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Kepler Confirms Exoplanet Inside Star's Habitable Zone
astroengine writes "Plenty of 'candidate' exoplanets exist, but for the first time, Kepler has confirmed the existence of an exoplanet orbiting its Sun-like star right in the middle of its 'habitable zone.' Kepler-22b is 2.4 times the radius of Earth and orbits its star every 290 days. 'This is a major milestone on the road to finding Earth's twin,' said Douglas Hudgins, Kepler program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. 'Kepler's results continue to demonstrate the importance of NASA's science missions, which aim to answer some of the biggest questions about our place in the universe.'"
Scientists don't yet know if Kepler-22b has a predominantly rocky, gaseous or liquid composition, but its discovery is a step closer to finding Earth-like planets.
Sure they do! Just look at the picture right next to the article! Man, who gets paid to Photoshop these spheres in front of bits of nebulae all day? That must be an interesting job.
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Mr. Sulu, set a course for Kepler 22b, warp 3, I'll be in my quarters looking over the latest Toupees Monthly.
Someone better start working on this faster than light drive. Of course, should we get there we'll probably find it a very tough planet to stand erect on.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I've looked a bit this morning and can't find anymore info about the star itself. What its apparent magnitude it? What constellation its in? Etc. All I can figure out is its referred to as Kepler 22 which only makes sense in relation to the program. But I'd love to be able to try and see the star through a telescope.
So, when will we be able to get a spectrographic reading on its atmosphere to see if there is free oxygen there? If an amateur using a 10" scope can see the dust around another star, is there any way the very best techniques using twin 10 meter scopes with' anti-aberration lasers can block out enough of the stars light to see just the planet's atmosphere?"
but you wouldn't wanna spend your vacation there... big planet, heavy gravity... girls there are probably built like East European wrestlers with thunder thighs that could swat you like a fly.
There is an exoplanet that may be habitable but it is far, far outside our reach.
What do we do now? Shoot radio broadcasts in that direction? Start building a probe?
Chevron and Conoco Phillips entering the space race.
Many of you may already be aware of this, but it is likely that going forward we will find these "goldilocks" planets with more regularity. Kepler luanched in 2009 with first observations in Jan 2010 and discovers planets using the transit method. Basically, a planet blocks part of its home star's light, and sensitive instruments can pick up on this difference in light. Two transits create a pattern to follow up on, the third transit is considered confirmation of the existence of a plant. So almost 3 earth years of observations means finally being able to detect planets with year long orbits (slight error in logic, depending on when you catch the planet in the act...)
So we are getting to the point where the data should start pouring in on planets more similar to our own. In another 12 months, I would expect to see hundreds if not thousands of planets similar to our own. That is when I think things get interesting. Say we find only 100 "habitable" planets... follow-up observations should give us an idea about the existence or nonexistence of life. Is it common? Is it uncommon? Are we just one of millions of life bearing planets? Are we an outlier? The mind boggles at what we will learn.
This is an interesting time to be alive :)
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
...to spend a ton of time, effort, and research to find Earths twin, only to find the race of carbon-based life forms living there has completely fucked up the entire planet by abusing its natural resources.
"Well shit. NASA, you're not gonna believe this...we found alien life alright...and they're as fucked up as we are."
Sure, because the science deniers are swayed by evidence.
When we land there and find that there is indeed such a planet, that's when we say: "Take that oh deniers of the science. It works bitches,"
If you're trying to show that science works, stick with examples where science has made seemingly outlandish predictions that later turned out to be true. Like the relativistic effects that need to be dealt with for GPS to work. Or go with the daily grind of science that is pumping out useful technologies in the form of airplanes, computers, plastics, and medicine.
Who'll get FTL drive first ...
Looks like the inner edge to me. With that much mass I suspect that it is Venusian (or maybe a boiling water planet).
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
But surely everyone can accept that all planets have an evil twin?
which is totally what she said
I seem to have missed all those people out there who think science doesn't work.
I know people skeptical of man-made global warming. I know of many others that aren't hard-core Darwinists (to various extents; not all Young Earth Creationists).
I know of absolutely no one who denies all of science as a discipline of knowledge. Definitely as a discipline which claims total knowledge, but not as a valid path of knowledge of the natural world.
I guess that's a long way around the barn to say "you are arguing with a straw man."
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
If you're trying to show that science works, stick with examples where science has made seemingly outlandish predictions that later turned out to be true.
Best example of this: radio waves. Hertz tried to prove that Maxwell's equations were bogus, because if they were correct there would be ridiculous things such as electromagnetic waves between antennas. It works, bitches!
i read the full article... 600
Not a whole lot. Clocks will just mean less to the world around us. Like DST, only moreso.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Best example of this: radio waves. Hertz tried to prove that Maxwell's equations were bogus, because if they were correct there would be ridiculous things such as electromagnetic waves between antennas. It works, bitches!
Wrong. Hertz created setups to deliberately try to prove that electric fields (and magnetic, but same thing) move at a speed less than infinite, to prove that Maxwell was right, not that he was wrong. Hertz also showed that light was an electromagnetic wave (or, rather, that they traveled at the same speed), and speculated that you could create light directly by ultra-high-frequency AC currents.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Basically you'd have to use very clever occluding telescopes and/or very wide inferometry to get a spectrogram separate from the star. But clever designs have been proposed recently. I dont think any made the 2010s budget due cost and technological immaturity.
The issue is that those who are "skeptical" of "man-made global warming" (with a few rare exceptions), and those who "aren't hard-core Darwinists" (a euphemism for "intelligent design", I take it?) by necessity have to reject science as a methodology in order to maintain their beliefs. They accept "science" as the name for a field which gets them useful toys, while completely rejecting the way in which it functions.
Also, the word "Darwinist" is asinine. It's a perfect illustration of the difference between people who take things on faith, and those who try to maintain a scientific approach to life in general. For the former, an idea is necessarily tied to the person who proposed it, and its validity hinges entirely on the character and reputation of that person. For the latter, the individual is irrelevant. Calling someone a "Darwinist" is as absurd as calling them "Newtonist", "Einsteinist", "Maxwellist", or "Saganist". It's a word which has been manufactured by theists for the sole purpose of framing the debate in a way with which they're comfortable; as the weighing of the opinions of prominent figures, rather than an honest, objective analysis of the data.
I really hope we find the Earth evil twin. Surely it will be a world swamped by corruption, hunger, war and incompetence.
Oh wait....
Why can't
It's an ugly planet, a bug planet
People are happy to trust scientists because for the most part, they have no idea what the scientists are saying. This is true up until the point the scientist says something the person disagrees with. "What do you mean human's evolved from apes!? You're a lunatic!" At this point the scientist is no longer an authority but a crackpot.
"by necessity have to reject science as a methodology"
Not at all. They just disagree with certain conclusions or in the case of man-made global warming think the case is inadequate so far.
That's not disagreeing with science as a methodology. Although evolution as a historical science is a hell of a lot different than physics, chemistry, or straightforward biology in the methodology department. That's not a fault. That just has to do with dealing with the past and not being able to run experiments.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Now what? Everybody says, "Woohoo!" and goes home? I just don't see how this has any importance, whatsoever, because I don't see how it can have any measurable effect on any decision made by anyone on this planet in the foreseeable future.
If you don't already see the importance in discovering life outside of our own planet, then I doubt you ever will. Go out into the world sometime, enjoy it, and see if you don't come back wanting more life in this universe. (Please note, I said 'into the world'. The 'world' is not just the human world. The human portion of this world is only the tiniest fraction of the greater whole. As Ed Abbey would say: Go to a national park, park your car, get out, and crawl on your stomach across the rocks and plants. Maybe, just maybe, then you'll learn something. He and I both doubt you will, but if you do that long enough your chances are better.)
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
This may be a bit like the hacker/cracker terminology discussion, though.
That's not how science works. I'm pretty sure someone asked your very same question when a 100 years ago a guy called Albert wrote about a dynamic Space Time. Nowadays we can't get by without his theories. Just because we research something that has no applicable effect today, doesn't mean it is without value.
And wearing a goatee.
eww, Mesklinite pr0n!
really, really, really think long and hard before GIS'ing that one, mate. I'm not kidding.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Just finished up having a conversation with my boss about this. He stated that he hates when they come out and "confirm" stuff like this when there is no way of "proving" it. He talked about how we are always changing theories and tried to use the declasification of Pluto as an example.. to which I countered that it was all semantics.. the facts about Pluto didn't change, only the classification.
We went back and forth for about 10 minutes with him trying to explain his point... the entire time I bit my toungue so that I wouldn't bring up the fact that he's a Catholic which is entirely based on faith. There's no proof of God existing yet billions of people (over multiple religions) believe there is.
He's normally a level headed guy and never pulls the religion card out, which is why I didn't either. But how he misinterpreted the article to mean scientists confirm there's a planet out there with liquid water really frustrated me.
I've got a bad case of the Mondays
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
[...] I don't see how it can have any measurable effect on any decision made by anyone on this planet in the foreseeable future.
Because the decisions made by the myopic semi-intelligent simians on some stupid backwater mud ball in the bad part of the galaxy are the only measure of "importance." Uh huh.
WALSTIB!
Who are these "deniers"? Theists? Whatever, hell with them. Here's the problem: So we find a carbon-life friendly exo. So what? Assuming there's no life intelligent enough to exchange radio signals with (probably a good bet) our next best plan is to explore it with robots. I'd down with that. But Kepler-22b is 600 light years from here. That's too far to make it a useful exploration target unless some crazy advances are made in relativity and so on. Seriously. How does that change anything? It doesn't.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
Is there any way we can see this? This is what protects us from becoming flesh flavored Hot Pockets(tm).
I disagree in the instance of androgenic global warming. It's just that science doesn't have all the data on that yet, nor do we know the models are correct. As to the rest, well, pretty much yeah.
I disagree in the instance of evolution. It's just that science doesn't have all the data on that yet, and I find it hard to believe that I'm related to monkeys. As to the rest, well, pretty much yeah.
I disagree in the instance of vaccinations. It's just that science doesn't have all the data on that yet, and I find it hard to believe that some lab geek knows what's best for my kids. As to the rest, well, pretty much yeah.
Do you see a pattern emerging?
Science is a methodology for finding truths, not a body of truths.
One can accept the facts of how an electric circuit works to light a lightbulb for example without accepting the facts of how man-made CO2 in the atmosphere warms the Earth. This does not have anything to do with accepting or rejecting science.
Rejecting results of experiments and observations conducted using the scientific method because they do not fit with one's preconceived notions or they are not conducive to making a profit is rejecting science.
a planet 600 light years away that stands a good chance of having liquid water.
When we land there
ROFL. Yeah, when we land there. It's ONLY 600 light years after all.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I suppose then, in order for people to disagree with your interpretation of your data then those people MUST be anti-science crackpots? Hasn't science ALWAYS been a contentious field where one set of people propose a theory, others disagree, more data is acquired, debates happen, etc? Isn't it a rejection of the scientific method to simply say "I'm right, you're wrong! Agree with me or you must be an ignorant-Scientology-creationist-idiot!"
To reject an argument simply because it is different from your own and then insult the people who proposed it is unscientific. Scientific "truth's" have a bad habit of changing as more data becomes available. That is, after all, why we call them theories and not laws.
I just don't see how this has any importance, whatsoever, because I don't see how it can have any measurable effect on any decision made by anyone on this planet in the foreseeable future.
Here's an interesting way it could have an effect:
1. US Government discovers habitable planets within, say, a century of here.
2. US Government scares the population of Earth by pointing out that this habitable planet might be filled with evil aliens who want to take over Earth.
3. US and foreign governments and UN all scramble to do whatever is necessary to take on the aliens, pouring massive amounts of cash into R&D, engineering projects, construction of defensive tools, space launching capabilities, and even pure research.
4. The economy recovers, because all this stuff has much the same effect on the world economy as WWII had on the US economy, but without the millions of people dying.
(Note: not entirely my idea)
I am officially gone from
Also, the word "Darwinist" is asinine. It's a perfect illustration of the difference between people who take things on faith, and those who try to maintain a scientific approach to life in general. For the former, an idea is necessarily tied to the person who proposed it, and its validity hinges entirely on the character and reputation of that person. For the latter, the individual is irrelevant. Calling someone a "Darwinist" is as absurd as calling them "Newtonist", "Einsteinist", "Maxwellist", or "Saganist".
I think it's merely recognition that Darwin is the most influential scientist ever. In the long run, he'll probably turn out to be more influential than the founders of the big religions of today such as Mohammad, St. Paul, Jesus Christ, and Buddha.
How about this... The human species has often viewed itself as occupying a privileged position in the universe. Earth, for instance, was often viewed as the center of the universe. Then, the heliocentric model was found to do a better job of explaining planetary motion. Later, it was found that the solar system occupies an undisinguished position in an undistinguished galaxy. Now, we are finding that planets are a dime-a-dozen. Discoveries like this one indicated that habitable worlds may not, in fact, be rare. Thus, the idea that our existence implies that the universe was created for us becomes less and less likely. I would argue that the question of whether humans occupy a privileged position in the universe does affect the decision making of many people.
I guess everyone enjoys having a bit of paranoid delusion. Religious people aren't out to put an end to science, despite the rhetoric of a few extremists. I've never come across anyone, religious or otherwise, who doesn't embrace science. Beyond minor details everyone I've ever known, including born-agains embraces science as the source of all our answers.
But I understand it's hard to be self-righteous if you don't believe everyone is out to get you.
I disagree in the instance of androgenic global warming.
Oh, dear. Not only are we releasing lots of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, now we're pumping it full of testosterone, too?
A planet in the habitable zone!!
Awesome.
600 Light years away though...
Could be a _long_ walk.
Better pack some snacks n stuff.
Bye bye!
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
ROFL. Yeah, when we land there. It's ONLY 600 light years after all.
I get it, I really do. We've only barely been to our own moon. We can't even get to mars. If we said we were going to send a probe you'd have every right to laugh, let alone a manned mission.
But hear me out first.
Mankind has only been engaged in industry for a couple of hundred years. And that was enough to get us to the moon. And humanity has no signs of ending anytime soon. What will we be capable of in another thousand years? Ten thousand? A million? Because if we don't do anything stupid we have that time. Our sun has a few billion years left in it.
It's important to look for extrasolar planets. It is important to see if they can maintain human life.
Reason being, that's the first step. We won't ever try to leave this solar system if we have no expectations to be able to survive out there. Now we are finding out that there are planets out there that might be able to support us. Now we have a reason to want to try to reach them. Yes, 600 light years is an uncrossable barrier to us. Today. But if you told the Wright brothers that we'd be walking on the moon in 70 years they would have told you you're nuts. They wouldn't have believed it. Another uncrossable barrier. To them. Not to us.
Finding these planets is exciting. It says that there is a reason to try to go. It kindles a desire to go see them. And given a million years of human progress, the science *will* come. Maybe it won't be as sexy as warp ships. Maybe it'll just be colony ships moving at a fraction of light speed and take a thousand years to get there. But one way or another, we will get there.
We will most likely visit this planet. Someday.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Not at all. They just disagree with certain conclusions or in the case of man-made global warming think the case is inadequate so far.
There are a few such individuals, but they're extremely rare. 5 years ago, I would have fallen into that category. It didn't take long to figure out where I went wrong. 5 years after I corrected my error, I see all the same characters still telling the same tired old lies, still ignoring the data, and still refusing to look at the science as separate from the politics. You generally cannot have a rational discussion with an AGW denier because their objections are not based in reason - they are emotional beliefs firmly embedded in political ideology. Like I said, there are exceptions, but they're so rare they're not worth mentioning.
Of course, there are plenty of people who DO believe in global warming, who also have a shit understanding of the science, and care more about the politics. The difference is that they're not rejecting science on that topic, though many of them certainly do when it comes to various types of new-age woo-woo.
Although evolution as a historical science is a hell of a lot different than physics, chemistry, or straightforward biology in the methodology department. That's not a fault. That just has to do with dealing with the past and not being able to run experiments.
If you think that we can't do experiments that show evolution in action, you must have stopped reading the literature shortly after Darwin published .....
Even if we ignore the studies that show the development of new complex traits in laboratory species, and long-term studies demonstrating speciation in the wild, we make predictions all the time about the types of transitional forms which should be found in the fossil record. Every time one of those predictions comes true, it further validates the model. The theory itself also posits certain things that we should NOT find - the classic example being a rabbit fossil in pre-cambrian strata. Finding such fossils would, at the very least, throw the theory into serious jeopardy. Likewise, we make similar predictions about DNA, and there we can run experiments much more easily. These are all forms of experimentation since, at it's very core, experimentation is about gathering new data and seeing whether it supports or opposes current models. Whether you do that by playing with the genetic code, or by making predictions and then going out into the field and digging ... either way you're doing experiments.
I would argue that the question of whether humans occupy a privileged position in the universe does affect the decision making of many people.
...in how they relate to each other, the non-human life on this planet, and our collective environment from second to second, day to day, year to year, generation to generation, and so on and so on.
Not too long ago, believing the earth wasn't the center of the universe could get a person killed. Remove certain strong beliefs and people wont feel they can throw anyone to the fire for simple, erroneous judgements. This leads to enhanced freedom from persecution and greater general happiness, I recon. Maybe learning we're not unique will lead us to treating our world with more respect.
To not waste space, I'll also give a short list of NASA-research impacted inventions:
-microwaves:
--everything from the microwave oven, the cell phone, GPS, and wireless internet signals are understood through techniques originally used by NASA.
-velcro
--originally designed for space suits
-any number of materials engineering breakthroughs
--all I know is, without carefully designed, ceramic tiles, going into space would always be a one way trip. I'm not a mat. engineer, but I'm sure those ceramics have helped all sorts of industrial processes. (Say, electrical power generation where you've got tons of heat to insulate and transport. Or, simply moving heat away from a CPU, perhaps?)
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
Out of curiosity, was Hertz right or wrong about the last part you mentioned, about creating light by AC currents?
The density estimate on the official Kepler page is estimated to be 14.7g/cc. That's somewhere between lead and gold. To sustain a density like that, assuming there is a fair amount of iron present (a very common metal readily created in large stars), the planet would have to be near half gold, uranium, or something equally unlikely.
Also, if the mass and radius (and therefore density) given are anywhere near correct, that's 20 gravities.
Something ain't right. What elements of that density are that common in a star of that population, age and metallicity? How would a planet of such density form, and in the process rid itself of pesky, feather-light extremely common materials like iron? The mass can be estimated fairly accurately with Dopper measurements. If the transit is reporting a size of 2.4 Earth radii, either the mass estimate is wrong, the transit data is wrong, or this is the most exotic, highly-radioactive metalball you're ever likely to find. What am I missing here?
There may be liquid water, but that planet's going to be as radioactive as it gets, with a hell of a lot of heat coming from the inside out.
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
So, instead of answering the question, you argue that I'm just not smart enough to see the obvious? How quaint.
No where did I say you weren't smart enough to understand something. I said that I doubt you'll ever have an appreciation for astronomical research, it's goals, and it's place in the world. You can prove me wrong by simply:
1.) Coming up with a compelling alternative to projects such as this as a national investment in R&D. Would you prefer finance researchers create new financial products such as more mortgage-backed securities or credit-default swaps?
2.) Proving that projects such as this study have never and can never design nor research something useful to society.
3.) Admitting you were wrong and that looking into the stars can teach us all a thing or two.
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
Kepler can only see planets with orbits that are edge-on, so they pass in front of the star and make a noticeable drop in it's brightness. Make the reasonable assumptions that the orbits are randomly distributed, and stars with planets in the habitable zone are also randomly distributed. Then we should expect that for every planet Kepler finds, there will be one 7 times as close it does NOT find, and another 340 more in between those distances it does not find.
Additionally, Kepler is only looking at 1/350th of the sky, in the direction of the constellation Cygnus. So add another factor of 350 more planets if you were searching in all directions. That gives you another factor of 7 in expected nearest distance.
Think of it this way: Kepler was not designed to find every nearby planet. It was designed to find the ones that happened to be in the right orbits so that it could see them, in a small part of the sky. It will give us a statistical sample of planets, from which we can estimate the total population. For each one it finds, there are 50-100,000 more out there, which is a LOT of planets.
I don't know. Google doesn't seem much help. I think the frequency is too high (light is in the terahertz, while most radios only go up to giga-hertz at most). Logically, it should be possible (it is basically the same as radio antennas, but amazingly high frequency), but I cannot find any evidence anyone has done it.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Kepler can only see planets with orbits edge-on to us, and it's only looking in one specific direction. For each planet it finds, we can expect there are 50,000 more that are closer. On average, the closest will be 30-40 times closer than the one it finds, thus 15-20 light years in the case of Kepler-22b. Still a long way away, but easier to get to.
And no, the next best plan is not to explore it with robots, it's to use the Sun itself as a gravitational lens in a mucking huge telescope. To use it for that, you need to get to the focus distance of the Sun, which is more than 550 AU out. As a practical matter, you likely need to be more like 1000 AU out, since at the minimum distance you are focusing light that just barely grazes the Sun's surface, and the light from the Sun itself is hard to block out in that case. Farther away you can use an occulting disk to block the Sun + some margin around it.
Because of the huge diameter of the Sun as a lens, you can get absurd levels of detail at a nearby star, on the order of 0.4 meters per light year of distance.
So do I, it would be a real bummer to find the Good Twin(tm) out there.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
I'd say he was wrong, the wavelength would be sub-atomic so it wouldn't be a current by any definition I've seen
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Send a probe and hope that Not Sure figures out how to communicate with it.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Remember that Kepler looks at stars using the "transit" method. Basically it stares at the little point of light for a looooong time, never blinking and waits to see if the light drops just a teeny bit due to something passing in front of it. How long? Well since it has to calculate the orbital period, it must watch at bare minimum for at least 1 year to see 2 passes (assuming its looking for a planet in an earthlike orbit around a sun-like star). Then, in order to make sure that it isn't some OTHER planet passing in front of the star, or an object in our solar system, or "sun spots" on the star, or maybe space butterflies getting in the way, the scientists must wait for a THIRD confirming pass (at the predicted time of course with the same drop in intensity) to be sure the observation is "real".
I think these guys have found the first "earth-sized" object that has made three confirmed passes. Note that the period is a bit less than a year so they've had enough time to get three observations in the three years. Soon, they'll be announcing confirming "third passes" on more and more planets that have periods in roughly the one-year window that indicates it's in the habitable zone around a sun-like star.
There are two things to note here: First, Kepler can only see planets that pass between it and the target star, that is the planet's orbit must be almost exactly edge on for us to see it. How close to edge on must it be? Well for example; the earth's orbit is a circle (very) roughly 100 million miles from the sun and the sun is roughly 1 million miles across. So, if the orbit was tilted more than 1/100 or 1%, from some distant observer, they wouldn't see it cross in front. (The size of the earth is inconsequential in this calculation because it is so small in relation to the sun). Similarly, for the kind of planets Kepler is looking at circling around sun-like stars, we are only seeing BY PURE CHANCE 1% of them. So if we see 100 planets circling these stars in their habitable zone; that means there are really 10,000 of them! So for a sample size of 150,000 stars, that means that one out of every 15 sunlike stars has planet in it's habitable zone! Amazing, especially when you consider our galaxy to have perhaps 10 BILLION sunlike stars!
Secondly, Kepler was launched before astronomers "discovered" that the best place to find "habitable" planets wasn't around sunlike stars but around smaller cooler stars. For various reasons, the habitable zone (where water can be a liquid) is proportionately larger in these "mini" solar systems (everything is smaller, like the orbits). They realized that even if a planet was tidally "locked" so that one face was always facing the sun, the atmosphere would redistribute the heat enough so the planet would be "habitable" (must sure be windy though). Another advantage is that these smaller stars live much longer than our sun giving life longer to come to well... life! Finally these smaller stars are much more numerous than sunlike stars. Anyway, I think Kepler was focusing mainly on sunlike stars and not these smaller, more numerous and perhaps easier to detect (because the orbits are smaller you don't have to wait as long for three passes) targets. Maybe Kepler II will go after them!
Just so that you know, Kepler is likely (has already?) been giving tons of other interesting data. I understand that its sensors are sensitive (and stable enough!) so as to detect possible sunspots in these stars. Also by paying close attention to the timing of the transits, they can determine whether other planets are gravitationally "tugging" at the transiting planet and perturbing its orbit (that's how Neptune was discovered). Finally, the resolution of the 'light curve" of the transit may be sharp enough to reveal any large moons in orbit around the transiting planet. So even if the planet in the habitable zone is too large to support life as we know it, it may have a right sized moon! (think "Pandora").
I'm afraid WE'RE the evil twin, then.
Have you looked at South America from space?
Orbits are not randomly distributed though. They often rotate within (or close to) a particular plane.
Meanwhile, scientists and the population at large on Kepler-22b are celebrating the discovery of Sol-3a: a planet that exhibits the same livable properties as Kepler-22b and offers the promise of an alternative to their resource-abused, irreversibly-climate-warming, short-term-doomed home world.
That would only work if we could confirm the existence of oil on the planet.
Some people are just skeptical that computer models = science. I have another name for a computer model: a computer hypothesis. It is nothing more than a hypothesis that needs to be tested experimentally. The models make a testable prediction and science requires actually waiting to see if the prediction comes true.
Could the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis be true? Sure. Is it true? There is still insufficient data to demonstrate it, but maybe in another 50-100 years we will have enough. If the evidence were really as solid as a lot of you guys seem to believe I don't think there would be nearly as much skepticism about it. Controversy in science tends to be inversely proportional to the amount of available evidence. Once proven the topic will no longer spawn 1000+ posts on slashdot. People will just yawn. Actually the topic already makes me yawn because true or not there is nothing we as a species can do about it. Well, short of a world government police state with 1984-level surveillance powers all over the planet or some major scientific breakthrough that makes people not want to burn stuff anymore. It is science that caused the problem. Only science can fix it. The only remotely realistic solution I've heard is for the entire planet to go 100% nuclear, but who is going to enforce that? Again, you need a world government to do that. And you'd also have to make electricity a hell of a lot cheaper than it is now or people are still going to burn stuff for various purposes.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Thsi is the new and intresting thing:
Previously the methods for finding planets has favoured massive objects, and they found lots of Jupiter size things....
Now we get a different picture: This method favoures thigns close to the star, and here the smaller planets are in majority: Check out the data from NASA: total: 2,326. Of these, 207 are approximately Earth-size, 680 are super Earth-size, 1,181 are Neptune-size, 203 are Jupiter-size and 55 are larger than Jupiter.
Next question is what is the minimum detection size for this method? Looks like the data lacks anything smaller than "approximately Earth-size"
Per Ohlin
I just don't see how this has any importance, whatsoever, because I don't see how it can have any measurable effect on any decision made by anyone on this planet in the foreseeable future.
Imagine that you were considering a move to the southern hemisphere, building a small (15-25 meter) radio telescope, and starting your own personal SETI project focusing on the most likely stars within 50 light years. The importance of this discovery is statistical. It makes it more likely that there is a habitable planet within a more realistic travel/communication range of 50 - 100 light years. It may be a slight effect but it is a measurable effect. If it encourages more people to get involved with passive and active SETI projects then it at least served some small purpose.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Do you see a pattern emerging?
A see a fallacious pattern, in the service of rhetoric, sure. But you know perfectly well you're ignoring the key part of this. It's not about "denying climate change." It's about raising an eyebrow when someone like Al Gore, who's positioned himself and his friends to make millions of dollars off of their hysterical characterizations of the situation, insist that human activity is the (and the only) driver of climate change. And that putting US tax dollars into specific funds, projects, and foreign investment groups - in which he is invariably invested - will solve the problem.
I will gladly deny his shrill, breathless assertions and his oily pitches for pumping money through his world-saving carbon credit cash cow operations as an accurate representation and treatment of the situation. And there are millions of people who echo his lines, more or less word for word, or who have their own vested interests in similar distortions.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
I didn't stop reading after Darwin was published. Space and lack of desire to spawn tangents prevent me from interacting with some of your comments.
Suffice it to say, these folks aren't rejecting science per se.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
We do it in synchotrons all the time - accelerate electrons around the ring, generating pretty much the full spectrum of EM up to X-Rays / Gamma Rays.
The space around the deflecting magnets can be considered as a "wire" since electrons are moving through it, and the bending process supplies the oscillation - i.e. AC current.
The "current" in a synchotron is essentially AC with a very strong DC bias (since you're pushing a ton of electrons in one-way through that wire).
But the orientation of the orbital plane around a star most probably IS randomly distributed. That's the point.
The wavelength of light is way bigger than sub atomic. 700-400nm is pretty big compared to a atom.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
But the orientation of the orbital plane around a star most probably IS randomly distributed.
Take care. Making too many assumptions has ruined more than one theory. What entitles us to assume this ??
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
Science is a methodology for finding truths, not a body of truths.
No, it is not. There is no such thing as a "methodology for finding truths". There is only such a thing as "a broadly shared view upon what constitutes a way to plausibly describe causal relationships". Science is a way to describe the world we live in, including ourselves, in such a way as to yield reliable results. "Reliability" is defined outside of science; as a matter of fact, we are right here and right now engaged in discussing the definition of "reliability". QFD.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
Right, so to summarise, AGW hasn't yet been proved and even if ti were true there isn't anything we could do about it anyway, because of your ultra right wing political prejudices?
Do you really think it's OK to do nothing for another 100 years, simply because a few nutjobs can't bear the idea of their world having to change?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
My suspicion too. (See post above.)
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
It's the "Hanz and Franz" climate theory. They not only make your planet warmer, they are here to PUMP! *doublehandclap* YOUR PLANET UP! *flex*
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
Well, there was a post a little while back about somebody actually making an antenna resonant at visible light wavelengths, as a possible future solar collector. If you attached an oscillator to it the antenna would emit light - in theory.
The problem is that visible light has a frequency in the hundreds of terahertz, and wavelengths in the hundreds of nanometers.
Antenna design already starts getting tricky in the microwave regions - where you often are using things like waveguides and such since ordinary wiring doesn't work so well. Creating an oscillator or a rectifier that works in the range of visible light will be a serious challenge. Once you do, then direct conversion of electrical/light energy would become possible.
Read up on terahertz technology sometime. In a nutshell optical technology has been moving further and further into the infrared, and radio technology has been moving steadily up the frequency ladder, and the Terahertz region is where they're starting to collide.
I agree that too many assumptions can ruin a theory, but what's more important is that the assumptions you use aren't arbitrary. That the orbital planes are randomly distributed isn't an arbitrary assumption. Planetary orbital planes typically follow their parent stars' spin axis, and that spin axis is arbitrarily oriented (Here's a bad astronomy link where they discuss it. That's the best reference I could find right now). Thus, the orbital planes of the planets are very very very likely randomly oriented.
Just for kicks, if that's true then we can calculate the transit probability. If we observe a star that is approximately the size of our sun, and the orbital radius of one of its planets is the same as Earth's, the chances of the planet's orbit crossing in front of the star as viewed from a point very far away is ~0.005. That's pretty rare, although if one assumes that there are ~5 planets in the system (which is an arbitrary assumption), we now have a ~2.5% chance of seeing one of the planets transit the star if we look for long enough. And there are a lot of stars out there.
The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
It isn't really a slippery slope fallacy in the classic sense. Slippery slope fallacy is about cause and effect- essentially domino effect gone mad.
GP just showed that the GGP's weak defense of his position was vague enough that you could use it to defend any crackpot position. That shows the GGP either has an argument so vague as to be logically invalid, or that the GGP has just stumbled across the world's first universally applicable, perfect argument. I'm going to guess that former.
Seeing as we're playing the fallacy game today, I probably don't need to point out that your post is almost pure ad hominem. By choosing Al Gore as a target, that's most likely Strawman. Possibly a "guilt by association" fallacy, too, depending on how much we're supposed to hate Al Gore.
That is, your only argument against the data, science and predictive mathematical models of climate change is "Al Gore argues the case for it, and he stands to make money if he's correct". It couldn't get more fallacious than "I will gladly deny his shrill, breathless assertions and his oily pitches for pumping money through his world-saving carbon credit cash cow operations as an accurate representation and treatment of the situation."- you don't like the argument because he's shrill and oily?
Three things to remember:
1) Al Gore is not a climate scientist. He is not the one behind the theory, nor the one who produced the models. Attacking him is strawman, when you should be tackling the models themselves.
2) The fact that Al Gore argues for it while also standing to make money if he's right is not in itself an argument against it. A theory and its proponents are not logically linked.
3) Its fairly reasonable to assume that Al Gore might have invested his money in climate change related companies specifically because he believed the science and wanted to support it, or because he believed the science and wanted to invest in what he believed would be the next big thing. That is, the reverse of supporting a theory to bolster existing investments.
Many lifeforms thrive right here on earth in environments very hostile to human life. Life can exist on something else that doesn't confirm to earth...
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
those who "aren't hard-core Darwinists" (a euphemism for "intelligent design", I take it?) by necessity have to reject science as a methodology in order to maintain their beliefs
Just plain wrong.
Intelligent design does not rule out evolution. It just suggests something more than mere chance affecting mutations between generations.
There's no established science that needs to be rejected to maintain this as a belief.
Direct observation of quasars and other celestial objects.
We can deffinetivly identify the direction of rotation of pulsars as well as a variety of other objects with accretion discs. From these observations we have determined that from our perspective, the orbital plan is esssentially random.
Since we know that angular momentum is conserved, it is safe to assume that the original stars that formed these objects had a random distribution of orbital plans relative to us.
Since we know stars have a random distribution of orbital plans, it is safe to assume that the planets round thoes stars do as well...
All based on direct observation.
I agree we are in a bit of a slump, space-wise. No shuttle anymore. No moon missions.
But I think the original "right stuff" guys wouldn't be surprised by our current state of affairs. They knew it was all based on funding, and PR, and the cold war. Russia not a threat anymore? Space program (aka gigantic propaganda "we're awesome" machine) would be scaled back.
But you're not thinking long term.
How about a thousand years from now, or ten thousand? Or a million? Do you think we'll stagnate that long? I don't. Things will pick back up inside of a couple of hundred years, tops.
Progress does happen because we do things. We'll get back to that soon-ish. And by soon-ish I mean sometime in the next thousand years. There are plenty of good reasons to get back up there. Orbital mining, zero g labs and construction sites, asteroid collision prevention...the list goes on and on.
We're going back. The current slump is just a hiccup in history.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
4. The economy recovers, because all this stuff has much the same effect on the world economy as WWII had on the US economy, but without the millions of people dying.
(Note: not entirely my idea)
There is at least one major drawback to this working in the same way. A significant portion of what made the US economy so powerful post-WWII was the fact that in the process of prosecuting that conflict a healthy chuck of the manufacturing capability of the rest of the world was reduced to rubble.
Intelligent design does not rule out evolution. It just suggests something more than mere chance affecting mutations between generations.
There's no established science that needs to be rejected to maintain this as a belief.
Bullshit. ID claims, specifically, that natural processes are not sufficient to explain certain features found in various organisms. Since evolution claims the polar opposite, ID is, ipso facto, a rejection of evolution. This would not in and of itself mean that they're rejecting science; however, since the entire argument basically hinges on ignoring inconvenient findings of evolutionary science while leaning on a god-of-the-gaps fallacy, it's safe to say that ID is a rejection of the scientific method in addition to being a rejection of evolutionary theory.
If ID simply claimed "well, yeah, this stuff COULD happen naturally, but we think god helped out anyway", that would be a different story. But that would require honesty, would make clear the fact that their position is entirely religious, and would make obvious the fact that they don't actually have any evidence to either disprove evolution or support an "intelligent creator". So they're ... "unlikely" ... to take that approach.