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First Rocky Exoplanet Confirmed
Matt_dk writes "The confirmation of the nature of CoRoT-7b as the first rocky planet outside our Solar System marks a significant step forward in the search for Earth-like exoplanets. The detection by CoRoT and follow-up radial velocity measurements with HARPS suggest that this exoplanet has a density similar to that of Mercury, Venus, Mars and Earth, making it only the fifth known terrestrial planet in the Universe. The search for a habitable exoplanet is one of the holy grails in astronomy. One of the first steps towards this goal is the detection of terrestrial planets around solar-type stars. Dedicated programs, using telescopes in space and on ground, have yielded evidence for hundreds of planets outside of our Solar System. The majority of these are giant, gaseous planets, but in recent years small, almost Earth-mass planets have been detected, demonstrating that the discovery of Earth analogues — exoplanets with one Earth mass or one Earth radius orbiting a solar-type star at a distance of about 1 astronomical unit — is within reach."
I appreciate the Rocky movies and all, but there's no way I would live on a whole planet dedicated to them. I'm fine here on Earth, thank you very much.
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By the time we actually got to one of these planets, would it still be able to sustain life? Should we be looking for planets that are in their early, less habitable stages?
Buckle your ROFL belt, we're in for some LOLs.
Looks like this little guy is only 0.002 AU away from it's parent star. I wouldn't expect to find any life there, but still, this is an amazing discovery. As these methods get fine tuned it's only a matter of time before we start finding planets roughly Earth-like not only in form, but also in relation to the habitable zone around their star. I don't think we'll ever get a probe, much less a person, to any of them within my lifetime, but at least we'll have an interesting list of spots to visit when we do reach that capability :).
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
You seem to be neglecting the fact that this - "let's image the surface! yeah! [...]" - is an entire area of science: astronomy.
It's not only the (seemingly pointless, as your post insinuates) search for celestial bodies beyond our own planet's atmosphere, but through this search we learn more about our own planet's origins and those of our local solar system, as well as our general role in the cosmos and what we can expect in the years and millennia to come.
"I'd just like to emphasise that taking a million years isn't a metaphor here..." -Rich Bradshaw
Smallest maybe, and the first to have a confirmed radius value, but hardly the first rocky exoplanet discovered. PSR 1257+12 wins by about 18 years.
Here's a scientific paper describing how the period/mass/size/etc of the planet was deduced from observation data: http://arxiv.org/abs/0908.0241
According to the paper, this planet's orbital semimajor axis (or in plain English, the "average" distance from the planet to the sun) is about 0.0172 astronomical units. Since its sun's temperature is roughly at the level of our Sun (also in the paper), it means the planet is probably a hell much hotter than the Earth...
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
Joking aside, if we found an exoplanet, with earthlike environment that would be completely amazing and would have interesting philosophical implications. If we found such a planet with life on it, that has profound implications. If we found a planet with roads and a city - civilisation, that has truly astonishing implications for our entire culture. Now, if it turned out that we were imaging ourselves... that's still a neat result and we'd learn a hell of a lot about how space-time works for that to happen. None of this is a waste of time - in the long view, our civilisation will only grow by looking outwards.
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
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.... watch me pull a planet out of my hat!
Maybe jump to the left?
Then a step to the right, perhaps?
Thinking wastes energy and adds to entropy. Better to run on instinct, programming, or blind hormone-induced rage.
Here's to hot beer, cold women, and Glaswegian kisses for all.
Well, it was a revolution in thought to discover that we weren't the centre of the universe. It would be a revolution in thought, politics and theology to know that we weren't alone in the universe. The discovery of an earth-compatible environment would also imply that interstellar colonisation was possible with sleeperships/seedships - that would greatly enhance the potential survivability of our species.
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
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1. That's Special Relativity.
2. .5c only gives a gamma of 1.15--for the traveler the apparent travel time is divided by 1.15.
3. If we assume that the other star is not moving at an appreciable percentage of the speed of light with respect to Earth (I believe this is a safe bet for pretty much any star in our own galaxy--the sun moves at .2c with respect to the rest frame of the MWG) then if Earth sees our ship hop up to .5c, that's how fast the other star will see it going, also.
What are you talking about?
.1c and a star thats 100 ly from us. It will take in the earths frame of reference 1000 years. Any other frame of reference will be about the same or less. At the destination star, it will be 1000 years to a very high degree of accuracy. Ship time will be slightly less.
The faster you go the shorter the time in both the travelers frame of reference and the destination stars frame of reference. We don't need to assume some guess about what will happen. This is all stage 1 physics. Its dead simple. We know how much time will have passed both in the ships reference frame and the stars. It won't be the same in all cases, but it is bounded to be equal to or below a classical estimate from Newtonian physics.
So at traveling at
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
In the grand tradition of selling things you don't own, like the names of stars and acres on the moon, I hereby offer to sell 40 acre lots on this planet for a mere $10,000 each. That's cheaper than a lot this size would cost in any large city here on earth. Imagine what you could do with your lot. Since there isn't any law enforcement there yet, you could grow illegal crops, build a manufacturing plant without any polution controls, or just use it to test your nuclear bombs. This is a limited time offering, and quantities are limited, so don't delay. And if you order today, we'll include the plans for a trebuchet so you can fling dead animals onto your neighbors property.But wait, order during this program, and we'll include a set of ginzu knives (shipping, handling, and other fees are an additional charge) which can cut through the toughest tomato without the need for a hammer, but you'll want to use one anyway just for the splattering fun.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Meanwhile, as scientists on an outer planet look our way:
"Rocky planets like the one recently discovered are turning out to be quite common throughout our area of space. Given a dense enough atmosphere, this planet could even support life like ours, although it's hot enough to kill all but the most tolerant extremophiles known. Spectroscopic analysis, though, reveals its deadly nature: much of its surface is covered with molten hydroxic acid, which forms toxic clouds and then falls as corrosive rain. If life-giving ammonia was ever present on the surface, it's long since combined with the abundant free oxygen in the atmosphere. Our chemists are still uncertain what could produce so much free oxygen; fantasists have speculated on forms of life that would metabolize oxygen in the same way that we metabolize hydrogen, but the analogy breaks down quickly as you look more closely at the chemistry involved."
The summary (and TFA too ;-) reminded me of the recent debate over the definition of "planet".
One obvious problem is with the claim that we only knew of four "rocky planets" before this one. Since Mercury and Mars are included, it's likely that the definition they're using would also classify at least Titan and Triton as "rocky planets", giving us six.
But, (I can hear people saying), Titan and Triton aren't planets because they don't orbit the sun. Well, neither does this new planet; it orbits another star. Some people have seriously defined "planet" to mean objects that orbit our sun, and of course that definition immediately says that there can't be any more planets in the rest of the universe. If you accept this new object as a "rocky planet", what's your definition? You'll have to word it very carefully so that it includes things orbiting a distant star, but not those that are in orbits around local gas giants.
And if you find a good wording for that, you face another likely future problem: How small an object is allowed as the primary? Suppose a new rocky-planet-like object is found in orbit around a nearby "brown dwarf". The primary isn't a proper star, so is the object merely a moon and not a planet? It's also likely that we'll soon find Jupiter-class objects in free space, not orbiting a star; if one has a Mercury- or Mars-like object in orbit, would it be classified as a rocky planet or a moon? If it's a planet, then why isn't Ganymede also a planet?
I'd predict that in the not-too-distant future, as smaller things can be detected remotely, astronomers might decide to abandon such definitions that depend on the type of primary, and rewrite definitions so that they only use properties of the object itself. Either that, or they'll deprecate "planet" as a lay term that's not useful for scientific purposes. Dunno what they'd replace it with, though.
Meanwhile, the Sophists amongst us may be in for a lot of fun in the near future. Those of us who sat at the sidelines chuckling over the angst caused by the demoting of Pluto are probably looking forward to a lot more astronomical geek humor in the next few years.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
No sooner will the discovery be made than you'll have theologians "discovering" that the thing "made in God's image" is the soul, not the body
The idea that "God's image" is not about the body is hardly a new one. 3 dimensional bodies are part of this universe. God, as creator of this universe, by necessity isn't. My guess is that "God's image" is about rational though, as that's what distinguishes us from animals.