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Kepler Discovers First Earth-Sized Exoplanets
ananyo writes "NASA's Kepler telescope has reached one of its major mission milestones: finding an Earth-sized planet outside the Solar System. What's more, it has done it twice in the same star system. Whizzing around the star Kepler-20, about 290 parsecs (946 light-years) from Earth, is not only an Earth-sized planet, but also something just a touch smaller — a Venus."
Um, what? What exactly do you think Johannes Kepler was, a washing machine?
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Damn that's fast!
Ascalante: Your bride is over 3,000 years old.
Kull: She told me she was 19!
Ummm ... as much as Kepler is the name of the device, Johannes Kepler laid out the mathematics of orbits. You know, Kepler's Laws.
Naming stars Kepler-20 (or whatever) is naming them after important scientists ... and since it's looking for things which orbit, it's quite apt.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Zzzzzzz??? Really??
Twenty five years ago, finding an exoplanet was considered to be some forward looking science that might not ever happen, and the belief then was that planets were likely quite rare. Ten years ago we'd found some planets, but they were all gas giants.
Now, we find a planet which is close to Earth in size, in a solar system with 5 planets in it, 1000 light years away That's some heavy stuff.
If you're incapable of understanding that this is actually pretty significant, maybe you should go back to your coloring books ... the estimate of the number of planets there are likely to be in our galaxy alone has likely gone up by several orders of magnitude in the last 20 years or so.
We're quickly changing from "oh there's likely not many planets" to "the universe is full of them" ... it's hard not to think that even if it's not what we'd call intelligent life, there's likely more than a few places that have evolved some form of life.
The more we see stuff like this, the more we see just how vast and astounding the universe around us actually is.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
the apparent size of this planet is the same as an object of 0.5 mm on the moon.
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
When you have a sample set of 1; then adding 2 data points is a fantastic expansion in scope even if we are quite positive that we do not have all of the potential information (soon to be discovered). At this early stage, finding a handful of other planetary systems has effectively multiplied what we know about planetary systems a thousandfold or more, even if we consider ourselves to be mostly blind still.
- Toast
We're quickly changing from "oh there's likely not many planets" to "the universe is full of them"
I wouldn't quite say that.
I don't really think that the estimates of how many planets there may be has increased. Instead, our technology has increased so that we can actually start finding the planets that we've always assumed were there.
The somewhat-dubious values that Drake used in 1961, according to Wikipedia, include:
fp = 0.5 (half of all stars formed will have planets)
ne = 2 (stars with planets will have 2 planets capable of developing life)
The value given for ne seems to be rather optimistic, but it's still too early to have reliable numbers. It will be a long time before we can take any arbitrary star, and see exactly how many planets it has.
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"but also something just a touch smaller — a Venus."
If there's a Venus and no known Mars... then does that mean it's all women?
Sign me up!
Have you learnt nothing from all your years of watching Star Trek? The women are all blue or green, have 3 breasts, and want to KILL you!
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hot enough to vaporize any atmosphere
Isn't an atmosphere already vapour kinda by definition?
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
>We're quickly changing from "oh there's likely not many planets" to "the universe is full of them" ... it's hard not to think that even if it's not what we'd call intelligent life, there's likely more than a few places that have evolved some form of life.
The more we see stuff like this, the more we see just how vast and astounding the universe around us actually is.
And yet, if General Relativity is correct, there's still no conceivable way for a planet 1,000 lightyears distant to have any kind of communication with us, or us with them, without a two-millennia time lag. And that's just for extremely high-power/sensitivity radio signals, let alone any kind of matter-based probe. I for one find that picture of the cosmos incredibly depressing: there's potential neighbours all around, but no possible way to communicate until our civilisation crumbles.
That's really why I hope that General Relativity is not, in fact, correct in its pessimistic assumptions about lightspeed being the final arbiter of causality and that there's some kind of cosmic loophole which would allow interstellar trade and travel for beings with humanlike lifespans.
Otherwise, no matter how many exoplanets or other wonders we find in deep space, the sensible logical implication is that we should ignore them because they could never have any causal impact on our civilisation. (Other than downloading some alien DNA from radio signals and using it to breed an alien-human hybrid Hot Chick, which science fiction tells us is always an excellent idea with no possible complications.)
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
What? It doesn't matter if we can have a direct conversation with alien life forms. The important discovery would be the simple fact that they exist. As of this moment our own planet is the only one in the whole of the universe that we know life exists on. Just finding a second one would be one of the great discoveries in our species' history. It's a bit silly on your part to suggest that such a discovery wouldn't in fact have a significant effect on our civilization.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
The problem with this thinking is the presumption there is only two data points. There are currently at least 19 different planetary systems with at least three or more planets which can be used for a comparison, and almost everybody involved with extrasolar planets knows this is just the beginning of discoveries. All told, there have been over 700 different planets which have been confirmed outside of our little old Solar System.
I would say that is enough to begin some statistical models and try to come up with some general trends based upon real data besides the single data point of the Sun and its planets. More significantly, this seems to indicate that planetary systems around stars are quite common to the point that stars without planets seem to be an exception... particularly if those stars are solitary stars rather than in systems of multiple stars.
Admittedly we are still mostly blind about what is "out there", but the Kepler survey seems to be providing some real statistical information about how common planetary systems might be, and since so many of the Kepler telescope candidates seem to be found in groups of multiple planets, it seems very likely that one common presumption of planetary formation being in a disc-like structure seems to be holding out very well. What the Kepler survey is really good at doing is identifying candidates which can then be studied with better telescopes now that we know some properties of these particular planetary systems, or even that they exist at all.
What's most pathetic isn't that the US is totally dropping the ball on this stuff, it's that other nations that have the ability to take over this important work aren't bothering to do so. Why aren't the Europeans doing more space exploration? They have 50% more population than we do, many of their economies are stronger (just look at Germany's economy), so what's the problem? All they can manage is one little probe to the outer planets?
Everyone whines about how America is going down the toilet (which it is), but I don't see anyone else stepping up to fill in, except China (which is much farther behind technologically, so has more ground to cover to catch up).
Stop reading so much science fiction, and try some real science. There will never be FTL communication. ENTANGLEMENT DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY /Morbo