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'Most Earth-Like' Exoplanet Gets Major Demotion

Posted by Soulskill on from the science-works dept.

audiovideodisco writes "Last month, the team behind NASA's Kepler planet-finding mission announced the discovery of the most Earth-like planetary candidate ever spotted: KOI 326.01, an approximately Earth-sized planet orbiting in the habitable zone of its star. There was much excitement; one astrophysicist even calculated the value of the new planet as exactly $223,099.93. But when an innocent fact-checker's question sent one of the researchers back to look at some figures, she noticed that the star's brightness was listed incorrectly in a reference catalog, throwing the planet's properties into doubt. After jiggering the calculations, the Kepler team now says that KOI 326.01 is neither Earth-sized nor in the habitable zone, and may actually be orbiting a different star. The Kepler researcher says, 'We're seeing the scientific method playing out in real time.' While this news is a bit of a downer, Kepler is just getting going, and it's expected to find many, many more Earth-like planets."

32 of 206 comments (clear)

  1. Real time science indeed by $RANDOMLUSER · · Score: 2

    All great science starts with "hmmmmm, that's funny...".

    --
    No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
    1. Re:Real time science indeed by Nadaka · · Score: 5, Informative

      Just... No. What you are describing is nothing related to science.

      What you are talking about may apply to science journalism. That is basically what happens when a liberal arts major gets told that he drew the short straw and has to write a science article instead of sympathizing with starving Rawandan kids or discussing the latest celebrity gossip.

    2. Re:Real time science indeed by h4rr4r · · Score: 2, Insightful

      At least it attempts to explain reality with observable phenomenon instead of the old "God did it, no thinking required" that religion is so fond of.

    3. Re:Real time science indeed by $RANDOMLUSER · · Score: 2

      You're right. Look how long "a god did it" has lasted.

      Science and religion have a lot in common in that they both attempt to explain the world (universe) and our place in it. The difference is that science can at least admit that it could be wrong. Falsifiability and all that.

      --
      No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
    4. Re:Real time science indeed by lupinstel · · Score: 2

      I agree with this guy. I have hated science ever since I was blinded by it back in 1982.

      --
      Don't blame me, I voted for Cthulhu.
    5. Re:Real time science indeed by Golddess · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The difference is that science can at least admit that it could be wrong.

      Unfortunately, some of the more hardheaded religious folks consider that to be a reason why religion is superior. I can't find the link, but a while back I came across a site that among other things had a series of one-panel comics by a creationist, and one of those comics made fun of science precisely because of its ability to change its mind about things.

      "Reporter: A new discovery changes everything you thought you knew about the origin of life.... wait, no, that discovery was just debunked by an even newer discovery."

      --
      "I'm not sure I like the fugnutish tone you used in your post!" -RogL (608926)-
    6. Re:Real time science indeed by elrous0 · · Score: 2

      And these days the next step after hypothesis is to issue a press release touting your amazing discovery.

      --
      SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
    7. Re:Real time science indeed by rednip · · Score: 2
      Maybe it took 40 years to fully debunk, but that doesn't mean there weren't people right from the offset (from the wikipedia article):

      From the outset, there were scientists who expressed skepticism about the Piltdown find. G.S. Miller, for example, observed in 1915 that "deliberate malice could hardly have been more successful than the hazards of deposition in so breaking the fossils as to give free scope to individual judgment in fitting the parts together."

      In essence it took 40 years for the people who benefited from or were fooled by the fakery to die off. There is a small segment of the population who will never admit a mistake.

      --
      The force that blew the Big Bang continues to accelerate.
    8. Re:Real time science indeed by boristhespider · · Score: 2

      Einstein got his PhD based on theories that he later overturned, in as fundamental a manner as is possible in physics. The same goes for Dirac, Schroedinger, de Broglie, Compton, Heisenberg and Bohr. Should their PhDs all have been revoked because they were found to be based on an inaccurate theory?

      I don't think anyone sane claims that scientists are without bias. They might claim "science" (in some unreal Platonic ideal sense) is unbiased, but scientists never can be because no-one ever is. The *data* is unbiased; you just need to be aware of what it actually means. So for example if you're measuring the temperature of an iron rod under increasing electric load and fail to mention that one end of it is in broad sunlight, your data may be unbiased but you're going to interpret it totally wrongly (and perhaps deliberately). And scientists... no, of course they're not. It's too political and grant availability is too based on fashions and the whims of partisan selection committees to be unbiased. Most scientists I know tend to be as unbiased as they can within those constraints, but anyone with their head turned on knows they're there. Anyone with their head turned on and a high-school level of history or sociology is also aware that *no-one* is unbiased and any time anyone interprets anything they add their own bias to it, inevitably.

      Ultimately the ideal is that you collect data and understand it as best as possible, remove the effects of all known systematics, build a model and make a prediction which can then be tested. Frequently someone comes along and points out another systematic, which then changes your model, predictions and tests. This can repeat for decades (or, in the case of something like evolutionary theory which is still, err, evolving, centuries). It's simply the nature of science.

      That isn't what seems to have happened in this case. It *looks* like slack groundwork, right at the start of the calculation. That's not a good image to have. To their credit, they checked, they acknowledged their fault, they repeated their calculation and they published the result knowing full well how silly it would make them look. (Also, in all fairness, knowing full well that someone else would do the same and make them look both silly *and* like they were hiding something.) One thing to take away from that is that the calculation itself appears to be totally sound -- you can bet that someone checked through the entire thing, from the data pipeline to the final calculation. So a typical case of garbage in, garbage out...

      And any way of looking at it it makes the Kepler team look daft.

    9. Re:Real time science indeed by Chris+Burke · · Score: 4, Insightful

      You want an "intractable belief" that is prevalent in science? Here's one ... that science is without bias.

      Except that's not a prevalent belief in science, unless you mean in the literal sense that "science" is without bias because it is a concept, not a sentient entity.

      The prevalent belief is that bias (and other failings) are an endemic property of the humans who conduct science, and it is only through the rigorous application of scientific methods that the effect of these failings can be mitigated, a process which is itself subject to the same human failings.

      This is a fine case of bias leading to a conclusion that was passed around as true, because science wants it to be true. How else do you explain how far wrong it might be that the planet they said was one thing, couldn't be further from the truth.

      Because there was an error in a reference catalog whose existence predates any knowledge of possible exoplanets, and therefore any possible motivation to "want" that planet to be around that star and with certain properties.

      Of course that's still a fuck-up. But it was a simple mistake, not bias, that lead to the conclusion. Maybe bias prevented them from investigating the catalog data prior to someone asking a question specifically pertaining to it, but then I would have to assume that they did do this for other discoveries in planets. Which I doubt. More likely, the real bias was being biased towards thinking their reference information was correct, and that bias applied to every observation, not just the ones they were especially excited about.

      My point is, that science is flawed, because people performing it are flawed. It does tend to correct itself over time however, but it cannot nor does it attempt to fix the problems it causes when it is wrong.

      Scientists already know scientists are flawed.

      And what does that last part mean? Science does attempt to fix problems it causes. A chemical with an unexpected side effect, they try to eliminate it if possible. They miscalculate the trajectory of a probe, they try to correct it if possible. And they try to fix the methodologies themselves to try to prevent the problem from repeating.

      For example, I imagine the catalog data they are using will be thoroughly scrubbed before you see another "earth-like exoplanet" announcement based on it.

      This has nothing to do with religion except where science acts like a religion while trying to pretend it never does.

      The only similarity between religion and science is that they both involve fallible, fundamentally irrational humans. The biggest difference is that science views fallibility and rationality as problems to be worked around, and accepts when those properties resulted in the wrong conclusion.

      In truth, this is a perfect example of science not acting like religion.

      --

      The enemies of Democracy are
    10. Re:Real time science indeed by Quirkz · · Score: 2

      Until we can get past the "a 2000-year-old book says it, therefore I believe it" and "some email I'm too lazy to check against snopes says it, therefore I believe it", picking up a stray scientific fact that gets overturned is the least of our problems. At least inaccurate science is in the right ballpark.

      --
      The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
    11. Re:Real time science indeed by mug+funky · · Score: 2

      it's similar to Asimov's three laws.

      faith is a trump card - it has root privileges when reason only has user level privileges.

      what science needs to find is the sudo command if we're ever to get through.

  2. Really .. by bsquizzato · · Score: 3, Funny

    After jiggering the calculations, the Kepler team now says that KOI 326.01 is neither Earth-sized nor in the habitable zone, and may actually be orbiting a different star

    "Sooo ... about everything we said, it's actually the complete opposite"

    Epic fail.

    1. Re:Really .. by Nadaka · · Score: 3, Informative

      Sounds more like an epic success for science to me.

    2. Re:Really .. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      "The chances for life on this planet are 100 percent," Steven Vogt, a UC professor of astronomy and astrophysics says. "I have almost no doubt about it."

      I and every other research scientist I know (a lot of them) all just shook our heads when we heard that quote.

    3. Re:Really .. by causality · · Score: 2

      Welcome to science. I would deem this a big success!

      No, science would be "as a preliminary, tentative finding, the data seem to indicate that this is the case, but we need to double-check all sources of error, look for contradictory information, and even after all that, if we still cannot falsify it, we can say only that it is consistent with our current understanding, something that has changed before and will likely change again". Of course, that isn't as exciting in a press release, hence the problem.

      Many people want final ultimate answers on certain questions. "Could there be other planets out there that might even be able to support life (as we know it)?" is one of them. It's related to the question of whether we are alone in the Universe. It's harder to appreciate that the search for such answers and the questions they raise is the more worthy point.

      This was a big success for yellow journalism. It was a gigantic fail for science. It calls into question how many other jumps to conclusions there are that we don't yet know about because they haven't yet been identified. You can have great science or you can make great press releases and sell newspapers. Wherever those two ends are opposed, we get to find out what our real priorities are, don't we?

      I agree it's definitely better than nothing that this one was corrected. That means this failure was recognized and corrected. It does not mean no failure took place.

      --
      It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
    4. Re:Really .. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      That'd be...

      CNN

      http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2010/09/30/100-percent-chance-for-life-on-newly-found-planet/

      Space.com

      http://www.space.com/9225-odds-life-newfound-earth-size-planet-100-percent-astronomer.html ,and a host of others. This was in mainstream press. Not tabloids.

      There are a few scientists around who occasionally say idiotic things. Unfortunately, sometimes they do it in front of reporters. This would be one of those times.

    5. Re:Really .. by causality · · Score: 2

      That'd be...

      CNN

      http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2010/09/30/100-percent-chance-for-life-on-newly-found-planet/

      Space.com

      http://www.space.com/9225-odds-life-newfound-earth-size-planet-100-percent-astronomer.html ,and a host of others. This was in mainstream press. Not tabloids.

      There are a few scientists around who occasionally say idiotic things. Unfortunately, sometimes they do it in front of reporters. This would be one of those times.

      I sure wish people would Google before asking such easily answered questions...

      --
      It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
    6. Re:Really .. by ColdWetDog · · Score: 2

      Being this wrong is seldom considered an 'epic success'.

      Except in Economics.

      --
      Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
    7. Re:Really .. by bunratty · · Score: 2

      Nope, that's a common climate myth.

      --
      What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
  3. The eureka paradox. by Fractal+Dice · · Score: 2

    At bleeding edge of knowledge/measurement the margin of error is often larger than the margin of excitement.

  4. Re:space science by MightyMartian · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Translation: I'm a pathetic, visionless stump of a human being who goes on Internet forums to try to convince people that my apathy is somehow equatable to cleverness.

    --
    The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
  5. How "Earth-like" was it in the first place? by blair1q · · Score: 4, Insightful

    When your only criteria are size and distance, you're not doing much to prove "likeness" to the Earth. In fact, you're doing less than 2 parameters/N parameters, since size and distance may have nothing to do with how habitable the planet may be to humans or any life forms.

    Stoichiometry and temperature are far more significant. The existence of stabilizing processes in the atmospheric and geological systems are also more significant.

    And then there's the little matter of the precise history of Earth, which went through several specific, major eras of development before it had these stabilizing systemic features and could support the formation of the first structures of life and their evolution into the first cellular beings.

    And then it went through several more specific, major eras of development to result in large, complex, multicellular plant and animal forms of life, interacting as a (somewhat) stable ecosystem, capable of surviving events that nonetheless mass-extincted whole swathes of species.

    The part about guessing wrong about which star the planet is orbiting is just bad astronomy, and is way past where they should be shutting up about its being "Earthlike."

  6. Review First, Then A Press Release by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    'We're seeing the scientific method playing out in real time', eh? How about letting that scientific method play itself out before you release your findings to the popular media? Or was it getting near the end of your fiscal year?

  7. Re:space science by $RANDOMLUSER · · Score: 2

    Perhaps you should pull your head out of your ass and look up the history of Cepheid variable stars or supernovae. Both had several false starts before the current theory.

    But you're right, "it's just space", so all we stand to learn from it is how the universe is put together and how it works.

    --
    No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
  8. Re:Scientific method or fact checking by nedlohs · · Score: 3, Informative

    The catalog was wrong, it's not a calculation it's just having the wrong data. Of course a quick look at the picture would have shown the error, but who looks at anything but the table of numbers?

  9. Real estate crisis IN OUTER SPACE by sourcerror · · Score: 3, Funny

    Real estate crisis IN OUTER SPACE

  10. Re:Scientific method or fact checking by Whalou · · Score: 4, Funny

    I never look at the pictures, I only read the articles.

    --
    English is not this .sig mother tongue...
  11. Re:You just got Pultoed by gstoddart · · Score: 2

    Am I right or what?

    Unlikely since none of us knows what "Pultoed" means.

    --
    Lost at C:>. Found at C.
  12. Why must NASA crush so many dreams? by makubesu · · Score: 4, Funny

    Here they had built up this poor young planet to be something of worth. They were promising all kinds of fame and fortune, telling her to leave behind her friends and family and devote herself to being the next Earth. The crazy parties, the celebrities endorsing her, they built up her dreams of fame, and gave up any other kind of success. Now they dump her dry because they ended up making some mistakes in their data analysis. All she's got left now is a lingering coke addiction. Don't you see they used her up and rang her dry? She had so much potential to be special in some other way, but now she'll just be remembered as another failure, probably turning tricks in the dark corners of the galaxy. We need to keep these hype monsters away from our planets.

  13. Mmm. Lost a planet, Master Obi-Wan has. by countertrolling · · Score: 2

    How embarrassing. How embarrassing.

    --
    For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
  14. Re:Scientific method or fact checking by boristhespider · · Score: 2

    Also, if you read the article (or knew about Kepler) you'd also know that they deal with hundreds of thousands of these cases -- Kepler isn't about targeting individual stars and finding Earth-like planets, it's about getting weight of numbers on your side to beat down the statistical error. I don't know why they picked this exact case to look at when they admitted themselves that it was a questionable one (maybe because it had turned out so nicely inside the habitable zone with a sane mass?) but that's not the aim of the project anyway.

    My point is that no-one at Kepler is employed to sit and stare at a few hundred thousand images saying "Yes, that star's brighter than that one" or "Yes, that looks like an isolated system" or "No, that looks like CCD noise, bin it". *Should* there be someone employed to do this? Maybe so, but you'd have to admit it would be one seriously boring job -- and you'd need a good few sets of eyes given the bad human judgement in it. There just isn't enough money going around to hire someone to stare at images full-time like that, let alone to hire three or four people to do it... In similar circumstances the Sloan Deep Sky Survey set up Galaxy Zoo over the internet to get people around the world to classify hundreds of thousands of images of galaxies for them. Get thousands of people assessing the same galaxy and the hope is that they clump around a decent classification. (I may not necessarily agree with that unless you can guarantee all of them have gone through the test cases carefully enough, but I know a few people involved in setting it up and they did think of that kind of thing; there are a good number of known test cases thrown out to assess how accurate people's judgement is and use that as a weighting factor.)

    NB: I'm not saying *you* didn't read the article, I've no idea. But saying "If one reads the article" makes you sound seriously stuck-up so I avoid doing that...