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Kepler Investigator Says 'Galaxy Is Rich In Earth-Like Planets'
astroengine writes "In a recent presentation, Kepler co-investigator Dimitar Sasselov unexpectedly announced news that the Kepler Space Telescope has discovered scores of candidate Earth-like exoplanets. Not waiting for the official NASA press release to announce the discovery, Sasselov went into some detail at the TEDGlobal talk in Oxford, UK earlier this month. This surprise announcement comes hot on the heels of controversy that erupted last month when the Kepler team said they were withholding data on 400 exoplanet candidates until February 2011. In light of this, Sasselov's unofficial announcement has already caused a stir. Keith Cowing, of NASAWatch.com, has commented on this surprise turn of events, saying it is really annoying 'that the Kepler folks were complaining about releasing information since they wanted more time to analyze it before making any announcements. And then the project's Co-I goes off and spills the beans before an exclusive audience — offshore. We only find out about it when the video gets quietly posted weeks later.' Although Sasselov could have handled the announcement better (and waited until NASA made the official announcement), this has the potential to be one of the biggest astronomical discoveries of our time — so long as these Earth-like 'candidates' are confirmed by further study."
can we just start calling them 'M' Class ?
Seems like the only info released was a distribution of planet size. Without planet composition, I would describe these as Earth-size, not Earth-like. It's a little early to get excited.
There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
If data shows that the number of planets which could support life like ours is high then another factor must be pushed down, because we aren't getting any visitors, and we aren't getting any communications from other species. My bet is that the vast majority of those planets have run away from having a habitual environment by turning into planets like Venus or Mars. We are lucky that our CO2 is locked up in limestone, not free in the atmosphere.
Gentlemen, prepare your terraforming equipment...
http://michaelsmith.id.au
That the galaxy is also reach in Berlusconi? I hope the astronomers are definitely wrong.
For the sake of mankind.
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
I wonder if every extraterrestrial civilization has a kdawson
It really doesn't matter when even the nearest one is entirely out of our reach, without even the hope of ever reaching it even with unmanned probes.
Is the Kepler team dysfunctional, or do they just enjoy pissing on one another?
Conservative, mod down for violating
In other news, scientists discover that the universe is full of matter.
Is interstellar space travel feasable?
If there is no faster then light method of travelling possible, then there are unlikely to be any visitors ever. End of story.
And while 400 planets sounds like a lot, in the milky way it isn't much at all, especially if you consider the short timespan that humans have been capable of even seeing into deep space let alone make their presence known. And there are countless disasters that can wipe out a civilization.
There are aliens out there, in the deep vastness of space and time. Just as somewhere there is a smart intelligent girl that totally digs D&D. To bad she was born 200 years ago.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
maybe it *does* owe me a living.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I agree. Water presence? Temperature within habitable range? At least a primordial atmosphere? Not sure if Kepler is the right tool to collect that kind of data, but to call them "earth like" seems premature. Granted, if the size approaches that of earth chances are they're rocky, solid planets, but that's it.
These Earth class planets don't just exist. Most of them has a functional Stargate on them!!!
Kepler needs 3 transits to confirm a planet, so given that it's only been up there since March 7, 2009 any planet around the same distance as earth will only have had 2 transits max.
It's exciting that there are so many candidates but I guess NASA doesn't want the embarrassment of getting everyone all excited then having to hugely backtrack on the number if some turn out to be something else.
It's really sad that a discussion about the possible detection of Earth-sized planets around other stars is dressed up in "it's our data and we want to publish first" and stuff like that.
Humanity will, one day, pay dearly the fact that scientists are forced to fight for resources...
Anyway, this is interesting news. If computers were considered "the revenge of the nerds", I'm curious what the next few years will be called.
new sig
"In a recent presentation, Kepler co-investigator Dimitar Sasselov preempted the official announcement that the exoplanet-hunting Kepler Space Telescope has discovered about 140 candidate worlds orbiting other stars that are "like Earth."
The operative word being 'candidate', which italicized in the TFA.
...take the prime directive into account ?
(because it should.)
Segmentation Fault in "Life, Universe and Everything" at line 42. Don't Panic.
By "Earth" like they mean rocky, as opposed to gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn.
In this solar system we have Venus - very similar in size to earth and made of rock. However it in no way could be described as habitable by even the toughest forms of life found here.
Theres an article in this months SciAm,(by the same guys, referring to 'super-earths' Rocky planets twice the size of earth or more. They could have life if they were at the right distance from their star, but so far we have only been able to detect close in planets (by their effect on the star. Its possible with these new instruments that we could detect planets transiting their star, but that of course depends on us being in the same plane as the orbit of the planet
Title of TFA: Kepler Scientist: 'Galaxy is Rich in Earth-Like Planets' It did not say "Galaxy rich in candidates for Earth-like planets" or the more realistic "Scientists discover Earth-size planets." You can't focus on the parts of TFA that are correct and ignore the parts that are sensationalized. Too often writers take good information and add in their own nonsense. There's a difference between saying "journalist is a candidate for being an asshat" and "journalist is a proven asshat."
There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
It looks like the distribution follows a power law. I'm not sure if that's an artifact of the numbers chosen but it would be cool if it were true.
Is that scientists assume that only 'earth-like' planets can support life, that they all have to be the same distance from Sol as Earth is; and that's just wrong. Life can most likely develop in all types of environments, so maybe there is life on giant planets, etc. Until we actually get out there and see, we shouldn't be assuming stuff!
Michael
http://s1.sfgame.us/index.php?rec=58163
And how long before we're mining the crap out of these planets to get our un-obtainium? BTW: The one thing that bothered me most in Avatar was that, while they mentioned it takes 6-years to get to Pandora, they never mention how long it took to discover Pandora. That's a lot of Galaxy to look at.
My prediction is that somehow, we're going to discover, within the next 20 years, something that can be confirmed as "earth-like" in that it appears to have atmosphere and water (from what we can see, being tens of light-years away). At that point, there will be a multi-national effort to reach this planet, which will bankrupt the world because the cost of such an expedition will be in the hundreds of trillions of dollars.
And then, when we get there, we'll find out that it's not *exactly* "earth-like". There will be something different enough that we can't live there, or terraform, or do anything with it. The entire trip will be a huge waste of resources.
And then for the next 300 years because of this failure, we will stop looking up at the sky and wondering.
And then *they* will show up to harvest us.....
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
all from the same author:
"The worlds unfallen and the heavenly angels had watched with intense interest as the conflict drew to its close."
Desire of Ages (1868) page 694 (http://www.whiteestate.org/books/da/da74.html)
"Cherubim and seraphim, and the unnumbered hosts of all the unfallen worlds, sang anthems of praise to God and the Lamb when this triumph was assured."
Thoughts from the Mount of Blessings (1896) page 105 (http://www.ellenwhite.info/books/bk-mb-06.htm)
"With unutterable delight the children of earth enter into the joy and the wisdom of unfallen beings."
The Great Controversy (1911) page 678 (http://www.google.com/search?q=With+unutterable+delight+the+children+of+earth+enter+into+the+joy+and+the+wisdom+of+unfallen+beings) etc...
I'd love to believe it, but I don't. Yes, there may be vast numbers of solar systems containing rocky planets in approximately the right orbits. But "habitable?" That's a big stretch. I suspect what we'll find is more like Niven's "Known Space" series, where the "habitable" planets out there are weird, marginal, and possibly inhabited by hostile things.
All about me
0: We are wrong about the life: it does take the finger of a deity.
1: They have better communications media that we cannot access.
2: It's dangerous out there: croaking frogs attract snakes.
3: We are in a game park: they communicate with us only when we have something to offer.
4: All technological civilisations always try one key experiment that sinks the ship: e.g. massive self-gravitating Bose-Einstein condensate >> black hole >> zip.
5: Singularity: biochemical 2 eV life is just too limiting and civilisations move on when they can. "On" may be into simulations, or into media that e don't know about.
Notes:
On 3 - self-propagating von Neumann machines can (theoretically) cover the galaxy in a few million years. Dust like seeds, working up to "plants" in the Oort, spraying their kind onwards in an endless chain. If symbol-using life is found, infest its nervous system and nroadcast on ege dark matter wavebands (? :) ) you you and I are either databased - immortality of a sort - or appearing on Arcturan TV.
On 4: Add themes to taste; or just accept that a critical mass of capability means that someone, somewhere always does it on purpose. 60+% of traffic head on collisions are "taking the bastards with me."
On 5: If we can understand congition as a physical process then we can emulate it as one. There is probably no difference between the quality of being aware that you have, that I have or that the steak that you had for dinner possessed when it wandered about and mooed. What differs is sensorium, memories, affect/ reflex balances.
What individuates You from Moo is probably a few GB, so the delta from standard human awareness that is You could fit on a DVD. Basic human awareness OS is - let's say - 1 TB, "you" 1-5 GB on top of that. So really not a very difficult task to emulate once you understand the basics; which we do not at all understand now, but which we will in 30-40 years.
Reading out "you" from the wetware is probably not a bit by bit fiddle but 'just' sensing statistically the balance between generic pay offs and balances in your processing characteristics. For example, a tree, as perceived by you now, or recalled later, is represented from a hardwired GL, tweaked to reflect as much detail as is required for the observation. Recalling that 'there were some trees' generates a vague and very geenral set of blobs in one's mind, after all. Memories of a tree or a face are essentially tweaked primitives: from generic face to 'Her' face 'Then' calls up some standard ways in which faces differ and a lot of links to other generics, themselves forming a web of what feel like memories.
So: backups, hacks, file transfers, upgrades, edits. Add better hardware. Massively parallel games for real - science fiction has been there already. Be Your Own Universal Emperor For Fake Real, or suffer arthritis and mortgage worries whilst trying to telephone Arcturus for Real real - which would you prefer?
pics and character stats, or it didn't happen.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
They are likely how many dozens of thousands of light years away ?
I guess we can now spend more attention observing spectra coming from these planets. But I am skeptical of chances of first contact from one of them (within our lifetimes).
Don't be too quick to jump to generalizations from a small set of data.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I agree. Water presence? Temperature within habitable range? At least a primordial atmosphere? Not sure if Kepler is the right tool to collect that kind of data, but to call them "earth like" seems premature.
Exoplanet spectroscopy has been done, but is a very new science and extremely difficult. And first, we have to be looking at a specific planet with specific instruments.
Kepler, on the other hand, is continuously monitoring a region of the sky and some hundreds of thousands of stars for signs of planets. It detects planets by the "transit method", which means you watch all the stars, and see if any of them dim slightly. You keep watching and if you see it dim again, you might have found a planet (rather than a one-time passing object between us and the star). To be fairly sure it's a planet, you need to see a third dimming with the same time delay as between the first two, showing that it's periodic. Ideally you want to see a 4th event to confirm, but 3 is good enough to call it a candidate -- or maybe they say candidate after 2? I'm not sure.
Note that this means Kepler only sees planets whose orbits happen to be about "edge on" from our perspective. So there could be many systems that Kepler simply can't see -- and given how many it has seen, I think it's safe to say that there are many such systems.
Anyway, from this data, Kepler can figure out the approximate orbital distance and mass of the planet. That's it. You can estimate temperature from proximity to the star, too.
Personally, given Kepler's limited-but-awesome capabilities, I wouldn't mind them saying "earth-like" simply to describe roughly earth-size planets that are in the habitable zone of their star. But I doubt that's the case for most of these, since Kepler has only been running for half a year, and for Kepler to detect something in an earth-like orbit around a Sol-like star, it would take between 2 and 3 years of observation. The only planets Kepler can find up to this point are ones that orbit closely to their star. So most of these are not going to be in the habitable zone.
The enemies of Democracy are
Tell us how many there are within 100 light years.
Its much easier to sell the public a car/planet/boat/spaceship if there is somewhere they want to go.
Its much easier to get the public interested in spending money on propulsion research if its gets them where they want to go FASTER.
It's great that we can now detect Earth-sized planets, but it's starting to look like Jovian moons are a more common life-friendly environment. In our solar system alone there are three, possibly four moons of Jupiter and Saturn that may be able to support life.
Since the moons get most of their heat from the gravitational pull of their planets rather than from their star, they aren't dependent on getting lucky in the narrow "Goldilocks Zone" of a system.
It may be that aquatic, vent-feeding moon ecosystems make up the vast majority of life in the universe, and photo-synthesizing, dry land ecosystems like ours are the rarity.
Kepler Investigator Says 'Galaxy Is Rich In Earth-Like Planets'
The Bible knew it all along! :smug
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I don't see how you could possibly tell that a planet was Earth-like. Earth-size maybe. I mean, I can kind of understand how one could get excited at the discovery of exoplanets. But ultimately all you've discovered are some really, really big rocks orbiting other stars. You can only guess what those rocks are comprised of.
Proverbs 21:19
To be fair, most headlines are selected by editors, not the journalist who wrote the article. An awful large percentage of editors have their position because of advanced ass-kissing abilities rather than journalistic or managerial capabilities.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
These planets are all in short, close orbits, so they're not earth like in any sense we'd care about.
What we need is an in-space, long-baseline multi-array so we can *see* planets in other solar systems. Then we'd have some worthwhile data in areas we care about. Do we *really* care if there is a small, boiled-dry word spinning around its sun every three or four days? No. We care if there's something with what we can believe is a habitable environment. For us, or for someone else. And we're not going to learn that by watching for wobbles in stellar output.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
The findings by the Kepler mission are wonderful, the claims that he presented unpublished data are stupid, the results he presented are available on-line at Arkivoc http://laolinghua.com/abs/1006.2799v2
The only thing that he did was to re-format figure 2 upper panel...
Isn't our solar system's ecliptic plane closely aligned with the galactic plane? That's what I remember from the last time I actually looked at the Milky Way up in the sky, anyway. I had always assumed this was for the same reason that the plane of rotation of most of the planets are aligned with their planes of revolution around the sun...
To the colonial board the survivability of the target planet mattered little. If it was an Eden their charges the colonists might survive and do well, or find a way to fail. If it was a hell they might perish, or win out. No matter which way it went they were rid of them, and that was what mattered.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
And in the 174th year after none of the ships were launched because there would always be a faster one, out of the dark came interstellar visitors of our own. Properly speaking they were barely moving relative to the galactic plane, but our solar system's orbit about the galaxy passed through their stagnant pond - the relic of a dozen wrecked solar systems much like our own. First the pebbles came, and then the stones. With interstellar velocities multiplying their energies they made asteroids look like Elm seeds. By the second year a minivan sized rock was falling every month. And then it was too late. The last telescope satellite spotted it just a few lunar orbits out - the killer rock, too close to turn, too big to survive.
There would be no ships.
The end.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I see nothing dysfunctional about this.
They don't want to release the data they spent the last several years developing a system to collect until they have a chance to study it and write the first papers from it. In the meantime, there's nothing preventing them from talking in general terms about the sorts of things they're finding. Saying there appears to be 400 earth-sized candidates isn't going to allow anyone to beat them to getting credit for analyzing the data.
And they said I was crazy for wearing a tin foil hat! This is something straight out of the "X" Files! Or for lack of better terms... "Exo" Files. Anyone want an aluminum Fedora? 20 Bucks, but priceless!
Else there'd be no home fire burning for the returning wanderer to tell the tale around.
Help stamp out iliturcy.