Finding Twin Earths Is Harder Than We Thought

Matt_dk writes "Does a twin Earth exist somewhere in our galaxy? Astronomers are getting closer and closer to finding an Earth-sized planet in an Earth-like orbit. NASA's Kepler spacecraft just launched to find such worlds. Once the search succeeds, the next questions driving research will be: Is that planet habitable? Does it have an Earth-like atmosphere? Answering those questions will not be easy. 'We'll have to be really lucky to decipher an Earth-like planet's atmosphere during a transit event so that we can tell it is Earth-like,' said Kaltenegger. 'We will need to add up many transits to do so — hundreds of them, even for stars as close as 20 light-years away.'" The abstract of their paper offers a link to the complete paper as a 17-page PDF; here is a short description from 2007 of the same researchers' work, outlining the type of spectral signature that an Earth-like atmosphere would be expected to show.

Comments

worthwhile spending.

[timmarhy]

hopfully we spend more money on such scientific endevours from now on rather than blowing up the middle east or trying to convert the unwilling to democracy.

it's ironic but i really think oil wasn't the reason for invading iraq - it would have been cheaper to just BUY their oil.

The smallest has just 3 times Earth's mass!

[G3ckoG33k]

The smallest, MOA-2007-BLG-192L, has just 3.3 times Earth's mass!

That is good new for us twinks! I don't have the muscle mass to suddenly weigh 260 kg. My 78 kg combined with my height makes me a twink)

It may take two or three generations to get used to that, i.e. you need to have been born by a mother who herself had been born there. My underlying idea is how one's body growth increases if you are born by a well fed mother. This is readily exemplified in western Europe with the introduction of the potato. The average height increased by more than 100 mm in 150 years.

That is not an example of evolution, however. It just shows how important nutrition is.

Re:In effect, what they are saying, is

[MrKaos]

I don't know if this is valid but, what about 10 devices doing the same job?

Huh? Why is modded a troll?

Re:NASA needs to latch onto this.

[Ralph Spoilsport]

Finding a "twin" earth, no matter the distance (assuming if we can see it, we can get to it at some point in the future) is possible _the_ most important thing for the continuation of the human race.

No it isn't. Humans are built for here. We are an evolving species and once the oil is gone and the metals we've dug up oxidise and wash into the oceans, we'll be right back to our neolithic lifestyle - you know - the one that worked for hundreds of thousands of years.

Industrialism will disappear and we we relocalise and eventually evolve into something else. If we prize certain features, such as intelligence and co-operation, to deal with changes in our environment, we might become a "better" species. If we prize violence and competition, then we will become something else. Likely, it will be a bit of both.

The stars will still be there, but they are not for us.

Wrong planet.

RS