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NASA's Planet Hunter Spots Record 1,284 New Planets, 9 In A Habitable Zone (networkworld.com)
coondoggie quotes a report from Network World: NASA's planet hunting space telescope Kepler added a record 1,284 confirmed planets to its already impressive discoveries of extraterrestrial worlds. [This batch of planets is the largest single account of new planets since Kepler launched in 2009 and more than doubles the number of confirmed planets realized by the space telescope so far to more than 2,300.] The discoveries were a result of an automated technique implemented in a publicly available custom software package called Vespa, which lets scientists analyze thousands of signals Kepler has identified to determine which are most likely to be caused by planets and which are caused by non-planetary objects such as stars. "Vespa computed the reliability values for over 7,000 signals identified in the latest Kepler catalog which identified 4,302 potential planets and verified the 1,284 planets with 99% certainty," said the Princeton researchers that developed Vespa. NASA said, based on their size, nearly 550 of the validated planets could be rocky like Earth. Nine of which orbit in their sun's habitable zone.
And it would take like 50 zillion years to reach the closest one, right?
Shouldn't that be "NASA's Planet Hunter Spots Record 1,271 New Planets"? If it's 99%, you'd expect 1% to be wrong.
Why are taxpayer dollars funding research looking for planets that nobody will ever visit and will never make a difference to anyone?
Why do the editors (I assume) keep putting stuff in [ ]s?
You don't need to identify every change you might have made to a submission (if that's what's happening). That kind of editing is supposed to be seamless. Highlighting it just leaves readers wondering if they're missing some significance.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
500+ billion/year on military in the USA alone(likely 1 trillion globally?); Lets just agree on borders and to stop #$%#$ing around in each others affairs and start to look outward.
No shortage of humans; no shortage of volunteers willing to do one way trips(mars and I'm sure elsewhere) .
I still remember the years of delay after the challenger accident... Find the problem(or suspected problem) and continue; don't miss beat.. 10's of thousands die in motor-vehicle accidents, a few dozen astronauts shouldn't cause a delay.
we need to address what provides the in time. For All I've never seen
You'd have to convince Russia and China of that. Force and threats are the only things that work. Personally, I think the US would do more with the lands called Siberia. Japan should logically extend to the islands north including Karafuto.
What they've spotted is NOT a planet, but the EFFECT ON THE STAR that's probably caused by a planet.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
One thing to keep in mind - according to many charts Mars and Venus are in our own star's habitable zone. Neither seem to have life. Even Earth seems like it would have a much hard time at it if not for some specific factors (ie, a large moon to stabilize the rotational axis - a rare feature for a rocky planet).
If we're batting only 1 out of 3 planets in the habitable zone of our own star actually having life, I wouldn't hold out too much hope of there being life on any of these planets just because its in the habitable zone. My guess (and really that's all we can do until we get a larger sample size of planets having life vs not) is that a very tiny percentage of these planets even in the habitable zones actually harbor life.
That said - even if there was only life in the universe at a rate of one inhabited planet per galaxy, the universe as a whole would still have billions of inhabited planets - it's just that there'd be virtually zero chance that life from one would ever be aware of or affected by life on another.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Yep. Our side enjoyed a brief technological and industrial advantage, won some wars, and carved up the disputed territories to our liking with no consideration for the residents or political realities of the situation. Why cant the rest of the world simply accept that the current borders are where they should be and get busy making do with what we've left them?
Yeah, it'd be great if we could all sit down and talk things out to reach an optimum solution, but that's not remotely realistic, even if we were willing to give up *all* our ill-gotten gains. The wheel keeps turning, and those empires currently disadvantaged inevitably gain new strength and opportunities, while those empires in ascendancy inevitably begin to crumble from hubris and neglect. What possible motive would currently disadvantaged empires have to sit quietly on their hands when the opportunity to climb to ascendancy in their turn presents itself?
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
The discoveries were a result of an automated technique implemented in a publicly available custom software package called Vespa
So which of these planets is Druidia?
The Habitable Zone means liquid water, it doesn't mean fit for *human* habitation. For that, we'd need close to 9.8m/s gravity, breathable air, standard atmospheric pressure, radiation shielding, nutrient rich soil, non-insane temperature (a 200 degree F planet would still be in the "habitable zone") and also, yes liquid water.
Given this narrow set of requirements, I'd say we'd need to discover many thousands more habitable zone planets before we find anything worth calling Earth 2.0.
(On the other hand, habitable zone planets could potentially support -non human- life and are exciting in that regards. And saying that new "habitable zone" planets were discovered will add some spice to an otherwise potentially dull announcement, at least to the mainstream.)
Given that the two methods of detection are planets that orbit in plane that is nearly our parallel to view axis (solar transit), or planets that are massive enough to wobble a star and orbit in a plane that is nearly perpendicular to our view axis, what our we not seeing. I would think these circumstances would be the exceptions rather than the rule. Can we extrapolate how many planets orbit stars, given that we can only detect these special cases?
http://drbo.org/x/d?b=drb&bk=62&ch=3&l=7#x
[7] Ever learning, and never attaining to the knowledge of the truth.