Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
Is the Kepler team dysfunctional, or do they just enjoy pissing on one another?
Conservative, mod down for violating
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.
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.
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
The Star Trek classification system would indeed be far better than the whole "What's a planet" argument definitions we've had (which has been hard enough with just our solar system), and things like Dwarf planets etc. We have classes for stars, so why not planets...
Might not be a bad idea, but we're scarcely ready to tackle the task. We're starting with a sample-size of 9, (or is that 8?) with direct, personal, and extensive observation of only 1, fairly extensive robot observation of 1 more, somewhat less robot observation of 2 more, and some robot and telescopic observation of the rest. Then we get into those pesky "moons", some of which might well be considered "planets" if they orbited the sun instead of some planet. (Think Pandora, for a fictional extreme example, but Ganymede, Titan, and Callisto aren't that far behind.)
Past that, our extrasolar observations so far haven't found much, if any, like our own solar system. We've found numerous super-Jovian (The easiest kind to detect.) worlds, some of them in decidedly non-Jovian orbits. I don't think we're truly ready to do any sort of planetary classification yet, unless we left it so diffuse at to not be useful - perhaps with a few more decades of extrasolar observations and technological advancements in the same... In the meantime, it seems kind of like doing a taxonomy of arthropods based on aquatic observations of shrimp, lobsters, prawns, and the like.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Anyway, it could be that Earht itself is a borderline planet for life [harvard.edu], just big enough for plate tectonics (something which Venus lacks, and which probably contributed greatly to its conditions); maybe even slightly too small in itself, but was pushed into habitable range by the collision with Theia (the collision that spawned the Moon)
If you look at Earth objectively, we could be living on what so many sci-fi stories like to use as examples of 'prison' planets. Highly hostile worlds which seem wholly unsuitable for life.
Earth:
Corrosive Atmosphere - High % Oxygen
Acid oceans (or base depending on your POV)... H+ OH-
Biologically active - We let biology run rampant everywhere, bacteria, virii, prions
Wild Temperature fluctuations - Denser atmospheres = temperature stable at a set altitude.
It would be interesting to go to an alien planet, and find out we were the ones adapted to an incredibly hostile environment.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
No, sir, I am not.
Briefly, the resolution achievable using interferometry is proportional to the observing frequency and the distance between the antennas farthest apart in the array. In space, the distance between the antennas, the number of antennas, and the size of the antennas are all matters of raw materials, no more. Once we can manufacture *in* space using materials gleaned from asteroids, there's hardly any limit at all to the size of the synthesized aperture.
The only limitation is the usual one - the data is as old as it is distant.
Believe me, pal, we haven't even begun to construct telescopes of the capabilities our current technologies can enable. We're just putting the money in incredibly stupid places. As today, we just stuffed another fifty nine billion dollars down the Pentagon's automated money disposal. Not to mention the 8.7 billion they "lost."
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
True. But the number it has found has promising suggestions.
Indeed. It's very promising that as soon as we are capable of detecting a new class of planet, we do, and lots of em. Even outside of Kepler. I would think the prevailing prediction at this point would be that planetary systems and planets are common, and we are likely going to discover many planets in the habitable zones of their stars.
The nice thing though is that we only have to wait a couple years to actually know. Which is why I think we should just wait on declaring "earth-like" planets found. The Kepler mission is designed to find those planets, earth-size and in the habitable zone, so let's not jump the gun is all I'm saying. Finding tons of earth-size planets is in and of itself quite awesome. :)
The enemies of Democracy are