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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.
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
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.
see! THAT was just a preview.
Wail till they're sure
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
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.