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Kepler Finds Five More Exoplanets
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.
something that is too hot to be a planet and too small to be a star
And I'm guessing they've already ruled out the obvious?
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.
Sure, finding habitable planets is cool. But what are they going to do once they've found one? Tick a box? Celebrate humanity?
Perform spectroscopy experiments to see if the planet has more in common with ours than just mass and relative distance from its star?
As part of the long, long process of answering one of the most amazing questions in humanity's existence: Are we alone in the universe? Is life unique to our planet, extremely rare, or as common as the stars themselves?
You might have you own theories one way or the other, but a theory isn't an answer. This is about evidence.
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As they get more verified examples under their belts, I expect they'll get a bit bolder. I certainly hope so, anyway. Earth-sized planets will be hard to double-check (Hubble could do it, but nothing on the ground), and large outer planets can't be double-checked at all, since they just make one pass and the next could be decades away.
--Greg
just what are you suggesting here? if it wasn't for projects like kepler we'd have hoards of astrophysicists wandering the streets bothering people with their telescopes.
The one with the density of styrofoam actually is styrofoam. Thats the one I worked so hard on my sophomore year for Mr. Nixs earth science class.
It turned up missing and I got a D for the quarter. I actually don't need it anymore so you're welcome to use it as a planet or whatever.
I doubt it will sustain life, but it will hold a hatpin, which I suspended it from.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Obviously the reason it makes headlines is that the question of how many human-habitable planets there are, and what kinds of properties they have, is tied to the question of whether anything vaguely like earth-like life exists elsewhere in the universe.
However a good deal of astronomers are also just interested in everything about the cosmos: what's out there, how does it work, how does it relate to other things, what kinds of variations are there, etc. From that perspective, this particular kind of thing, "exoplanet", is a class of far-away object we don't have a lot of examples of and can't give particularly confident accounts of (how and how often they form, their distribution, etc.). Even if there was no tie-in to human habitability, there are a number of astronomers interested in collecting more data on and clarifying our understanding of basically any class of "thing we don't yet know everything about".
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
"...the scientists running it are fully confident that it will find Earth-like planets in some star's habitable zone"
Good to see that we're keeping a nice and closed mind about any lifeforms that might be outside the box. Just because we're so stuck on the definition of life that works here on our planet doesn't mean we won't find a lifeform that completely redefines "habitable zone".
Play more games.
IIRC the density of the planet is not the same throughout. If that is the case, the comparison is pretty misleading. It could very well be a rocy core with a very thick layer of some light gas.
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"....if they are out there to be found." They are out there whether we can find them or not. What I find really strange is why just prior to the fist exoplanet being discovered that scientists bothered debating the existence of exoplanets in the first place.
Now we might actually have a chance of finding intelligent life in the universe!
And if we can get them to come to Earth, we could even have intelligent life on Earth!
wake up and hold your nose
--Greg
Dude, chill. Check a couple stories back and you'll see they're just getting around to the flying cars everyone was promised would be here by now back in the 50s and you're bitching about 80s promises!
Relax and check back in another 20-30 years.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Why bicker? We know what was meant, get a life.
If there are not many planets that show signs of possible life at all, then there are going to be very few where life has even possibly developed our kind of intelligence. There would be even fewer where there might be a technological civilization. Looking for a signal or sending one becomes a real needle in a haystack operation. If we could afford to send just a few signals, say by high powered laser, there would still be no point in funding it, because we would still need to send those signals to literally tens of thousands of near stars just because we haven't narrowed our search. If we could only afford to listen, we might be deciding to commit to a project that would have to run for hundreds of years, and the human race has been pretty reluctant to try such long term feats, and not real good at keeping civilizations going long enough to finish them.
On the other hand, if planets in vital zones are common, designing instruments to specifically look for signs of life on them makes more sense. If we find evidence of life, we can then look at other, easier to detect factors, such as how old the related stars are, and we end up with a list of places that might have advanced lifeforms with intelligence, and even technology such as radio. There's a fair chance we could work through that list in just a few years. It becomes a small enough project we could tackle it with what resources we have, and the people who start the project would live long enough to see the answers.
The payoff could still be huge! Just as huge as a more scattershot approach, for much less time and money. Imagine if we found ourselves talking with a civilization that had already figured out fusion power, or foolproof ways to keep nuclear war from happening, or some other technology we won't invent by ourselves for a hundred years, a thousand years, or more. That's the potential big payout. The next tier down might be things such as just finding a civilization that has already passed through a long industrial pollution phase and cleaned up its old toxic waste dumps and such. Just knowing that they managed not to kill themselves off with some of the things we worry about is pretty valuable even if we don't know the details. Maybe we find aliens that are really good at physics, but don't know as much about industrial chemistry as we do. They want to trade how to make flying cars for our advanced secrets of how to make paint that weathers well in sunlight.
Who is John Cabal?
Actually...yeah. I mean, assuming the image is any good. How'd you manage to keep the chromatic and spherical aberration bearable at that aperature?
What if we find aliens who want To Serve Man?