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."

Comments

Great Super Earths.

[jellomizer]

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.

Re:Great Super Earths.

[Jason Levine]

Maybe they'd conquer Earth to turn it into some sort of weird alien spa. "Take a relaxing trip to Terra 3! Bask in the warming rays of Terra's star. The lighter gravity will make you feel years younger. All of your needs will be catered to by Terran slaves. We don't even mind if you break a few. We've got billions more."

Re:Great Super Earths.

[vlm]

... the increase in gravity isn't all that much: "For example, a planet with 5 times Earth’s mass but twice the radius ...

So, they're saying its kind of like the difference in average weight between shopping at Target vs Walmart? I guess thats OK then.

Threat

[Rik Sweeney]

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 :)

Re:Threat

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

We call those "Berserker Probes"...

Pretty much the game-theory asshole's take on colonization via Von Neumman machines. The argument goes that, in an environment where diplomatic missives can only travel at the speed of light, and hypothetical relativistic kinetic-kill vehicles a few factors of ten slower, you have to do unto others before they do unto you...

about HARPS

[ThorGod]

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.