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NASA's New Telescope Finds Exoplanet Atmosphere
celticryan writes "NASA's new telescope has made a promising discovery. 'As NASA's first exoplanets mission, Kepler has made a dramatic entrance on the planet-hunting scene,' said Jon Morse, director of the Science Mission Directorate's Astrophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington. 'Detecting this planet's atmosphere in just the first 10 days of data is only a taste of things to come. The planet hunt is on!'"
The public's attention for exoplanets is already waning.
One day I expect Kepler to discover an Earth-like planet with an Earth-like atmosphere and the public won't even care. Getting funding to image the surface of that planet will be an uphill battle and even if the returned images show undoubted proof of intelligent life, people still won't care.
Can you imagine that?
How we know is more important than what we know.
There've been numerous measurements of this planet before. It was chosen because it's relatively well-studied for an exoplanet, so it was good to test the precision and accuracy of the sensors.
Just because you don't like the truth, does not make it false.
Shhhh, we're hunting pwanets, not wabbits.
no, wrong telescope, wrong story, wrong mission.
If you get a chance to look at TFA, you'll see a comparison between the light curve as captured by ground based observatories and by Kepler. Makes a pretty compelling statement for doing observations in space, no noise! (Actually there is noise but you have to really zoom into the data like they do on the Kepler web site).
Anyway, I've been following the Kepler program on their web site and have read of a couple of "reboots" where they had to put the spacecraft into safe mode. Anyone know if they've found/fixed the problem? It's not good to have a program specifically designed for 3+ years of non-stop continuous observation to have intermittent gaps in its observations!
It's amazing to think that within a few years we should know if there are plentiful earth sized planets in the "habitable zones" around stars! Extrapolating from today's news release, maybe we'll even know if they have atmospheres! (Does anyone know how much more difficult it would be to "see" an atmosphere around an earth sized planet as opposed to a "hot jupiter"?).
Science proceeds one step at a time. When in 10 years we are able measure the composition, make sure you come up with something else you would like to know, and remember to make a sarcastic comment about it.
Anyway, I've been following the Kepler program on their web site and have read of a couple of "reboots" where they had to put the spacecraft into safe mode. Anyone know if they've found/fixed the problem? It's not good to have a program specifically designed for 3+ years of non-stop continuous observation to have intermittent gaps in its observations!
NASA should have unticked the "apply updates automatically" those service packs are a killer.
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
With a day side temperature of more than 4300 degrees, I'm trying to think of what on the planet would not actually be flat out molten or even vaporized.
This is my sig.
Real hunters don't capture animals in just in photos. If we are amazingly lucky and find a planet mostly like earth in, say, 10 light years from here, current technology, economy, politics, human rights and so on will make them impossible to reach in the time of our lives (and probably next few generations, but only if we put our mind on that). Odds that have intelligence and an advanced enough technology just lower the chances, and increase a lot the average distance, so the time for a phone call.
In the other hand, knowing that will increase our understanding on how universe works, and that could well have applications here, if we want a result in the next (few?) years.
classifies this planet as a "hot Jupiter." It is so close to its star, the planet is as hot as the glowing red heating element on a kitchen stove
Basically it is super big, super hot gas giant continually roasted by the nearby star. Speculating about the composition of its atmosphere or possible biosphere are therefore dashed.
Class Y, or demon class.
The game.
Safe mode is safe.
From an operational standpoint you want to have lots of things which trigger safe mode. I don't think you should treat going to safe mode as a bad thing.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
not telling
but i wonder if anyone has made a study of this:
fruitful pressure/ temperature triple points to look for
for example, earth is the right temperature/ pressure for water to be a gas/ solid/ liquid all over
this allows for complex thermodynamic interflow and mixing and dynamicism, which can lead to life
additionally, water is polar, so unlike methane, for example, chemical interactions can be even more complex
additionally, water is a very common chemical in the universe
so what i'm getting at: other fruitful triple points out there of common, polar chemicals for us to look for?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_point
for example one that comes to mind: ammonia. common, polar
but not carbon dioxide (not polar, so no complex chemistry probably)
and howabout something very exotic and improbable but imagination grabbing: say a possible life-evolving chemistry on a planet based on the complex interplay of liquid/ solid/ gaseous heavy metals
what i'm getting at: we should classify these triple points, based on elemental abundance/ observed concentrating trends in certain plantary belts, and look for these triple points specifically, to maximize our ability to find life
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
This reminds me of the first time I went fossil hunting. I found a trilobite by accident. I haven't found one since. This planet is a fluke until consistent results can be established. I wish them the best of luck.
Lots of exoplanets have been found.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Yep, slashdot already featured coverage of the planet in question, although I guess discovering an atmosphere around it is new information..
Well It is a good thing that planet hunters are better at finding things than you, seeing as they have found 358 extrasolar planets. From what I hear, it is much harder to observe the wobble of a star's red shift or see the wink of a star as a planet travels between us and it, than it is to break open a rock in a known trilobite bed.
Source http://exoplanet.eu/catalog.php
Math is like sex. People who get it are popular in class, people who don't are not.
That is one of the most ridiculous statements I have ever heard. It's a completely invalid comparison. The planet was already known to have a transiting exoplanet so it's not like it was dumb luck. As someone pointed out this verifies that everything on the spacecraft is working properly. To date, lots of transiting exoplanets have been found and it's not luck, it's statistics that tell us there will be more.
I have to apologize. After reading the "smelloscope" tag under the summary, I could not help but hear the voice of Professor Farnsworth in my head while reading your post. For some reason, I can't read your post any other way now. I'm sure your post is well thought-out, and indeed informative, but I just can't take it seriously with that voice!
You might be right that this planet is a fluke, but I see absolutely no reason to imagine it is. A fluke is not just the first in a series but something unexpected or unlikely, and this is absolutely neither. Care to elaborate on your pessimism, or are you just trolling?
They tell us "we've detected the atmosphere" but don't tell us what the atmosphere is made of. Nice.
This being slashdot, the authors assumed you would come to your own determination that the atmosphere was in fact some sort of gas and didn't feel the need to elaborate.
run CancelWiseassMode($me)
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
That's ok. I'm reading your post as Leela.
no text.
usually means the entirety of the post is in the subject line, or sometimes used lazily as a 'me too!' post in reply to a request etc.
...intermittent gaps in its observations!
That's the CIA covering up the aliens looking back at us.
Who leaves Atlantis off the maps?
Who keeps the Martians under wraps?
We do! We do!
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
No need, there's a giant three-fingered robotic arm on board.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Read here about the Reboot issue:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17565-kepler-spacecraft-sees-its-first-exoplanets.html
Quoting:
The prime suspects are energetic charged particles known as cosmic rays. Earth's atmosphere shields us from these particles' potentially dangerous effects, but they bombard spacecraft at a rate of thousands per second.
If a cosmic ray hits a vulnerable spot in Kepler's electronics, it could cause a voltage spike that mimics a request from ground controllers to reboot the spacecraft's computer. "It could be that the computer is just chugging along doing everything fine, and then a cosmic ray comes sailing through," Fanson says. "All of a sudden it thinks it's been asked to reset, so it resets."
Alternatively, cosmic rays could toggle chips in the computer's memory, making it misinterpret instructions. The reboots could also be caused by a bug in the software, or half a dozen other things, Fanson says. "There are many, many things you have to look at that could be causing it. These systems are very complex," he says.
The mission has a number of safe mode days per year budgeted. It's hard to keep everything running when cosmic rays are raining down on your computer.
We live in amazing times. I cant imagine what we will be able to do in 100-200 years time. I hope we start to come together as a species and explore this amazing galaxy.
Guess what: other researchers have independently verified the existence of trilobites! You can rest easy now. Your declaration of success is eagerly awaited by all NASA engineers.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Hey Baby.. I guess that your not from around here?
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them.
... whether there's any life on it. Not intelligent, but any kind.
Sure, but you can't blame the public too much for getting bored. I mean did you jump up with excitement with today's slashdot story about Sony's portable reader (truely would have been a wonder 30 years ago -- lines around the block) or were you like -- whatever... Science fiction is to blamed for making the future seem all spandex sexy and immediate and the bummer is that the laws of physics make the stars very far away. The first "Life" world will be a blip of oxygen where it's not supposed to be and maybe a funny pigment wavelength that can't be modeled. Then it will be time to send the probe at 0.1 c to go check it out -- now let's wait a hundred years to get close ups of that microbial ocean -- see how much we get bored doing that. I am hard at work myself creating a secret society where patient machines will do all the dog work...don't tell anyone. ---537
I love the artist-rendered picture that accompanies the article. Anyone find the picture in a larger size?
Wealth would be better spent either helping humans on Earth or, if we must have a space program, finding ways to get people out there. No point in knowing something is there if we can't get to it.
This reminds me of the first time I went fossil hunting. I found a trilobite by accident.
If you go out fossil hunting and actually find a fossil, that's not an accident. Because you were deliberately looking for it, you see?
If you'd gone out shopping and found a fossil, that would be classified as an accident. I do hope this helps to clarify the situation.
Thanks AC, didn't know that! Makes me feel a bit better.
I often wonder not if, but when we'll make first contact. Watching Discovery channel a lot, I undertand we are discovering things in space at a faster rate than ever. Most of what we know about space we've learned in the last 40 years.
While we're all thankful for the awe-inspiring images that the Hubble Space Telescope produces, I think in some regards these kinds of plots are just as cool. With these data points we can say more about this planet than the HST ever could. Neil deGrasse Tyson described this in a clever way:
And I simply say that gravity is as much a signature of something's existence as a direct photograph of it, we have many ways we can measure something is there. Just as you do if you live in a cabin in the woods, you come to learn what a bear footprint looks like very quickly, and if you see such a footprint outside one morning, you'll start looking for the bear that was once there. You're not going to say, "oh, I didn't see the bear, therefore it couldn't have existed."
That's how astronomy works. You're looking for bear prints in the vast space of the universe.
so the chemistry there couldn't get very complex
so its most probably dead
now the triple point of ammonia on the other hand...
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Is Kepler in some sort of particularly vulnerable orbit?
Granted the electronics in Kepler are probably more sophisticated than many spaceborne systems, but I'd imagine the protections would have been planned to match.
I mean, we've been shielding spacecraft from Cosmic Rays for a LONG time, why would this suddenly be an issue? I don't hear of similar reboots in anything from Apollo to Cassini.
-Styopa
Yes, Kepler is in an unusual orbit. It's not orbiting Earth, it's orbiting the Sun, although it's designed to stay close to the Earth over its mission lifetime. But it is only receiving partial protection by the Earth's magnetosphere. It's possible that it will be more vulnerable to single event upsets (SEUs) as time goes on.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
Already one after ten days... Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!
fuck you faggot (yeah i fed the troll, sue me)
I just assumed he read this part of the article:
Although this is already the highest precision ever obtained for an observation of this star, Kepler will be even more precise after analysis software being developed for the mission is completed.
And interpreted it to mean that they'd "know" what the atmosphere was composed of once they finished writing the software that would "interpret" the data.
But still, the article didn't talk about composition such as 80% nitrogen or anything. Granted, they might be able to determine that based on the signatures they can now graph, but it is a little misleading. Still cool tech, but misleading title.
Kif, this poster has a strangely alluring voice - have the boy lay out my formal shorts...
Could be worse. You could read it as Zapp Brannigan.
(Does anyone know how much more difficult it would be to "see" an atmosphere around an earth sized planet as opposed to a "hot jupiter"?).
It's relatively easy to see the atmosphere of any planet. As they say in TFA, Earth-like planets should only be 1.5 times more difficult to see that gas giants.
Kepler looks at spectra from the stars to see the drop in light associated with a planetary transit in front of the star. When the planet is in front of the star, you can see all manner of absorption lines in the spectra from elements in the planet's atmosphere. The big one you look for is water, and then you march down the common hydrocarbons and organics trees.
Provided you catch the needle in the haystack of finding an Earth-like planet transiting its star at the exact moment you're looking at it, then the atmospheric detection and characterization is easy from there. Detecting a signature of life, especially a heavily polluting culture like ours, is also easy.
What the fuck kind of operations do you run? Don't let me near them, please, they might kill me.
Safe mode is bad. It means something fucked up. That it fails safe is obviously good engineering, but that it fails in the first place is a very bad thing.
If your design is constantly tripping safe mode, then it's a shitty ass design and you probably fucked up the fail safe too, and anything critical in/near your system is bound to suffer irreparable damage eventually.
I seriously hope you don't run a gas plant or something. Unless you have really good people working for you, you will probably kill someone some day. Even good people may not be able to stop your dumb ass and your idiotic idea of what a fail safe exists for.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller