can never have an earth-like planet for the simple reason that half of all stars are too close to each other. To have a planet with a temperature range suitable for life, its orbit has to be very regular. Another star too close prevents such stable orbits. Other parameters such as the right elements in the proper proportions must also be right, as must be the rotation rate and gravity. The likelihood of all that coming together by sheer chance is exceedingly remote.
All theory is gray
Life can be based off of any atom with a valence higher than 2.
References, please. Silicon, valence 4, same as Carbon is a natural possibility, but I've never read anything seriously suggesting another base element.
It's easy and there are many out there availible. Just look for the green trail following the orbit of a planet. Red and blue trails are much harder to live on, though still possible.
Why would they stop using one technique when a different technique is developed which attacks a different question from a different perspective with different constraints to the original technique?
More techniques will be developed for detecting and studying planets in orbit around other stars. But the current techniques will continue to be used until there is nothing more that can be wrung out of them. Which is not in the near future.
For a start, there's not a lot of high quality telescopes in the southern hemisphere, so that's a significant chunk of sky which is under-represented in surveys.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"