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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.
With current technology that puts these planets a mere half million years away.
Cool! Kepler finds planets by observing the slight dimming of a star when a planet transits in front of it. Which means that it only finds planets that are lined up right to see this from our point of view. Only a small fraction of planets will be lined up this way. So there are good odds that there are terrestrial planets much closer to us. It'd be nice if something like the Terrestrial Planet Finder could be built. That would find planets at any orbital inclination. Then we could build something big enough to do spectroscopic observation of these planets to find out if their atmospheres actually do have water. Probably have to build that one on the moon.
Cant find any calculations on the power level or bandwidth of a detectable signal - Seti Institute dont have anything. Any takers on an estimate?
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
I don't know about "never" but you do bring up a point: space is so vast that finding life of any sort of life is going to be a very long process.
I've been let down by sci-fi. In a Star Trek:Enterprise, it was mentioned (Season 4, IIRC) that Vulcan was 26 light years away. In reality, how many planets that may under the most flexible standards support life within that distance?
As far as I know it's zero.
In sci-fi at "Warp" whatever, the universe is teaming with life.
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.
I'm afraid that humanity is going to be alone for a very very long time - maybe we will never see life on another planet.
I really hope I'm wrong because I think it would be the coolest thing in the World to find life on another planet and my hopes are on Mars - bacteria or something.
And even looking at them now would put them at the end of the Roman empire and the beginning of the Byzantine (when Christianity became more of a cult) to give you a reference point. We probably won't be receiving any radio transmissions (which would be the most likely evidence of an intelligent species) from them for another ~1000 years and that's if there is even an intelligent species there that developed as quickly as we humans did and even if they are sending out radio transmissions, would it be coming from the right direction, have enough power and linearity to be differentiated from background noise.
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Their sun is 7 billion years old which puts the at a more developed state than our 4.8 billion year old system
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
All of that assumes that life developed there like it did here, and started at the same time. For all we know their intelligent species could have been going for 10 million years before hominids showed up here. Those planets might as well be a billion years older. Maybe the planets have far more natural resources than Earth, and they never entered large wars like we did here. There's no reason to assume that we are looking at a planet that has a civilization on it equivalent to our civilization 1200 years ago, just because it's in the habitable zone of its star.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
How long is it, if ever, before we are going to have a telescope that can definitively tell us that a planet has an atmosphere containing oxygen and large amounts of water?
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I find it frustrating that with so many capable biologists on our planet, we have an obsessive belief in the theory that life cannot evolve or exit on planets where liquid water is available. I think it's a despicable thought process that's in desperate need of modification.
Geekism is your _only_ God!
To add to that, Wikipedia lists the age of the parent star at 7 billion years, plus or minus 4 billion. It could easily be twice as old as the sun.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
And even looking at them now would put them at the end of the Roman empire and the beginning of the Byzantine (when Christianity became more of a cult) to give you a reference point. We probably won't be receiving any radio transmissions (which would be the most likely evidence of an intelligent species) from them for another ~1000 years and that's if there is even an intelligent species there that developed as quickly as we humans did and even if they are sending out radio transmissions, would it be coming from the right direction, have enough power and linearity to be differentiated from background noise.
You're forgetting something. The Earth is approximately 4 billion years old, but the Universe is almost 14 billion years old. That means there should be planets out there that are much older than Earth. So, you could have a planet that evolved at the same pace as Earth, but started millions (or hundreds of millions) of years earlier.
ok stop kidding your self. look around we are killing everything in sight. we pollute our own world. we are killing the most precious thing in the universe, life, at break neck speeds. If i were an alien i wouldnt stop here if it was the last out post on life in the universe, except for to steal the precious species that are not like us on this planet. Futhermore if we as so much get out of our solor system i be they would send a big rock toward us or blow up our sun. We are a cancer to this planet,and if we don't stop it we wont be going ANY WHERE EVER!
NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER GIVE UP! "No limitations, no boundaries, there is no reason for them."
I've been let down by sci-fi. In a Star Trek:Enterprise...
Well, there's your problem right there.
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
Human beings are never going to get outside the solar system, the distance is just too great to get them to even the nearest star as bags of cells in water. But there is a reasonable chance that we can both transmit and receive information from other civilizations - all be it completely asynchronously. If we get really good at robots we might be able to seed a few local stars with self repairing robots with a range of science fiction purposes, but we will probably never know if they make it. Our current lifestyle is more likely to lead to human extinction before such grand objectives are attainable however, we are doing a lousy job of ensuring our own long term viability on the earth currently and it doesn't look likely to change soon. Heck its good fun though!
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
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And even looking at them now would put them at the end of the Roman empire and the beginning of the Byzantine (when Christianity became more of a cult) to give you a reference point. We probably won't be receiving any radio transmissions (which would be the most likely evidence of an intelligent species) from them for another ~1000 years and that's if there is even an intelligent species there that developed as quickly as we humans did and even if they are sending out radio transmissions, would it be coming from the right direction, have enough power and linearity to be differentiated from background noise.
You're forgetting something. The Earth is approximately 4 billion years old, but the Universe is almost 14 billion years old. That means there should be planets out there that are much older than Earth. So, you could have a planet that evolved at the same pace as Earth, but started millions (or hundreds of millions) of years earlier.
Technically, planets don't evolve, they form. But regardless, whether or not there is life on a planet does not depend on how old it is. Mars and Earth are both the same age and both in the goldilocks zone and yet one has life and one does not.
It is far simpler ot come up with all the obstacles to life evolving on a planet than the likelihood of all the right things happening at the right moment for life to actually evolve on a planet. Obviously, we are here, so it can happen, but it is not as simple as a rock in space with some water on it.
If i were an alien i wouldnt stop here if it was the last out post on life in the universe, except for to steal the precious species that are not like us on this planet. Futhermore if we as so much get out of our solor system i be they would send a big rock toward us or blow up our sun
What makes you so certain that intelligent, technologically capable alien races don't go through the same problems that we do? At a minimum, it is likely that interstellar travel requires mastery of nuclear energy and metallurgy across the entire periodic table, with all of the environmental risks that implies. Additionally, just to get to the point where they could develop nuclear power would likely require a period of industrialization using cruder organic sources of energy. It's very hard to imagine accomplishing this without any environmental degradation. Given the number of possible ecological catastrophies that could happen along the way, I think we're actually doing reasonably well so far.
Yes, we're just waiting for the ansible.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
All right smarty pants, you figure it out.
We're waiting.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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"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
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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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That's cool, and I'm all for looking for these things, but I can't help but feel a little sad knowing we'll never get there to explore them, even with robots.
I think we'll get to exploring and colonizing other worlds, if we can get together as a race to do it. "The impossible" has been done by us time and time again. Airplane flight was once impossible, as was going to the moon. The impossible is just something that hasn't been done yet.
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“Never say that you can't do something, or that something seems impossible, or that something can't be done, no matter how discouraging or harrowing it may be; human beings are limited only by what we allow ourselves to be limited by: our own minds. We are each the masters of our own reality; when we become self-aware to this: absolutely anything in the world is possible.
Master yourself, and become king of the world around you. Let no odds, chastisement, exile, doubt, fear, or ANY mental virii prevent you from accomplishing your dreams. Never be a victim of life; be it's conqueror.”
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http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/impossible
I've been let down by sci-fi. In a Star Trek:Enterprise...
Well, there's your problem right there.
It's been a long road getting from there to here?
"You're forgetting something. The Earth is approximately 4 billion years old, but the Universe is almost 14 billion years old. That means there should be planets out there that are much older than Earth."
But the earliest stars only had hydrogen to work on, and wouldn't have had any rocky planets. You have to wait for second and third generation stars (and their systems) before you get the heavy elements (anything heavier than iron has to be formed in a supernova)
It may be possible to have life (as we know it, Jim) without elements heavier than iron, but i don't think you could get a technological advanced species that could get to other stars.
Of course that still leaves plenty of time for cultures to be many millenia older and more advanced than us.
A targeted transmission search would almost certainly use directed, non-diffracting beams (they exist - google it). Meaning the necessary power would be dramatically dropped, because they would only transmit to a small number of star systems that have a chance of hosting life.
However, it's fairly likely that an advanced civilization would use neutrinos, or some other weakly interacting matter, for interstellar communications, rather than simple electromagnetic waves. Non-the-less, life is out there - like it or not. Maybe not close enough for you to meet it in your lifetime, but it's out there.
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
What do you call "a lifetime"? Why do people not question "aging"? Why not grow to maturity (say 25 year-old) and then stay that way, basically forever? Right now people that support research into aging complain about the Earth not being able to support an ever-expanding population, etc. etc. And on the other hand people complain that things can't be done "in a lifetime".
If you are going to travel in space for an extended period of time, you will need a radiation-hardened body. Start researching. DNA re-sequencing nanites, etc.
When the copyright term is "forever minus a day", live every day like it's the last.
Well then all we have to do is wrap the earth in a sheath of exotic matter that warps space-time to the point that a single second in the sheath on earth is 1000 years outside of it. Then just send out swarms of self replicating robots programmed to track down habitable planets and encase them in similar sheaths. After that build worm holes between the habitable worlds, easy-peasy!
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spin_(novel) (it's a great book)
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"Vulcan was 26 light years away. In reality, how many planets that may under the most flexible standards support life within that distance?"
According to Kepler and collected data from all planets found it was estimated that at least 46% of M stars have a planetary system making 94% likely to find a earth like planet within 10LY (this for M-Stars only, not counting other star types).
Source: http://phl.upr.edu/projects/habitable-exoplanets-catalog
Current technology works by expelling atoms one side so the ship moves to the opposite direction. You are always limited to the speed said atoms are expelled.
Currently with ion propulsion the fast you could go that i know of is DS4G with exhaust speed of 130 miles per second. Comparing with Light Speed (186 282 mile per second) means 0,07 % the speed of light (6000 years to next star).
Not saying what you saying is impossible just referring to how hard it is and what our current technology allows.
see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacecraft_propulsion#Table_of_methods
Just for perspective the fastest probe ever built (New Horizons) travels at 35 800 Miles per hour (or 10 miles per second).
There are other theoretical propulsion systems and some have proof of concept that work and are faster but there's a long way for that. Even if we could solve the speed issue there's still the safety issue, at those speeds (10% Light speed for example) one grain of dust has a huge amount of kinetic energy (Ec=1/2m*v^2) it could destroy the spacecraft easily. Not to mention radiation and other issues.
Giselle 581 is about 20 light years away.
Early results indicate at least a third of solar systems with stable stars (over billion years) possess planets. And on average there seem to be as many attached planets as stars in our galaxy. Keplers method can only see somewhere between a half percent to one percent of possible solar systems. And only planets with orbits less than five years. But they are observing a huge number of stars.
Plus NASA is on the verge of approving a "super Kepler" for the 2020s that can observe several percent of the sky instead of the quarter percent Kepler looks at now.
The problem is that NASA can only fund a small handful each decade. And this before proposed federal austerity programs which would cut much more.
At the Long Beach AAS meeting this year a group successfully teased an atmospheric spectrum from a "reverse transit", that is when the planet goes BEHIND the star. This method assumes most of the time you observe the planets and stars combined spectrum, except during reverse transit.