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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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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.
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.
Bemoan our lack of FTL transit and paw desperately at the sky, while our sad little mudball continues to shout itself to pieces over meaningless displays of tribalistic self-importance, treats the future as its greatest enemy, and continues to believe that such is the best course of action.
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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 :)
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It's hard to see how their talents would apply. What are they going to do, lobby for c to be relaxed?
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...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.
(Also, state the obvious to farm karma.)
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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.
Agreed. If it's the same density then 2.4x radius would be 14x the mass. I'm trying to picture a planet with intelligent pancake beings.
Or they'd have a stronger physiology. Or live in the water. Or perhaps a thousand other options we haven't thought of.
I have a feeling that they couldn't for very long. It's one thing to endure high G stress for a few minutes to get accelerate to high velocities, but for long periods of time? I can well imagine that being subject to 2.4g for days or weeks would probably lead to all sorts of nasty physiological effects. I'll wager your heart would be heavily stressed, and there would be a tendency for blood to pool.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Yeah, but that's not a very happy version of "survive". At constant 2.4G, you'll have major circulatory, digestive, and bone strength issues. On the other hand, after a few hundred generations, we'd have dwarves that would look right at home in a Tolkien story. Probably be incredibly strong and durable, too. Homo Sapiens Khazad.
The preceding comment is my own, and in no way construes an opinon of the Emperor of Mankind.
Given the billion-year timescales to evolution, I'd say the likelihood of such synchronicity is exceedingly small. Unless they've known about our planet for millions of years and have come to the conclusion that no possibility exists for technology allowing a visit.
"sometimes he felt that his whole life was a dream, and he wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it."
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.
Agreed. If it's the same density then 2.4x radius would be 14x the mass. I'm trying to picture a planet with intelligent pancake beings.
Hal Clement did a nice job in Mission of Gravity . The planet Mesklin has 3 g at the equator and 700 g at the poles. Nice read. Clement knows his physics, so it is quite interesting on that level as well.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
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
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
"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.
And wearing a goatee.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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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").
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.