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Kepler-186f: Most 'Earth-Like' Alien World Discovered
astroengine (1577233) writes "About 500 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus lives a star, which, though smaller and redder than the sun, has a planet that may look awfully familiar. With a diameter just 10 percent bigger than Earth's, the newly found world is the first of its size found basking in the benign temperature region around a parent star where water, if it exists, could pool in liquid form (abstract). Scientists on the hunt for Earth's twin are focused on worlds that could support liquid surface water, which may be necessary to brew the chemistry of life. "Kepler-186f is significant because it is the first exoplanet that is the same temperature and the same size (well, ALMOST!) as the Earth," David Charbonneau, with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, wrote in an email to Discovery News. "Previously, the exoplanet most like Earth was Kepler-62f, but Kepler-186f is significantly smaller. Now we can point to a star and say, 'There lies an Earth-like planet.'""
Now all we need to do is send a couple of Nexus-6 replicants to the Tannhäuser Gate.
If I do, I could be there in what, 25k years..round about?
After all, Mericans are always saying to me "if ya don't like it, git'out".
Well?
If we are quiet, maybe we'll get lucky and they won't notice us....
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
The scientists act like any place with liquid water will magically be a great place to live.
So why not have a wonderful life on this planet with water and not ship our tax dollars into outer space?
Maybe this could be it!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemesis_%28Asimov%29
Is figure out a way to get there within a human lifespan, with a couple caveats:
1. females need to get there in an early enough age to reproduce and start a colony.
2. figure out a way to get there before we destroy our own planet.
...but until someone fesses up to owning an actual, *working* interstellar drive this is kind of useless.
had the Monolith reporting to someone/something about 450 ly distant. It had reported how bad humans behaved, and was therefore ordered to destroy them. The messages took a combined 900+ years, so it didn't receive orders until 3001. What a coincidence. Or maybe I remember all that wrong.
Voyager 1 is 127 AU away, 500LY is about 31 Million AU.... so we only need to go 250,000 times further than we ever have! That seems doable.
L053R
If you happened to notice any UFOs zipping around it may be because they noticed earth 500 years ago or more.
You know what makes a planet Earth-like? Having life on it. Not theoretically maybe being able to support life, but actually doing so.
If they are advanced enough to travel here then they've had their own version of the Kepler telescope for 500 years and have known at the minimum that Earth has liquid water, oxygen, and chlorophyll (I think that can be picked up used spectroscopy). Basically anyone advanced civilization nearby probably has known about Earth as a life-bearning world long before humans came along.
Just a cool thought to counter the idea that we're hidden until someone detects radio.
If they are advanced enough to travel here then they've had their own version of the Kepler telescope for 500 years and have known at the minimum that Earth has liquid water, oxygen, and chlorophyll (I think that can be picked up used spectroscopy). Basically anyone advanced civilization nearby probably has known about Earth as a life-bearning world long before humans came along.
Just a cool thought to counter the idea that we're hidden until someone detects radio.
Did they ever imply the singularity caused us to burrow underground in that book? I thought it was just hinted that humanity moved to some higher state of being.
"Now we can point to a star and say, 'There lies an Earth-like planet."
No, now we can point to yet another object in the sky and say "there lies another planet we haven't even remotely figured out how to get to yet."
I just love how we wax poetic about earth-like planets as if we can get there. Or even have a hint as to how to get there beyond theories Einstein wrote 100 years ago.
Seriously. We can't even figure out how to travel ONE light year, and we're getting all excited about one that's "only" 500 light years away.
Can't wait to colonize that planet! Who's packing the 3D printer?
Love it, but we REALLY need to concentrate on the closest stars (less than 50 light-years away) that would be targets for our first probes out of the solar system.
If the sun was different, but it had an atmosphere like our planet, the situation on the ground would apparently look remarkably like home. At least once you factor in the white point adaptation in our visual system. The first paper on that page is sort of tongue-in-cheek, but presumably fairly accurate prediction of what being on an earth-like exoplanet under a different sun would look like at ground level:
http://cgg.mff.cuni.cz/project...
I believe this planet will be like Venus, a rocky surface, but a CO2 atmosphere that makes it at least 300 degrees Celsius on the surface.
How much of this "habitable zone" factors in water's ability to be liquid to to pressure? Too thin it vaporizes (Mars). Too much, it vaporizes (Venus). Merely being the right temperature isn't enough.
Also, having a magnetic pole strong enough to shield it from the solar wind, so what does wind up in the atmosphere doesn't wind up in space.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
We could send radio signals that far, with the big dish at Arecibo. If they have intelligence, and radio, we can communicate with a 1000-year round trip time. Maybe we should transmit some of the proposed canned messages to other civilizations every month or so.
If there is other intelligent life out there, it looks like they're a very long way away. Too far to talk to round trip, even at light speed. None of the known extra-solar planets within a few light years look promising.
Republics are not people.
>The sooner we launch one, the sooner our descendants get to hear back from it.
Not necessarily. Or more precisely by the time they hear back from it the information will likely be completely redundant.
At present all our mature propulsion technology is very much focused on planetary usage. Rocketry is the only one at all suitable to operating in space, and it's *horribly* inefficient in terms of specific impulse, which will be *the* deciding factor for interstellar travel. Ion drives show immense promise, already completely trouncing chemical rocketry in terms of specific impulse, but it's a technology very much in its infancy and the absolute thrust current engines can produce is miniscule, useful for little more than station-keeping and lining up gravitational slingshot maneuvers. If we launched an interstellar probe with today's technology then it's quite likely that a second probe launched 50-100 years from now would be able to make several round trips before today's probe ever got anywhere close to the target. For a mission whose expected payoff is centuries away that sort of thing is well worth considering. Much like Voyager making its pokey way out of the solar system, the value of an interstellar probe built on current-gen technology would be primarily in learning about the beginning of the path, not the destination. And unless there's some completely unexpected navigation hazard in the gulf between stars there's unlikely to be much to learn worth the cost of the probe.
Now what might be an interesting mission with current or near-term technology is a gravitational-lens telescope - rather than sending a probe towards Kepler-186f we send a telescope "eyepiece" in the opposite direction, and when it reaches a distance of only about 700AU (0.011 light years, ~10x Voyager 1's current distance) away from the sun we could start to use the sun's gravitational field as an immense lens in a telescope so powerful we could count the pebbles on 186f's hypothetical beaches. Maybe even individual grains of sand. Not to mention everything else we might see in that general direction. The downside to such a telescope is that it's extremely difficult to substantially change the target. With a telescope 700AU long even a few degrees of change requires moving your eyepiece across a distance rivaling Pluto's orbit. Still, with a clever flight plan we could get immensely detail information about dozens or hundreds of other star systems as our eyepiece slowly swept out a few degrees of motion. The only real question is, is 186f really interesting enough to be the first target? I would imagine looking toward the galactic core would offer far more interesting things to see.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
But corporations are. I'm not sure I want to say goodbye to AOL just yet.
that's a pie in the sky
we might as well call it "heaven" - someday, if we work really hard, and be real good, we'll get to go to a nice clean world, away from all this pollution and catastrophe.
easier to think like that, than to actually attempt to terraform earth into paradise.
so, bullshit, basically. Scientific mythology.
Towards the end of the Ordovician Period, CO2 levels here were over 10 times what they are today, yet our planet was in the deepest ice age it has ever experienced.
It's not safe to make simplistic assumptions.
Money spent on space exploration stays on earth. We don't launch buckets of money into space. We pay people on earth to launch chunks of metal into space. They then use that money to buy cheeseburgers, thereby stimulating the economy.
Not entirely accurate, but more accurate than the parent post.
Read all Joe Haldeman. His brother too.
"Did you mean: 186 Kepler Ct, Corrales, Sandoval County, NM 87048?"
Add it to the rest of the collection of "Earth like worlds" they've amounted thus far.
Girls and boys, I find these posts that popup once a month to be boring and worthless as I can literally point my finger into the night sky and say "Look Ma, there is a Earth like planet there", and at the same time shrug and say "Who gives a shit", 'cause I sure as hell am not going to see it in my lifetime nor will anyone else for that matter.
Edit: and by some stupid humour of slashdot's the captcha says 'search'
Time to lob some ice balls full of tardigrades at Kepler-186f with those new fangled linear motor railguns.. for the lulz ofc.
Don't get too excited guys, it still needs water, oxygen (plants), and a magnetosphere to support life such as ourselves... not saying it's impossible other forms of life could be there. Now if they find an oxygen filled atmosphere... holy smokes, maybe they're reading slashdot too!
How do I send them my resume?
Future study has a 50% chance a priori of finding that that planet is warming up, at which point we will be bombarded with millions of posts by idiots telling us that this proves AGW to be a hoax.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Your idea of a 'major pain' is seeing an article that you don't want to read. Then you go into it and post a pointless stupid fucking comment anyway.
I like seeing Phil Plait stuff on here, and even more so now I know it annoys you.
It's orbiting an M star at about Mercury distance, there's a chance it's tidally locked (couldn't be bother to make the calculations right now) and even if it wasn't the environment that close to a star that size is not the best possible for life.