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Kepler-62 Has 2 Good Candidate Planets In the Search for Life
astroengine writes "About 1,200 light-years from Earth, five planets are circling around sun-like star Kepler-62, two of which are fortuitously positioned for water, if any exists, to remain liquid on their surfaces — a condition believed to be necessary for life. The discovery, made by scientists using NASA's planet-hunting Kepler space telescope, is the strongest evidence yet for more than one Earth-sized planet existing in a star's so-called 'habitable' zone. 'We're particularly delighted to find that there are two planets in the habitable zone,' lead Kepler scientist William Borucki, with NASA's Ames Research Center in California, told Discovery News. 'It sort of doubles our chances of finding that Earth we'd all like to find. When you think about Earth and Mars, if Mars had been a bit larger, if Jupiter hadn't been so close, we'd again have two planets in the habitable zone and maybe we'd have a place to go,' he said." There's also a third planet believed to be a good candidate for hosting water.
There are other methods, which can find planets at any orbital inclination. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methods_of_detecting_extrasolar_planets
"Man will never reach the moon regardless of all future scientific advances." --Dr. Lee DeForest, "Father of Radio & Grandfather of Television."
"The bomb will never go off. I speak as an expert in explosives." --Admiral William Leahy, US Atomic Bomb Project
"There is no likelihood man can ever tap the power of the atom." --Robert Millikan, Nobel Prize in Physics, 1923
http://rense.com/general81/dw.htm
As a potential lottery winner, I totally support tax cuts for the wealthy
IN real life even if we could travel at Warp speeds, there's hardly any planets - that we know of today - that can support life within a lifetime of Warp travel. Eight times - TEN times the speed of light is not good enough, I'm afraid.
We need THOUSANDs of times the speed of light to have a Star Trek or Star Wars type of intergalactic society.
Warp factors in Star Trek are not linear. The actual scales very a bit, and they're not always consistent between episodes and given distances + ETA, but if you take a look at the TNG section, warp 1 is the speed of light, but warp 2 is the 10x the speed of light, warp 3 is roughly 39x the speed of light, and by the time you get to warp 9 we're talking 1,516x the speed of light. So, with Star Trek, the scientific advisors to the writers know that.
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