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50 New Exoplanets Found, Billions More Await
The Bad Astronomer writes "Astronomers using a sensitive spectrograph have just announced the existence of 50 more planets orbiting nearby Sun-like stars. The important things to note: 1) Sixteen of them are super-Earths, and 2) 40% of all Sun-like stars appear to have at least one planet with less mass than Saturn."
That is the last thing I want to hear. All full of Life forms that are use to gravity much greater then what we are use full. If they beat us to space they will land on earth being smarter and stronger then us. I like the Old Grays small stature and wimpy. Sure they may have massive mental powers but I can really whack them hard with a big stick.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Do any of them appear strangely, completely metallic?
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
They prefer to call their own planets "Krypton"
The problem is that if these planets do indeed harbour life, it could be at least as technologically advanced, if not more than us. This means that they pose a threat to our planet.
I say that we concentrate all our efforts into building space faring vehicles capable of travelling to these planets with the soul intent of destroying them. Before they destroy us.
If you find this too ridiculous then imagine Rick Perry saying it :)
Summation 2
Billions more await?
Did the submitter/editor think for a second how it sounds and what it means?
a) Billions of them are dying to be "discovered" by us humans?
b) If we know there a billion of them are waiting, by definition we also know they exist and we found them already. So how can they be "waiting"?
Dibs.
Best one I've ever lived on, in fact.
Has anyone been filling the terms to the drake equation as we narrow down the ranges for the various terms?
This is likely to be informative:
"HARPS is the ESO facility for the measurement of radial velocities with the highest accuracy currently available. It is fibre-fed by the Cassegrain focus of the 3.6m telescope in La Silla.
The instrument is built to obtain very high long term radial velocity accuracy (on the order of 1 m/s). To achieve this goal, HARPS is designed as an echelle spectrograph fed by a pair of fibres and optimised for mechanical stability. It is contained in a vacuum vessel to avoid spectral drift due to temperature and air pressure variations. One of the two fibres collects the star light, while the second is used to either record simultaneously a Th-Ar reference spectrum or the background sky. The two HARPS fibres (object + sky or Th-Ar) have an aperture on the sky of 1"; this produces a resolving power of 115,000 in the spectrograph. Both fibres are equipped with an image scrambler to provide a uniform spectrograph pupil illumination, independent of pointing decentering."
1.) It's an optical telescope.
2.) It's on the face of the earth (I find this amazing.)
I got the impression from Frank Drake's book that astronomy was 'best done' by satellite radio telescope.
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
I for one, welcome our eaty, meaty, bone chewing OverLords!
Yes, but how many have less gas than Uranus?
(sorry)
I eat only the real part of complex carbohydrates.
I had the same question. What I'm curious to know is how random their sample of sun-like stars is. If they cherry picked them, their results can't be used for estimating Drake parameters. (But who could blame them their first couple times out?)
Note 3 of the article:
"the planets found by HARPS are around stars close to the Sun. This makes them better targets for many kinds of additional follow-up observations"
Note 8 is also relevant:
"With large numbers of measurements, the detection sensitivity of HARPS is close to 100% for super-Earths of ten Earth-masses with orbital periods of up to one year, and even when considering planets of three Earth masses with a one-year orbit, the probability of detection remains close to 20%."
So, 'back of the envelope' guestimating, their results may only apply to stars close to the sun and represent a lower bound to whatever frequencies they calculate. I don't think anyone knows, yet, whether stars near earth are atypical of the galaxy at large or not.
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
Once we can be sure there is no one watching... once we can be sure no one is watching...
Well... you'll see.
P.S.
In Soviet Russia.. exoplanet find YOU!
This sig is not paradoxical or ironic.
There is one think I really wish I'd see in the summary: what stage of "discovery" are we at. Is this the first pass of the raw data? Or is this confirmation of unconfirmed data. We've seen some pretty high-profile new planets evaporate into thin air^h^h^h^h ether.
At the same time, I am still excited about this explosion of new discovery. If, somehow, we can continue to not self-destruct for another 50 years or so, we will see a cataloging of our galaxy that was only imagined in science fiction
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
We use gravitational lensing to find these planets. Smaller planets are harder to find. Less gravity, less lensing.
So it's not surprising to find the bigger stuff first. I'm sure there are plenty of other planets with wimpy earth like size and gravity waiting to be found.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
I initially misread the article subject as "50 New Exploits Found, Billions More Await".
"unless it is a water-world (what else is liquid or low density in the habitable zone?) with incredibly immense ocean depths" Um, the home world of Jar-Jar Binks?
This is really earth-shattering news, so to speak. Lets see. If each one of those planets has 50 creation stories, then... AARRGGHH! (head explodes).
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
I'm sure that, with all the earth-like planets we find, we will STILL only find one where the advanced and powerful race has consistently worked against exploring all that it sees.... Earth
Mod me down, I shall become more off-topic than you could possibly imagine.
Yet anther sky survey shows that we can see many planets from here, some in the zone that would support life as we (would like to) know it. Couple that with the building blocks of life being found in comets and meteors, it really is not much of a stretch to think that the StrarTrek universe where life is common and all the intelligent races are related at a fundamental level. It is the heigth of hubris to think that we are alone in a Universe this big. I only hope we grow up a bit before we start encountering our distant relations -- maybe the speed of light velocity limit are our crib bars...
Why are we spending money finding planets we'll never see when there are kids starving to death?
insert comment --> here
Gold is a wonderful conductor. Silver is slightly better, if I remember correctly from the handbook on the electrical and chemical properties of elements my father had, but it oxidizes rather too readily. (If you could solve the reactivity of it, it would absolutely trounce copper for the interconnects on ICs just as copper did when it replaced aluminium.) So, yeah, for long-distance wiring, running gold cables would be wonderful - at least, underground. Gold's a bit too soft for my liking for overhead cabling, given the mass.
It's not just the purity of the elements that are interesting, of course. It seems likely that the extremely low pressures involved would produce some fascinating structures and compounds. (One of the first things I learned on the Internet was that the compound C3O is stable in gas glouds.) Just as buckyballs and graphene were only recently discovered and have the potential to revolutionize material science and electronics respectively, it seems reasonable to believe that there are exotic forms that only exist in space and have not been discovered that will be just as revolutionary in future. (I don't know if a diamond the size of Earth would have much in the way of interesting properties - besides the potential for destroying the entire gemstone market - but I'm sure some future geek explorer will take the time to find out.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Given the odds, surely its a mathematical certainty there's at least 2-3 replicas of earth in our galaxy alone...
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
in the last 1-2 years, our astronomy technology didnt make a major breakthrough to suddenly discover 50-55 exoplanets at once. what happened ? whats the occasion ? 50 in a row to boot ? what will you do next ? 'discover' planets with life ? and then the stage after that is where you ...............
Read radical news here
Bender: Would you censor The Venus de Venus just because you can see its spewers?
Planet Express Ship: Ugh! Disgusting! While you're at it why not create a National Endowment for strip clubs?!
Bender: Why not Indeed!
Hectice, baby, Mercator says hello to you
"the planets found by HARPS are around stars close to the Sun. This makes them better targets for many kinds of additional follow-up observations"
Good point; this would seem to make them likely to be similar to the sun, since local stars usually form within the same nebulae, same time, and same conditions. Still, I don't think this violates the SPIRIT of the drake equation, since our main interest is in figuring out how likely it is that we'll meet aliens someday. Sampling nearby stars is perhaps MORE relevant to us than a general estimate throughout the universe.
I want to leave this planet, full of pollution, data centers consuming power like cities, wars, crime and stuff. How do I get to these SuperEarths? In my Prius or something??
We're just doomed to peering at them through telescopes, either on the ground or in LEO and guessing what it must be like to actually land on them. It's not like anyone's going to be able to reach them anytime soon, or is even working towards interplanetary (let alone interstellar) travel, with NASA going on facing budget cuts.
"..One hosts to look them up, one DNS to find them, and in the darkness BIND them."
If some nearby stars have habitable planets, and some of those have life, and some of those have intelligent life, and some of those wish to dominate Earth... we're not ready!
We would have to:
1. Establish resource self-sufficiency, so we wouldn't have to trade for vital necessities on ruinous terms
2. Become discreet, and stop broadcasting all our weaknesses and information to potential competitors
3. Unite, in our approach to dealing with extraterrestrial forces
4. Learn of the New Message from God, which reveals the intentions and character of the intervening extraterrestrial forces, and how to face them
According to http://www.eso.org/public/images/eso1134f/
the planet HD85512b (one of the new planets discovered) is a super Earth and lies in the habitable zone of it's parent star.
It's already been speculated that there are far more red or brown dwarf stars than previously thought and these stars can have habitable zones. The parent stars of the only habitable candidates discovered so far (Gliese 581, and HD85512) are both significantly smaller than our star. Does this mean we should change our search parameters and concentrate more on finding exoplanets that orbit smaller stars (2/3's mass of our sun and down)?
c'mon, consider the subject matter
the proper metric here is "billyuns and billyuns"
show some respect for carl!
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
+1 insightful (if I had points)
I suspect the truth is that we don't have anything like enough information to know if looking close to Sol is skewing results. On the one hand, it may be that some regions of space are particularly friendly to planet formation (in which case a local search might reveal more planets than is typical - our system being a consequence of that planet-friendliness). On the other hand, it may be that the distribution is relatively uniform (in which case, a local search might reveal fewer planets than is typical - since our presence 'uses up' some of the local quota)
Of course, we’ve yet to discover a system with as many planets as Sol - but that's likely to be due (at least in part) to the difficulty in detecting low mass bodies at interstellar distances. (after all, we only discovered Pluto in the 1930s, and Eris in 2005 - and by comparison, those are on our doorstep)
Thought experiment: if we were to look at a hypothetical twin of the Sol system located (say) a couple of hundred light years away, how many of those planets would we be able to detect with our current technology? (I have no idea what the answer is - but I'd be fascinated to find out)
Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.
I am modifying the Drake Equation to compensate for the probable cause of why we've not heard from Extra Terrestrials yet:
N=R * fp * ne * fl * fi * fc * L * STFU = 0
Check my math please but I think that's right
Yeah, I don't know. They're measuring wobbliness and changes in brightness (I think). Just off that, it'd seem like all they could do is measure the total mass of the planetary system and (maybe) estimate a lower bound for the number of planets. (i.e. How many times does it flicker, by how intense, and the wobbliness.) It's impressive, really.
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
In other news the universe is once again more complex than we initially thought.