Kepler Delivers Confirmation of Extrasolar Earth-Sized Planets
That's 'Earth-sized', not 'Earth-like'. These places would make terrible vacation worlds.
Much like the Hubble Telescope before it, the Kepler Spacecraft Observatory has turned out to be an astonishing scientific resource. It's already been established that Kepler is ridiculously adept at locating extrasolar planets, with a possible 99% success rate that defies some of the most optimistic early estimates. Among those recent planetary discoveries is the confirmation of an Earth-like world currently called Kepler 22b, a so-called 'super earth' twice the size of our own. As fantastic a discovery as that was, 22b is officially old news as of today, thanks to NASA's announcement that the Kepler Observatory has nabbed an even more remarkable discovery: not one, but two confirmed Earth-sized planets.
Unlike Kepler 22b, whose large size guarantees a high-gravity environment unsuitable for humans, the two latest discoveries, both in the Kepler 20 star system, are almost the same size as our own lovely planet. Kepler 20E has a radius approximately .87 times the size of earth, just slightly smaller than Venus. Kepler 20F (that images is an artist's conception) is just barely larger, measuring 1.03 times Earth's girth. Both planets are thought to be of terrestrial (rocky) composition with masses similar to Earth's, making them perfect fits for bodies conditioned over millions of years of evolution to Earth standard G.
There's just one catch. Though Kepler 20 is similar to our own sun, none of its planets are remotely habitable. The Kepler 20 star system has a total of 5-detected planets, all of which orbit at a distance that puts them within the orbit of Mercury around our own sun. That means extremely fast orbits and correspondingly horrid surface temperatures; Kepler 20F orbits Kepler 20 every 19 (earth) days and enjoys a mercury-esque 800 degrees Fahrenheit. That's positively chilly compared to Kepler 20E's incomprehensibly hot 1400 degrees and incredible 6.1 day orbit. So don't pack your astro-vacation gear just yet.
Even though we have yet to find another place to call home, it has now been proved we have the ability. Thus the Kepler mission can consider itself justified. Now if we could only figure out how to actually reach any of the planets we discover...
- SOPA Not Even Passed and Work-Around is Already Available
- HTC Already Has Workaround to Avoid the ITC Ban
- Sony: We Didn't Apologize for PS Vita Screen Issues
- Mozilla Releases Tablet-Friendly Firefox 9 for Android
- Transforming MorpHex Robot Invades Your Nightmares
- Motorola May Be Violating Another Microsoft Patent
- Chinese Hackers Break Into U.S. Chamber of Commerce
- Windows Phone 8 Coming in June 2012
- Reddit's Erik Martin on SOPA: "The End Of Reddit"
- Growing Trend: Botnets, Malware Are Hitting Smartphones
- Insider Claims Microsoft Was Kicked Out of Future CES Shows
- Steve Jobs Lands Trustees Award; Also Gets Bronze Statue
- Support For SOPA Gets GoDaddy in Hot Water
- Hasbro Sues Asus Over Tranformer Prime Tablet's Name
- Asterisk Prototype: Spider-Man's Long Lost Robot Cousin
- Samsung Announces Two Dual-SIM Galaxy Phones
- Amazon Relents: Kindle Fire Browses Android Market
- Sony "Super Phone" Spotted with 13MP Camera, LTE
- Mitsubishi's Emirai Interface: The Future of Car Interiors
Great news, all we need now is FTL drive spaceships, wormholes or a working Stargate and we can stripmine it, err, colonise it.
How many here thought for a split second this was new on Nvidia?
luckily I have no plans to leave this planet anytime soon.
How many here thought for a split second this was new on Nvidia?
+1
Alcubierre Warp Drive here we come. Now what shelf did I leave that negative energy again ... ah yes .. .here it is.
How many here thought for a split second this was new on Nvidia?
I did, after that kickass Radeon 7970 announcement
Great news, all we need now is FTL drive spaceships, wormholes or a working Stargate and we can stripmine it, err, colonise it.
It will all start with finding some ancient ruins on Mars...
I did, after that kickass Radeon 7970 announcement
It will all start with finding some ancient ruins on Mars...
Personally I am hoping it will be more like Total Recall, rather than Doom, I would rather the future was full of mutants than demons.
Personally I am hoping it will be more like Total Recall, rather than Doom, I would rather the future was full of mutants than demons.
How about more like Mass Effect?
Great news, all we need now is FTL drive spaceships, wormholes or a working Stargate and we can stripmine it, err, colonise it.
That's not necessarily true. If you could travel close enough to the speed of light, you could travel there in what seems to you like a very short time. Of course Earth would be much older if you were to ever come back.
Probabilistically, no surprises here.
wonder what it feels like (if any different) to orbit in 6.1 days.
We can get there. All we need is a motor home that can travel at Ludicrous speed!
Great then all we have to do is send a craft and wait a few hundred thousand or million years to confirm that a potential planet was found.
It could very well be that there are no shortcuts like warp or wormholes to make faster than warp travel possible. Nor that it is possible to build massive power sources such as anti-matter.
I hope that this stuff is possible but we may never know or visit even our nearest neighboring system. I'm sure that cheap relatively fast travel will be possible within our own system. Beyond that everything seems to require unbelievable amounts of energy that even nuclear fusion wouldn't come close to providing.
That's not necessarily true. If you could travel close enough to the speed of light, you could travel there in what seems to you like a very short time. Of course Earth would be much older if you were to ever come back.
Just think, you return to find your great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandchildren are waiting for you
...
The greeting card industry would have a field day
its very possible we could travel to these planets with the tech of today and the genetics of tomorrow (just think we could live forever and everything) but what happens if on your way the planet your going to gets destroyed for what ever reason and now is uninhabitable now your energy runs out it be shitty.
I was not aware Hubble had been decomissioned already. Hence, for a moment I thought Nvidia discovered a planet...
Yeah, there are likely trillions of them. Statistically, the likelihood of one solar system having 9 planets if most stars have no planets at all is rather slim. So yes, most stars probably have planets. Imagine all the civilizations smarter than ours out there specially if they survived the atomic age without destroying themselves, something we are unlikely to achieve given our record of tribal warfare.
Yeah, there are likely trillions of them. Statistically, the likelihood of one solar system having 9 planets if most stars have no planets at all is rather slim. So yes, most stars probably have planets. Imagine all the civilizations smarter than ours out there specially if they survived the atomic age without destroying themselves, something we are unlikely to achieve given our record of tribal warfare.
Hilarity would ensue if in a few years we get radio transmissions from a race thousands of light years away, we listen in to their signals for about a hundred years then it all goes silent a few years after they invent nuclear weapons
...
No point in going to that planet, unless you plan to study ancient dead civilisations from the safety of a radiation suit
The Drake equation comes to mind here...
Ummm, that could possibly send a shot across the bow and get us to straighten our act. As we are headed now, I see little chance that we will make it.
By the way, in my estimate radio wave communication is a rather primitive technology that no doubt has been superseded by all but the least advanced of extraterrestrial civilizations, probably billions of light years away from us. Radio wave communication may seem as advance to some exosolar civilizations as smoke signal communication seems to us now.
Given that communication can be boiled down to just transmitting a series of zeros and ones or binary states, it is likely that myriads of sophisticated methods of sending signals across the universe, and possibly into parallel universes unknown to us, have been developed in the universe at large. We will probably never reach the level of technological sophistication to achieve decryption of those messages, or even sense them with our limited technologies.
there are shadows out there....
I have to ding Tom's a point for taking forever to report this... Though I will give credit for giving what appears to be the most ACCURATE version of the same article.
Great news, all we need now is FTL drive spaceships, wormholes or a working Stargate and we can stripmine it, err, colonise it.
As gm0n3y mentioned, due to the effects of time-dilation, simply getting close enough to the speed of light would suffice in ensuring the original generation of colonists are there when they arrive; peg your speedometer close enough to c, and even a >10,000-light-year trip across the galaxy will only pass by as a mere few days for those on-board. (and, thankfully, the ship itself, so you needn't worry about it deteriorating)
Such technology isn't so fantastically out of reach as one might think: nuclear pulse propulsion is something that was developed even back in the 1950s, and even using older atomic bombs of the era, it could reach up to 10% c; more modern designs using inertial confinement fusion (plausible for this century) or even antimatter, (plausible for coming centuries) could achieve vastly higher speeds.
Great then all we have to do is send a craft and wait a few hundred thousand or million years to confirm that a potential planet was found.
So I take it that humanity didn't know that the planet Jupiter existed until Pioneer 10 was able to beam us some up-close photographs of it?
You might do to brush up on the methods used for detecting planets: Kepler, in question, simply detects them as they eclipse (or more accurately, "transit," as they don't block the star entirely) their parent star. Once you watch it happen enough times with enough regularity, you know something's orbiting there. By measuring the amount it dims the star, you know what percentage of the star's surface it's obscuring, and hence the size of the planet.
And no, for Kepler, that's not considered enough to "confirm." (Kepler's actually found >2,000 "planetary candidates" so far, BTW) The alternate method used in conjunction is the older "Doppler Method." (Radial Velocity) If they can confirm that the parent star is being "tugged" as by a force coming from right where the planet should be, (i.e, it lines up with the orbit seen in the transits) then it's pretty safe to say there's a planet there, just as if it'd been directly imaged.