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Kepler Finds Five More Exoplanets

Posted by kdawson on from the nice-places-to-visit-but dept.

Arvisp was one of several readers to send news of five new exoplanets discovered by the Kepler space telescope. In addition to the new "hot Jupiters" — the easiest targets to find — Kepler's early data has turned up some oddities, including something that is too hot to be a planet and too small to be a star. And one of the exoplanets is so fluffy that "it has the density of Styrofoam." The real news is that Kepler works as designed, and the scientists running it are fully confident that it will find Earth-like planets in some star's habitable zone, if they are out there to be found. Here is NASA's press release.

5 of 102 comments (clear)

  1. But Why? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    Sure, finding habitable planets is cool. But what are they going to do once they've found one? Tick a box? Celebrate humanity? It seems like a waste of money to me. Really interesting stuff - but for what?

    1. Re:But Why? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

      Well, for one thing perhaps we could stop hearing the same tired lines from the population control Nazis (a.k.a. "Progressives). Question for "progressives": Why is it that your answers to society's problems always amount to killing or sterilizing part of the population, then strangling the rest with onerous regulations? Why do you hate individual liberty and self-determination so much? Why can't you dream of a humanity that is capable of reaching and expanding into the stars? You constantly praise yourselves for being so open-minded, but you are some of the most closed-minded fucks I've ever met.

    2. Re:But Why? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

      Obama's Director of the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy (a.k.a. Obama's science czar) John Holdren, for one.

      http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/beltway-confidential/More-Holdren-Traditional-family-is-obsolete-50807107.html

      http://www.google.com/search?q=american+eugenics+movement

      In particular, read http://hnn.us/articles/1796.html and note the following paragraph:

      "In an America demographically reeling from immigration upheaval and torn by post-Reconstruction chaos, race conflict was everywhere in the early twentieth century. Elitists, utopians and so-called "progressives" fused their smoldering race fears and class bias with their desire to make a better world. They reinvented Galton's eugenics into a repressive and racist ideology. The intent: populate the earth with vastly more of their own socio-economic and biological kind--and less or none of everyone else."

      This is why I want to puke when someone tells me they are a "progressive." Fucking racist pig is what they are.

  2. Pretty good for a dead european white male by DNS-and-BIND · · Score: -1, Troll

    Kepler? I thought he died back in the 1600s. He's still around, and still looking through telescopes?

    Oh, I get it, this must be some new science thing. It was just poorly explained in the summary, which is usual for Slashdot. If they discover more planets, it's really going to screw up astrology (which Kepler studied intensively). Did NASA take these considerations into account?

    --
    Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
    1. Re:Pretty good for a dead european white male by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

      shut the fuck up idiot.