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New Exoplanet Is Best Yet Candidate For Supporting Life
First time accepted submitter uigrad_2000 writes "With all the new exoplanets discovered recently with Kepler, it seemed a sure thing that the first exoplanet in the habitable zone of a star would be found soon. The irony is that Kepler was not involved. GJ 667Cc is at least 4.5 times as massive as Earth, and lies in the habitable region of its host star, reports Scientific American. It was discovered by comparing public data from the ESO to recent observations from Hawaii and Chile. As opposed to the stars Kepler is watching, this is only 22 light-years away, making it even more interesting."
"this is only 22 light years away, making it even more interesting."
It's like a price on an estate: as remarkable as this is, it's only 55.3 million! Still unreachable :P
The universe mocks us.
Here's silver candy,
It doesn't make you fat.
It'll get you girls and all of that.
It only sells for a modest fee.
A quintillion dollars
Or exceeding C.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
What if we go there? 4.5 G?
It woukld take some excersise and quite a few generation in low gravity space before we reach that high gravity Earth2...
Just one of many practical issues.
(No, I don't think we'll ever reach it; 22 light years)
in just the last few years (or so it seams) we can now identify "earth like" planets. A more advance race could probably do it much better. All the sudden the thought of ET's finding us isn't so far fetched.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
"It's basically glowing cinders, or a well-lit charcoal," Vogt said. "We know about a lot of these, but they're thousands of degrees and not places where you could live."
Yeah, except for the Zerg. That planet is called Char.
wait we are there and this is just cover.
So, when do we start building the probe?
Let's go!!!!
"Whenever the cause of the people is entrusted to professors, it is lost." ~ V.I. Lenin
It takes a certain amount of energy to move a certain amount of mass a certain distance and gravity determines that pretty significantly. I don't think 4.5x Earth's mass would result in gravity levels that are compatible with life just based on how much energy it would have to consume to move. But who knows, maybe they're magical fusion-powered space unicorns.
It's ironic in that no one knows what that word means, and the folks over at Kepler are driving themselves into a frenzy trying to find an earth analogue. They apparently missed one quite nearby.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
It's like flying cars: somebody's always building yet another Great Almost that gets on the cover of some publication to tease us, then runs away and hides in Flawland.
Table-ized A.I.
A rocky planet 4.5 times the mass of Earth would probably be quite volcanic because it has yet to "cool down" inside, and because more gravitational pressure would be cooking the core hotter.
Table-ized A.I.
You have two weeks.
Get it done.
Ha ha 22 lightyears, or 208,131,625,000,000 kilometers
--------------------------------------------- "In the end, we're all just water and old stars."
It orbits the star in 28 days. That means it's probably tidally locked. One side of the planet would be boiling, the other side would be freezing. The only habitable area on the planet would be yet another habitable zone near the planets terminator.
Weather on this planet would be pretty crazy, if it has an atmosphere at all, and life? I doubt it. Any life on this planet would have no day/night cycle, which seems kind of important for life as we know it.
And that's why I'm really getting tired of all these sensationalist "We found another Earth-like planet" headlines. Mr. Guillem Anglada-Escude of the Carnegie Institution for Science is being very disingenuous claiming that this is the "Holy Grail of exoplanet research". It could be, but without knowing more about it it's just as likely that it's as dead as Mercury or the Moon. Except bigger.
Why should it be "even more interesting"?
Is there any plan to physically reach that planet?
It'd take 22 years at the speed of light to reach it, provided that you can accelerate and decelerate istantaneously to c.
Ah! You watch too many sci fi movies. And the bad ones!
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
Who can say a precise data source like hahaped?
gee didnt see that coming ... say something about our infallible space program on Slashdot and instantly get modded down, your more predictable than the space plane people, IE decades of the same ass bullshit, that never leaves the ground
Even if the probe takes 200 years to return, it will be a mjor acomplishment for the human race, and it would provide extremely important scientific data.
Now that I mention it, how come there are no plans to send probes to nearby solar systems? for example, Alpha Centauri is just 4 light years away. If we send a probe now, and the probe could get to up 10% of light speed, in 40 years it will reach that solar system and in 80 years it will be back on Earth.
For the last couple of decades SETI has been searching the sky methodically looking for any interesting signals around the 1.420 gigahertz range which is the "precession frequency of neutral hydrogen". SETI will now be able to point their radio telescopes at places we already know are interesting and check them on a much wider range of frequencies. I may be hopeful but I can't help feeling it's an exciting time to be alive.
I don't know what's worse, his grasp of statistics, or... no, wait, that's about as bad as it gets.
Please tell me that Vogt is some kind of PR Scientician, not an actual, real, bona fide astronomer.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
That's not why you're getting modded down. You're getting modded down for being obnoxious.
Mada mada dane.
This research strikes me as particularly useless, and perhaps a criminal waste of money. They're looking for planets mainly, it sounds to me here, because they're looking for LIFE. Even if they find it, though... let's say they do. Tomorrow. They find life. What does that change on Earth? Feeds the hungry? No. Convinces religio-morons that their phony-baloney god is bullshit? Of course not, there's no fixing that form of stupid from without. They'll just add a couple chapters about what their "god" did on the fifth and sixth days that he didn't bother to dictate to the "bible"'s authors previously. An updated edition will be released. Would finding life elsewhere end wars here? Nope. Stamp out political corruption? HA! Shit, it wouldn't even put an end to the "Taste's Great" versus "Less Filling" debate.
Finding life elsewhere would only confirm what anyone with any fucking brains already knows: life is not special, just rare for the same reason a straight-flush is rare. Of all the possible arrangements of 5 cards drawn from a standard 52 card deck, straight-flushes represent a tiny minority of possible outcomes. Likewise with life. Not actually special, just uncommon due to the relatively large number of solar-system configurations and geometries, proximities to large, bright objects, etc., that are NOT conducive to the evolution of anything like multicellular life, like being too close to a star that's too damn hot.
Intelligent life, likewise, is unlikely unique to Earth, (if we can call ourselves that... over 50% apparently believe in ghosts, goblins, faries and shit, so...) just that much rarer than life in general due to the fact that having intelligent life presupposes multicellular life. Then technological societies (which is what they're really look for... planet fucking Vulcan...) require life-conducive circumstances, life, multicellular life, intelligent life, THEN on top of that they have to have the right resources lying around on their world. Imagine if Earth had almost no metal ore anywhere near the surface, and if lodestones (magnets) had never been around to find... if there were no silica or other similar substances to form pottery, glass, etc., from? It's very easy, I think, to imagine a society developing and managing to get by without having the materials present to build any kind of circuit, any steam-devices, etc.
Some of the dozens of exoplanets they've found to date could be CRAWLING with intelligent life, but if they don't have the materials to build so much as a simple radio... we'll never know they're there. Then suppose there's intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, say, 500 light years away. They are there, and all... intelligent-y right now. NOW. They just started transmitting radio. We couldn't hear from them for another 500 years. They will hear from us in 100, but we will have to wait 600 years to find out what they think of us from our first broadcasts. I think anyone alive today won't be then.
Suppose within 400 years, they wipe themselves out, as the ever-increasing level of technology exponentially increases the lethality of any one malcontent individual, and they all die. After 500 years, we hear their first broadcasts, and are amazed at how similar the aliens look, who their languages (while totally different from ours) are made in a similar fashion from collections of similar sounds... we think of what we want to say back to them, decode their language, figure out how to say hello to them, and even can travel to them. We put people in our fastest ships and send them out, only to learn that 100+ years before they left Earth to visit our new would-be friends, they blew themselves right out of the universe. Depressing, isn't it?
You say no intelligent race would be dumb enough to do that, but didn't we almost do the exact same shit repeatedly over the last 100 years? Why does everyone assume aliens will, by default be more intelligent than we are? Who the fuck taught them? How does that work? Dumb-asses point t
and only 100 stars ? One star, on average, per 55 cubic lightyears ? That is 2..37 lightyears on average between two neighbouring stars... That says something about the challenges awaiting interstellar travel.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
The system has much lower abu The aliens over there have prolly gone back to sleeping in trees and dragging their knuckles on the ground, as they saw that inventing computers was going to be impossible.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
Let's say our goal isn't to contact intelligent life from elsewhere, but to go there. How long would it take a "ship" to reach a planet a mere 22 LY away? remember we only have chemical rockets... nuclear-powered engines might be on the horizon, but even there would be a far cry from "hyperdrive" or whatever. 22 years at the speed of light would take a LOT longer at the pokey speeds we could manage. Then again, who will you send? What's the business model? How will money be made sending someone to another solar system? Who wants to invest in a project that you know won't possibly turn a profit for 38,000 years? Might as well give your money away. You'll never see it again anyways. Like I wrote earlier, useless and a waste of money. If you think we needn't worry about it ever making money, ask yourself if you'd let a stranger borrow yours without being paid interest, and probably never getting paid back...
You live on it! do not support missions to other stars, to seek our death light years away will
hasten the inevitable destruction of our planet. This is not startrek, this will _NEVER_ be startrek.
there is no warp drive, we have no access to MARS let alone some other solar
system or galaxy,.... and even if we did those places are death zones. no potential for
actual life....
these people are harping on about the distance from a star meaning the planet is neither
solid ice, nor blistering inferno..... no evidence of oxygen nitrogen or anything remotely
resembling the signatures of life which we could not detect anyway. fantasyland.
There is no outerspace, thats astronomers business...
the business of the human race ENDS at the upper ranges of geosynchronous orbit,
where we can no longer receive the benefits of our efforts as a race of humans.
(yea sending probes to check out the other planets was really cool and worthwhile
but in general it will yield nothing more than curiosity... No men should ever die to
visit mars, and there's no reason to go back to the moon... just because we can?)
I'm sick of this fantasy land of American politicians who would do anything to avoid
looking at the real world, and handling the dire work required by their people.
that noone has yet commented on the fact this newly discovered planet has three suns. Can you imagine a world where a true nightfall is fairly rare?
Just to elaborate on why it's such a big if.
1 gram of matter travelling at 0.75c packs about 4.6 x 10^13 J of energy, or the equivalent of a 11 kiloton bomb. By comparison the "little boy" bomb used at Hiroshima was 15 kiloton. (At 0.9c it becomes 29 kilotons, and for 0.99c it's 132 kilotons, while 0.999c it's 454 kilotons.)
So even forgetting chemical rockets, if you took enough uranium to get about 15 kilotons of energy out of it, and accelerated a single gram of matter with it, and had an efficiency of about 73% for the whole thing (i.e., not just blow a nuke under that gram of matter, but somehow focused it so about three quarters of the energy go into pushing that gram), then you'd get a gram of matter moving at 0.75c. One gram.
Note that this already means pretty much some kind of cannon setup. If you put all that uranium and stuff in a rocket, then you accelerate the whole rocket, not just that gram of matter, and end up with a _much_ lower speed.
The energy necessary to do that for even a modest spacecraft weighing 50 tons -- barely more than the combined command module and lunar lander of the Apolo 11 mission -- is left as an exercise to the reader. Remember though that for a round trip you need to accelerate AND decelerate once in one direction, and then accelerate AND decelerate once more in the other direction. So multiply by 4.
And again, that was under the assumption that we have some kind of Mass Effect style accelerator at both ends, so the spacecraft doesn't have to carry and accelerate/decelerate its own fuel and engines and whatnot. If you actually do need to haul your own uranium and engines, which at least the first mission would, then things get even more ridiculous.
So even with nuclear engines (this kind of talks are like a honeypot for the kind of SF-fetishist who heard something vague about Orion rockets or engines with water and uranium salts, and thinks they're kinda like a warp drive and make everything magically possible), the energy budget necessary for even a modest mission at 0.75c is immense. Mind bogglingly immense.
Sorry, folks, it's just not going to happen in your lifetimes. Sorry to be the one to piss on the parade of every fellow nerd who grew up with Star Wars fantasies, but there simply is no feasible way to just get to it and pack someone on a 44 year trip.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
We are a 1-2 decades away of being able to directly image planets. It would use some king of occulter, that would block starlight, but it has to be large enough to not cause too much diffraction at the edge (also the shape is important).
Mapping them is even harder, but inferometry (either in space or on earth) could help (extremely difficult to get needed precision though).
We will have a long list of planets possibly suitable for life by the time imaging (first for spectrometry and later for nice photos) becomes possible. Discovery of extrasolar life would probably be the most important in scientific breakthrough of the century. Maybe we're lucky to have it on neighbouring stars.
In ALL of human history we have only sent a few probes into the beyond. Of those, only a few have ever made it out of our solar system, and that was 30+ years ago.
If we use this as a base line of current capability, Voyager 1 is traveling about 17,000 m/s. It can go 4.2 light years in about 73,600 earth years. Factoring that this new planet is 22 light years away, at our current proven technology, it would take us approximately 385, 524 earth years for use to send a probe to this new planet. Of course this is to smash into the planet at 17,000 m/s, so some additional time for deceleration would be required. Also once it got there, assuming that it has a power source strong enough to beam a light message back somehow, that would take an additional 22 years on top of all that. I have no idea how long the delay would be with radio, certainly a very long time anyway.
So yeah, a pretty big IF. I find it more likely we will all have killed ourselves by then, or evolved into some sort of thing that no longer remotely resembles what we currently are, so it may be hard to determine if this would even interest us anymore.
There seems to be a fair bit of skepticism about reaching this place because at 22ly it is way to far. But what about a probe? Probes can be much less massive, can be designed to operate for long periods of time, don't need to maintain contact. Also I don't see the need to stop in the system to collected data. Just whizzing through with some high powered instruments should be sufficient.
Radio SETI will find nothing, that's not the logical way for aliens to transmit, and the "water hole" argument is contrived. There are a multitude of other such RF frequencies with compelling arguments that are in other bands....the answer is to use none of them. Funny here on Earth it took decades for scientists to realize that a pulsed high power laser with current technology would far outshine a star for the brief nanoseconds it is shining. Thus you only need proper wide-spectrum photomultiplier tubes to cover the whole visible spectrum and then some! A transmitter would just repeatedly target a large number of stars.
There are several optical SETI endeavors going on right now
I am in the opinion that it would be better for mankind, Earth and the Universe to find a way to sustain life on Mars than to mess with travel at light speed.
Welcome our new GJ667Ccian overlords.
I loved Galaxy Quest
[Trying to explain TV to the Thermians]
Gwen DeMarco: They're not ALL "historical documents." Surely, you don't think Gilligan's Island is a...
[All the Thermians moan in despair]
Mathesar: Those poor people.
I was wondering how much detail we can see at that range either from Hubble or any other telescope. Does anyone really know?
Could we read the license plates on Alien cars?
Can we at least tell if the lights are on?
Does that communication system work if they use anything other than base 10 math?
Base won't be a problem, no more than today, when computer count in base 2, most people count in base 10, ans some people count using weird combination (mixed base 20 celtic influence, mixed base 5 with roman, base 12, base 60 in summeria, etc...)
A prime number is a prime number, no matter what crazy writing system you use to write it down. Base systems are just that, encoding ways used to write down abstract number.
To go back to the parent exemple:
base will only start to play a role when we send graphical representation of equation, as in written down in picture form.
once we send "5 + 7 = 12", not as a bip sequence, but as a nice bip-encoded picture. In addition to learning the strange symbols we use to write number, the alien will notice that for some crazy reason, we start to use 2 symbols for anything bigger than a number of 9.
If they count in base 20, they'll probably reply something along the line of "5 + 7 = B", with "5", "7", "B", "+" and "=" replaced with their own local way to represent the concepts, ordered in their preferred way to order their symbols (prefix notation? opposite endianness? etc).
That's why math is regularily proposed as a "first common language", a numbre is always the same numbre, no matter what crazy writting system you use to write it down.
Just curious, because it seems like the only reason we use base 10 is because we have 10 figures (and toes).
Some civilisations have used 20, because that's the total number of fingers+toes. ...
Some civilisations have used 5, because that's the number of finger on 1 hand.
Some civilisations have used 12, because that's the number of phallanx (finger bones) on the 4 long fingers, and because it is nicely divided by 3 and 4.
Some civilisations have used 60, because it's pretty much easy to divide by quite an impressive number of divisor.
Our civilisations use 2 for computers, because a simple representation between "signal" and "no signal" is the easiest to implement.
But you just need to convert value from one system to the other. The maths behind remain the same.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
no I am obnoxious on many threads and most of the times get modded up, again say something about nasa and all the fucking space geeks get their feelings hurt, its pathetic really that so many still have this gndn dream that we continue to burn piles of cash on for no real good reason
Who said anything about a round trip? This would be a one way ticket, multiple generations born on a ship.
You are very angry about things that you don't seem particularly up on or interested in. There are many decaffinated brands that taste just as good as the real thing, you know.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
I don't think we should ping for extraterrestrial life anymore. I am starting to think what if there is life out there and they are searching for natural resources.
They find our planet, feed on us like we are cows, and harvest our natural resources.
Maybe we are lucky our planet is stuck way out in a far out region in the milky way.
Just a thought.
I dont drink coffee, it makes me twitchy, and yes I get angry about using my tax money to fund other peoples unfeasible dreams. You want space go privately do it and leave me and my pockets out of it
Fucking basic science, such a waste of taxpayer money!
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.