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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.'""
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.
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.
Because the future of humanity depends on getting off of this rock eventually.
...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.
Wrong! Think of all the cheap labor we could exploit by conquering the natives!
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
Using a phrase like "the future of humanity" suggests that humanity as it currently exists has a future. As technology progresses and the merging of man and machine becomes a possibility, who knows that future inhabitants of this planet will want or need. In his novel Marooned in Realtime , which deals with a technological singularity, Vernor Vinge speculated that an advanced race might decide to just burrow deep underground and live in a virtual reality there instead of expanding out into the cosmos. Sure, you could argue that billions of years from now civilization would be threatened by the sun expanding into a red giant, but that's hardly a case for the need for human beings to get off Earth now or anytime soon.
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
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.
I used to think that way too, until I grew up and realized that not everything bad that happens to Earth is caused by humans, and that even if we were all holier-than-thou angels, the Earth would end one day without our help.
First off:
We don't actually ship money into space.
Secondly:
We pay people, we have things manufactured, we do RnD. SO the money doesn' t disappear.
Thirdly
What we develop for space exploration helps us on earth as well.
Fourthly:
This planet will meet its doom. Either via global warming, a giant rock, or a massive solar event. So we should make a way to get some people off the planet.
Finally:
We know life an occur with liquid water, that's why it's a goal and why people get excited. No one thinks it's magically a great place to live, but it does improve the odds.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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.
The citizens of the USA spend more every year on new cell phones than they do on the entire budget of NASA. Pick something else to bitch about.
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
Of course it will end. The sun will consume it eventually. This is on a time scale that is of no consequence to us.
Could a big rock come along and smack us? Yup. But we don't have to leave here to be able to stop it.
Could we one day leave and have every single colony wipe itself out? Damn straight. Maybe something/someone will come along and wipe out the colonies. Who knows. Maybe a plague could travel between them on ship and take everyone out.
That said, leaving Earth != insured survival.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Even if we are completely sustainable, the sun won't last forever, and before that point, it would engulf us.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
You are not allowed to attack shallow thinkers. They have feelings after all.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
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.
I'd be interested in hearing the case for your third argument. I suspect the free market could have come up with Velcro eventually.
... or we could carpe diem and prepare for the day when each one of us will have to explain our choices to the Almighty.
To be honest, I'd rather have Velcro taken away and the $100 billion dollars NASA has disappeared from the pockets of tax payers.
You're making some huge Keynesian assumptions here. Are you intentionally equating funding NASA with paying people to dig ditches? I honestly can't tell. Is it going out on a limb to claim private individuals do a better job of spending the money they earn than spending it on ditch digging projects? I think there is enough aggregate demand in the free market to keep things going just fine without robbing the folks. The lawyers in DC disagree with me.
You say the planet will meet it's doom. Well, these newly discovered planets won't out-live the heat death of the universe (if you're going to go along with Karl Sagan's naturalist opinions about astronomy). We could be planning things out decillions of years out from now
The sun will last close enough to forever for pretty much any purpose we might have. After expanding into a red giant it is expected to collapse into a white dwarf, which will survive long past the point where the expansion of the universe will have driven all other galaxies beyond the boundary of the observable universe. If we are still around and have the technology to move a few billion people between stars in anything like a timely fashion, then it will probably be even easier to simply adjust the Earth's orbit to compensate for the changing solar output. A giant ion-drive on the moon could easily tug the Earth around without significantly affecting the planet itself. For that matter we could even put a bunch of natural-spectrum lights on the near face and take the whole planet with us to a new star. Whats a few million years transit time when you're taking your whole planet with you? While we're at it maybe we could grab Mars, Venus, and all the other small planets in the system as well, and cross the cosmos as a swarm of terraformed rogue planets.
But us still being around is a pretty serious question-mark. Consider, estimates are that the sun won't begin its red-giant phase for another 5 billion years, that's about 25,000x longer than our species has existed in anything resembling it's current state, and 10x longer than it's been since the Cambrian explosion of multicellular life.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
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.
But it didn't. In fact, the almighty free market simply stagnates and prevents competition, as wealth and power are concentrated into a few hands. Don't believe me? Check out the labour market right now - wages are dropping, work conditions worsening, yet companies are making record profits.
How about that invasion of Iraq, then? How much more has that cost the US? Throw in Afghanistan, Korea, and Vietnam to boot. How much now?
The F-35 at around $850 BILLION. Nearly a trillion dollars on a fighter plane.
How about those tax breaks for wealthy? They've cost the people billions - because the tax breaks simply sit in various bank accounts around the world, earning interest but paying almost no tax, while employees pick up the tab.
The gifts to the banks and various other large companies a few years ago - that resulted in a few CEOs getting bonuses - must have chewed up a fair bit, too.
The amusing part is that, you've condemned NASA for a bit of money spent over more than a decade when it's a drop in the bucket when compared with the trillions thrown at making sure the rich and powerful continue to have influence and wealth.
Huge advances in manufacturing and computers are creditable to NASA, without which, we probably would not have the smartphones with the capabilities we have today.
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
That, or developping time-travel / multiverse-shift.
Maybe we deserve this world ?
Perhaps instead of reading about government mismanagement on various websites you should actually familiarize yourself with NASA.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
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!
There was a sci-fi book I read, and for the life of me I can't remember the title. One of the weirdest books ever. In it, dinosaurs had escaped to Phobos before they died out, and the earth had a massive world-changing event in which mountains split and formed into rocket engines that propelled the earth out of the solar system entirely and to another star. This was the aliens' way of meeting new species...bring them all to them.
It was a truly bizarre book, and I wish I remembered the title...
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
And who knows, maybe they've got some oil, and not enough freedom.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
That does sound very weird, and way too full of plot holes for my tastes. I mean I could see dino-sapiens escaping to Mars if it was postulated that it had been life-supporting at the time, but tiny lifeless Phobos? As long as you're going someplace that will need a completely artificial environment why not just go underground on Earth? And the aliens sound downright sadistic, murdering entire planets to study the deep-frozen remains that survive an interstellar journey? Or did they include an artificial sun as well? Either way the tectonic stresses of Earth-based rockets would likely be devastating.
Yeah, what can I say? I like my SF to be at least plausible.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Oh yes, it was the most implausibly bizarre book I've ever read. And the interior of phobos was hollowed out to be a habitat where the sentient saurians (hadrosaurs if I recall) had been living for the last 65 million years. Yes, something was done to keep the planet from freezing. I wish I could remember the name of that book...
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
I think perhaps he's considering the repeated devastations of Earth's ecology for poorly understood reasons, the over-use of resources being only one possible cause. Until we can deal with a little thing like 100,000 years of winter, our future is pretty limited on this planet.
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
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.
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?
This comment strongly suggests that your grasp of this entire issue is that of a simpleton. No-one said anything about living on this place. You made that up in your own head. You should question what else you've been making up in your own head to make others seem ridiculous in your narrow world view.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Why a higher, superior intelligence would shun curiosity about the contents of outer space (including the potentially important discoveries and resources there) is beyond me.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
It's very clear that you started with your conclusion. The $850 billion on the F-35 is money well spent to you? Shows you're an ideologue who isn't interested in changing their mind.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
I'm not sure how NASA has done much for me besides reaching out to muslim nations. To be totally honest I have doubts it is doing much for the Muslims either. The modern organization with the name of NASA knows less about how to get into space than Von Braun and Goddard.
lol at least now it's clear that most of the shit you're spewing can be safely ignored.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.