11 New Multi-Planet Star Systems Discovered

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11 New Multi-Planet Star Systems Discovered

Posted by timothy on Thursday January 26, 2012 @10:50AM from the ok-now-sort-on-forest-moon dept.

astroengine writes "The number of known multi-planetary star systems has just tripled. What's more, the Kepler space telescope science team has just announced that they have doubled the number of confirmed exoplanetary sightings made by the observatory. Some of the newly discovered worlds are only 1.5 times the size of Earth, while others are bigger than Jupiter. Fifteen exoplanets are between Earth and Neptune in size, but further observations will be needed to determine if any have a rocky surface like Earth, or a gaseous consistency like Neptune."

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More of them? by ColdWetDog · 2012-01-26 10:52 · Score: 5, Funny

This isn't going well. Every month there are new planets, new solar systems.
Soon we'll be surrounded!

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Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
1. Re:More of them? by X10 · 2012-01-26 11:39 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  We should organize them into some sort of federation.
  Good plan. I'll be the emp^H^H^Hcongresperson.
  
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  no, I don't have a sig
Rocky? by PPH · 2012-01-26 10:55 · Score: 3, Insightful

rocky surface like Earth
More like a liquid surface, statistically speaking.

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Have gnu, will travel.
1. Re:Rocky? by jd · 2012-01-26 12:22 · Score: 2
  
  Well, no, the oceans are not considered a part of the surface as far as planetary science is concerned.
  
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  It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz by Samantha+Wright · 2012-01-26 11:03 · Score: 2

No, but some of them may be demolished to make room for a new hyperspace bypass.

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With all due respect to Fermi.... by forkfail · 2012-01-26 11:06 · Score: 4, Interesting

... one of the following appears to be at least probable:
1. There really is something weird about our dual-planet system (tides, etc) that makes life truly rare.
2. It really is impossible to go FTL, meaning we're stuck in our system, and had probably stop treating it more like a sewer than not. (Also: 50 generations to Motie-hood!)
3. Intelligent life has a propensity to kill itself off.
Doesn't look so good for us.

--
Check your premises.
1. Re:With all due respect to Fermi.... by ModernGeek · 2012-01-26 11:14 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  I'd consider the fourth option, that we've only had human history for 6,000 years, good records for less than probably 2,000, and that we're in the boondocks. If we had been visited, the chance is that there just isn't evidence of it, and that we'll either have to wait to be visited again, hope that other civilizations see our radio transmissions and see it as worthwhile to come here, or go out there on our own and see what's out there. The problem is that our technology is young, we are young, and there really isn't anything that interesting about us.
  
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  Sig: I stole this sig.
2. Re:With all due respect to Fermi.... by CRCulver · 2012-01-26 11:29 · Score: 2
  
  There's the four option, namely that intelligent races quickly evolve onto some higher plane and they don't stick around their home planet or even the visible universe. Vernor Vinge's novel Marooned in Realtime has some interesting speculations about the possibility of a technological singularity and how it might explain the apparent lack of other intelligent civilizations.
  
  2. It really is impossible to go FTL, meaning we're stuck in our system, and had probably stop treating it more like a sewer than not.
  
  You wouldn't need to go faster than light to expand through the universe. Von Neumann probes for instance could bring signs of civilization throughout the galaxy even if they were moving relatively slowly.
3. Re:With all due respect to Fermi.... by Princeofcups · 2012-01-26 11:34 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  I'd consider the fourth option, that we've only had human history for 6,000 years, good records for less than probably 2,000, and that we're in the boondocks. If we had been visited, the chance is that there just isn't evidence of it, and that we'll either have to wait to be visited again, hope that other civilizations see our radio transmissions and see it as worthwhile to come here, or go out there on our own and see what's out there. The problem is that our technology is young, we are young, and there really isn't anything that interesting about us.
  I have a fifth option. Maybe our level technology and scientific understanding is NOT the be all and end all of the universe, and we are looking for the wrong things. Imagine a colony of ants deciding that there is no life other than ants because no one else (humans) is reading and answering their chemical trails. The ants have no idea that we use sound to communicate, and cars to travel. Believing that radio communication and launching hunks of steal into the cosmos for travel are the only options may be very presumptuous. Give us about a million years to mature as a species, and then maybe we'll be able to "see" what's really around us.
  
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4. Re:With all due respect to Fermi.... by Beardo+the+Bearded · 2012-01-26 11:36 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  Maybe they took a look at how we treat the rest of the planet's people.
  We don't help the thousands of people dying of thirst in Africa. Unemployed drug addicts are put in prison instead of rehab. We'll dump our waste where our kids will find it. We use slave labour to make our toys.
  Then they decided that our overall planetary mores are to not help, and they are respecting the wishes of our species.
  Or maybe we're the equivalent of goldfish, except not as cute and we can't be housebroken.
  
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  ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
5. Re:With all due respect to Fermi.... by the+gnat · 2012-01-26 11:44 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  If there IS intelligent life out there, I have serious doubts that they consider us being under the same umbrella as them
  Actually, that's my least favorite Star Trek cliche - the benevolent, highly-evolved, omnipotent alien race that sees humans as mere children, either unworthy of their time, or in need of friendly guidance (and hectoring lectures about killing each other). I would say exactly the opposite is more likely to be true: any alien species aggressive and inventive enough to explore space is guaranteed to have endured warfare and ecological destruction in recent memory. Species that lose their aggression will stay at home smoking pot, eating takeout, and watching cartoons until they all die of boredom and/or congestive heart failure. That doesn't mean that they'll find our behavior at all intelligible; if a space-faring race was highly collectivist (either by evolution or by engineering), they might find our individuality and the violence that it often leads to incomprehensible. But I doubt they'll have managed to avoid strip mining, fossil fuels, or nuclear fission in the course of their technological development, and they'll probably engage in practices that we would find abhorrent, like compulsory euthanasia.
  That doesn't necessarily mean that they'll advertise their presence to us - there are a number of good reasons to avoid doing so, which would apply even if we were a pacifistic agrarian species. But I absolutely think they would study us, because they won't even be exploring interstellar space unless they were either exceptionally curious, or exceptionally desperate. I personally find it more likely that intelligent life rarely makes it out of their home solar system in person - although I'd wager that there are a few scattered derelicts full of cryogenically frozen alien colonists drifting for centuries.
6. Re:With all due respect to Fermi.... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-01-26 12:09 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  Unlike your hypothetical ant-human, we can observe and acknowledge other forms of communication ... such as ant chemical trails... Thus we are not so naive as your analogy would suggest. Not that we couldn't be ignorant of galaxy scale communication systems, but we're better equiped than you suggest.
7. Re:With all due respect to Fermi.... by Kjella · 2012-01-26 12:16 · Score: 2
  
  1. There really is something weird about our dual-planet system (tides, etc) that makes life truly rare.
  Possibly, or maybe it's converting from natural attributes to artificial attributes that is rare. I mean, it took billions of years from the first life until we came along and humans are not particularly strong or fast or have good claws or fangs to capture pray or defend ourselves, nor the natural ability to survive most of the climates we live in. We survived by making weapons, tools, housing and clothes, but just barely. We almost went extinct 70000 years ago with only a few thousand humans left alive - if that branch had died out how many millions of years could it have been to the next potential race? You can have some very intelligent animals as such, but they wouldn't be building radio telescopes or space rockets.
  
  2. It really is impossible to go FTL
  This one alone just isn't enough though. If you look at universal time frames then just the 65 million years since the dinosaurs went extinct should be enough to populate large parts of the galaxy, even if it takes thousands of years to travel between planets.
  
  3. Intelligent life has a propensity to kill itself off.
  Possibly, or maybe life already on the grid is waiting for new life to announce itself, not go polling Earth every year or even every century when it's been silent for billions of years. If we start finding habitable-ish exoplanets and start pinging them with high powered directed radio signals, then take 2x the distance in light years and wait for replies things could be different.
  Fermi took one unknown and broke it up into lots of factors that are also unknown, as long as at one of those factors is completely unknown so of course is the product. But we're making progress on some of them, like the distribution of planets in the universe. And that was the point, just breaking it down into sub-problems that could be studied individually. It was never meant to solve anything as such, maybe doesn't it even have enough unknowns. But it's way you can work towards an answer at least.
  
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8. Re:With all due respect to Fermi.... by jd · 2012-01-26 12:48 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  I don't see why so many people equate aggression with the thirst for discovery. Aggressive societies don't always do much in the way of exploration (several of the Andeman Island cultures being examples) and have a propensity to self-destruct when they expand too far (the Romans, the Norse, the British and the Americans being examples).
  True, passive societies don't always do much in the way of expansion either, but to assume that this is a purely linear spectrum just doesn't match what we know of societies or indeed people.
  Even the simplest models of individual behavior need four independent variables (Briggs-Meyers) and these clearly differentiate between tendencies to discover vs. tendencies to control. Politics is usually defined along three additional axes which do not equate to any of the behavioral axes. Aggression-Passivity isn't amongst any of the axes so far, so we need to add that as well. So societies require at least 8 parameters to describe them, probably a great deal more.
  We aren't remotely advanced enough to know what ranges of values within what parameters would make for safe vs unsafe contact. 95% of the problems between cultures on Earth are down to that fact alone - and that's with us being 99.5% identical. We certainly can't begin to figure out what the requirements are for safe contact with life that evolved along totally independent paths.
  
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  It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
9. Re:With all due respect to Fermi.... by youn · 2012-01-26 13:04 · Score: 3, Funny
  
  I believe the answer is 42 :)
  
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  Never antropomorphize computers, they do not like that :p
10. Re:With all due respect to Fermi.... by arisvega · 2012-01-26 13:09 · Score: 2
  
  .. we are the only one to develop technology. We are rare.
  How about an air-conditioned dome with water conserving capabilities that also maintains fungal gardens harvested for food for millions of individuals?
  Get over yourself: if all humans dissapeared in an instant, the rest of the planet would get along pretty well.
  
  --
  The three laws of thermodynamics:(1) You can't win. (2) You can't break even. (3) You can't even quit.
11. Re:With all due respect to Fermi.... by tbird81 · 2012-01-26 20:07 · Score: 2
  
  Every civilization and population has to evolve. To evolve we need competition.
  Ever since the first RNA molecules started grabbing nucleotides off each other to duplicate there has been competition. There's always finite resources, and those that can take them can survive (and reproduce) better.
  Any successful person, and any successful population, always has some advantage that gets resources in the current environment. No species survives if they don't have competitive strategies. An alien is not going to have some completely egalitarian civilization - they wouldn't evolve if they did.
12. Re:With all due respect to Fermi.... by Jappus · 2012-01-27 01:48 · Score: 2
  
  Any successful person, and any successful population, always has some advantage that gets resources in the current environment. No species survives if they don't have competitive strategies. An alien is not going to have some completely egalitarian civilization - they wouldn't evolve if they did.
  Who ever said, that it is only the body that needs to evolve? Maybe, to be a long term resident of the Universe, the average collection of meatbags have to first grasp the concept and accept the full consequences of the fact that they also need to allow their minds, mores and intelligence to evolve.
  After all, just like you inherit your genetic code, society at large inherits its cultural, moral and intellectual signature. If that signature is not on par with surviving for a long time as a society/species, then that can be just as bad as -- or even worse than -- having evolved a disadvantageous physical makeup.
13. Re:With all due respect to Fermi.... by mcgrew · 2012-01-27 07:10 · Score: 2
  
  To evolve we need competition.
  
  I think you completely misunderstand evolution. Evolution isn't a fight, it's an adaptation. If the environment changes, you adapt to the new environment or you die. If the envoronment stays the same and you change, you'll likely die. You could say that lions were competing with gazelles, but it would be incorrect -- if the gazelles die, so do the lions. If you eat all the food, you starve. If it gets warm enough that your sustinance no longer grows, you either adapt and eat other things, or you starve.
  Competetion doesn't drive evolution, change does. And your "successful person" is completely off the mark. Single organisms don't evolve, populations do. One of the biggest reasons humans have dominated the planet is because of our social structure, whic is probably our greatest strength and why sociopathy is, in fact, a disease.
  It is our cooperation, not our competetion, that has made our species dominant. We evolved that cooperation because without it we would have become extinct, and perhaps that's why we're still here and the Neanderthals aren't -- they were the "capitalist man alone" species while we are the "socialist" species. Snce there's some DNA evidence that there was some interbreeding, perhaps that explains Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh and their antisocial psychopathy and their greedy, heartless mental diseases.
  
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Pascal's Triangle? by segwonk · 2012-01-26 16:57 · Score: 2

I wish that someone knowledgeable about planetary formation could help me out here...

I seem to recall reading a theory many years ago (circa mid 1990s) about the expected/predicted pattern of planetary formation. That is, it was thought that planets would form from an accretion disc around a star in a mass-pattern that approximated a horizontal line from a Pascal Triangle. e.g.:

1 6 15 20 15 6 1

Translated to our solar system, you have the big gas giants Jupiter & Saturn in the middle, and smaller bodies Pluto and Mercury at the extremes. It's not a perfect model, but I've always felt that these gas giants that have been detected around other stars should also have a number of smaller planets in their systems.

But I have not seen reference to that idea again since then. I'm beginning to wonder if I imagined it, but I'm not that smart.

Does anyone know what I'm talking about?

- jw

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- ------ Go 'til ya know.
Re:With absolutely no respect towards anyone... by VortexCortex · 2012-01-26 18:13 · Score: 4, Funny

How about this option:
Would YOU trust US with a Warp Drive?!
I think the answer is very very simple: Just beyond the Oort Cloud, sits a Universally Translatable Sign:
"Quarantine Zone - Human Infestation.
We apologize for the inconvenience."
-God
Re:eNtroPy by arisvega · 2012-01-27 05:46 · Score: 2

how many parsecs of time it would take
Nice try. Everybody knows that time is measured in light years, DUH!

--
The three laws of thermodynamics:(1) You can't win. (2) You can't break even. (3) You can't even quit.