Planets that can potentially support life... - Page 28

On October 17 2012 10:20 Monochromatic wrote:
So they just found a planet that is like earth in its mass and star?

But there is zero chance it could ever support life?

I fail to see the importance of this discovery..?

On October 17 2012 10:38 ItsFunToLose wrote:



How about the purpose for doing so?

What incentive is there for the current generation to invest in a colony separated by a distance of centuries?

What if 300 years into the 900 year journey to the planet, earth develops a technology that can get there in 100 years instead of 900 and at half the cost?

Just for the swag of it all?

On October 17 2012 10:47 Epishade wrote:


"The European team detected the planet by picking up the tiny wobbles in the motion of the star Alpha Centauri B created by the gravitational pull of the orbiting planet [2]. The effect is minute -- it causes the star to move back and forth by no more than 51 centimeters per second (1.8 km/hour), about the speed of a baby crawling. This is the highest precision ever achieved using this method."

That's ridiculous the way they measured it. Their precision of 51 cm/sec and the insanely little movement of the star that they were somehow able to measure is hard to believe. I don't know how their HARPS system works in measuring this kind of stuff, but it just seems to unrealistic to make a measurement so precise from that far away. I just don't think we have the technology to detect such little changes to star movement like they did here.

The star HD 40307 was known to host three planets, all of them too near to support liquid water.

But research to appear in Astronomy and Astrophysics has found three more - among them a "super-Earth" seven times our planet's mass, in the habitable zone where liquid water can exist.

Many more observations will be needed to confirm any other similarities.

But the find joins an ever-larger catalogue of more than 800 known exoplanets, and it seems only a matter of time before astronomers spot an "Earth 2.0" - a rocky planet with an atmosphere circling a Sun-like star in the habitable zone.

HD 40307, which lies 42 light-years away, is not particularly Sun-like - it is a smaller, cooler version of our star emitting orange light.

But it is subtle variations in this light that permitted researchers working with the Rocky Planets Around Cool Stars (Ropacs) network to find three more planets around it.

Francois Fressin, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), presented the analysis today in a press conference at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Long Beach, Calif. A paper detailing the research has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal.

Kepler detects planetary candidates using the transit method, watching for a planet to cross its star and create a mini-eclipse that dims the star slightly. The first 16 months of the survey identified about 2,400 candidates. Astronomers then asked, how many of those signals are real, and how many planets did Kepler miss?

By simulating the Kepler survey, Fressin and his colleagues were able to correct both the impurity and the incompleteness of this list of candidates to recover the true occurrence of planets orbiting other stars, down to the size of Earth.

"There is a list of astrophysical configurations that can mimic planet signals, but altogether, they can only account for one-tenth of the huge number of Kepler candidates. All the other signals are bona-fide planets," says Fressin.

Altogether, the researchers found that 50 percent of stars have a planet of Earth-size or larger in a close orbit. By adding larger planets, which have been detected in wider orbits up to the orbital distance of the Earth, this number reaches 70 percent.

Volunteers from the Planethunters.org website, part of the Oxford University-led Zooniverse project, have discovered 15 new planet candidates orbiting in the habitable zones of other stars.

Added to the 19 similar planets already discovered in habitable zones, where the temperature is neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water, the new finds suggest that there may be a "traffic jam" of all kinds of strange worlds in regions that could potentially support life.

Rather than being seen directly, the new planet candidates were found by Planethunters.org volunteers looking for a telltale dip in the brightness as planets pass in front of their parent stars. One of the 15, a Jupiter-sized planet orbiting a Sun-like star, has been officially confirmed as a planet (with 99.9% certainty) after follow-up work with the Keck telescope in Hawai"i and has been named "PH2 b". It is the second confirmed planet to be found by Planethunters.org.

A report of the research has been submitted to the Astrophysical Journal and is released via arxiv.org on Monday 7 January 2013. "There's an obsession with finding Earth-like planets but what we are discovering, with planets such as PH2 b, is far stranger," said Zooniverse lead Dr Chris Lintott of Oxford University. "Jupiter has several large water-rich moons - imagine dragging that system into the comfortably warm region where the Earth is. If such a planet had Earth size moons, we"d see not Europa and Callisto but worlds with rivers, lakes and all sorts of habitats - a surprising scenario that might just be common."

Planethunters lead scientist Professor Debra Fisher of Yale University said: "We are seeing the emergence of a new era in the Planet Hunters project where our volunteers seem to be at least as efficient as the computer algorithms at finding planets orbiting at habitable zone distances from the host stars. Now, the hunt is not just targeting any old exoplanet - volunteers are homing in on habitable worlds."

On January 08 2013 11:54 Tenshix wrote:
I used to be excited about all these new planets and stuff, but frankly it isn't exciting at all. Just tell me when we find a planet with an advanced civilization on it please.

On January 08 2013 12:01 Adreme wrote:


We wont be able to likely tell something like that especially if they were smart enough to go underground.

On May 03 2012 02:36 heroyi wrote:

A somewhat relevant tale:

NASA sent astronauts on the moon and brought a camera with them. They took a couple of pictures and did a couple of missions and whatnot. Afterwards when they returned to earth the scientists examined the inventory. They noticed that on the camera, which is quite expensive and was new, had a small scratch on the lens. Obviously this isn't right so when the scientists examined it they found bacteria on the lens. Everyone panicked and essentially shut the whole facility down quarantining everything. Later they examined it and found it to be earth-born. This is when they realized how some microbes could survive in space.

Cool story.

On January 08 2013 12:18 Tenshix wrote:


That is a likely factor, and there are probably more advanced ways of hiding themselves like cloaking their entire planet and making it nearly impossible for other advanced civilizations to find them. However, I believe that there are other civilizations out there who are on the same level we're at or near it. If that is the case, we could probably find them because they wouldn't be hiding anywhere.

On October 17 2012 10:42 Luepert wrote:
3.5x earths mass --> stronger gravity --> Any life that evolves there is strong as fuck --> We're fucked.

On January 08 2013 12:20 Myles wrote:

In my mind it's not a question of if they're out there, just if they're close enough for us to ever know.

On January 08 2013 12:43 Tenshix wrote:


I guess that is true, and since we've only discovered so many exoplanets (~700 out of an estimated 100 billion in the Milky Way alone?) it's hard to say how close an alien civilization might be. Perhaps when the time comes when our technology advances will we learn more about these exoplanets and how close a civilization might be.