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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!'"
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.
I am not in any way affiliated with this or any other planet finding project, so I am "the public," and I certainly will care. I hope this happens in my lifetime. Imaging the surface of an exoplanet may be more of a challenge than finding an interesting one, given the distance. But I suppose you think no one anywhere cares about anything, the future will be worse than the past, and our society is heading downhill at even ever-increasing speed. People have thought that for thousands of years and we still get by, so I'm not worried. Bring on tomorrow.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
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.
Sadly, I think you're right.
NASA will have to pay money to Big Media for a spot on a reality show. Two morbidly obese women will be mud wrestling... the camera pulls back and Paris Hilton is now in the foreground saying "Life on other planets is hot! Drink Red Bull!"
.
Trolling is a art,
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.
The public's attention for exoplanets is already waning.
The public don't know what exoplanets are. They aren't interested in them at all.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
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!
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.
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.
No, I really can't imagine that.
Imagine the headline "Life Discovered on Earth-like Planet 25 light years away". Your typical newspaper-reading/internet-news-scouring/cable-news-watching connected person will know of it immediately. They may not understand the details, they may not have followed the whole saga, but they'll know and they'll find it interesting, because its clear-cut, easy to understand, and impressive.
After that, the last connected folks will hear about it through discussion. "So did you hear about that planet they found with life?" makes a much better conversation than "So what about this weather?", yet is something you might say to someone in the elevator.
Think of how much the general public cared about the non-issue of re-classifying Pluto. Discovery of extra-terrestrial life is much more important and just as easy to understand, and is such a leap beyond our current knowledge. That's not say that it would be the existential, world-changing discovery that I believe proof of intelligent life would be, but people would care.
That would be the New Worlds telescope.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Worlds_Mission
He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
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.
Sorry, people are stupid the world over. We certainly don't have a monopoly on populations largely comprised of morons.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
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.
In fact, science is cheap, comparing to the lumps of money we waste on:
fuck you faggot (yeah i fed the troll, sue me)
Galileo's scientific discoveries broke medieval Europe free of the shackles of Church doctrine, and over the next hundred years did more to improve the lives of the average European than any redistribution of the Church's tremendous wealth could have done. Not that the Church was going to actually do anything to materially benefit the population: that wealth was after all a necessary part of the greater glory of God. Oh, and also this: every pious person would get their reward in Heaven. You simply had to head out toward Polaris and take the first right after Saturn, then look for the Big Gate. You can't miss it.
The Kepler findings may be of the same sort. Any proof that life has arisen off Earth will have a major impact on fundamentalist belief systems. This would shift all kinds of intractable political arguments based on religious differences to new ground.
The question is not whether we can afford to do science in place of doing more of the same as what we have always done. The question is how can we afford to do more science in ways that will tell us more about our actual place in Reality, and thus lead us increasingly toward the benefits of an ever renewing Age of Reason.
Not that Reason is the be-all and end-all: there is a truth in beauty that has nothing to do with reason. And imagination and creativity are important, but irrational. But at the moment there does appear to be a deficit of reason in mankind's affairs.
Will