Hubble Discovers a Hundred New Planets 395
Spudley writes "The BBC is reporting that the Hubble Telescope has discovered over a hundred new exoplanets - a number which almost doubles the total known. Apparently they are also expecting to be able to analyse the atmospheres of up to 20% of them. The discovery will be confirmed within the next seven days."
Re:The mighty galaxy (Score:2, Insightful)
Too bad... (Score:5, Insightful)
And we are retiring this why? (Score:5, Insightful)
What a shame that the only thing that has frequently motivated us to look to the skies and spend the money to get there is fear and politics.
RMW
Irony (Score:0, Insightful)
This is good (Score:5, Insightful)
so wait... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The mighty galaxy (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, getting kids interested in other planets so they study science is a worthless endevor.
Re:The mighty galaxy (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh please there are much more important things for people in education to focus on then some planet hundreds of light years away. What practical reason would they have for teaching (what little they know) about the contants of a planet's atmosphere in another galaxy.
That was meant to be sarcastic, I hope. If we force education on our childrent to focus solely on the exactly what they need to know to be another cog in the machine, and not a thing more, we will be turning out a generation of proles. Things like "No Child Left Behind" and its emphasis on standardized testing are likely to do just that.
Cosmology teaches us about the joy and wonder of the universe, and impresses us that we are able to gain even a glimmer of an understanding of it. That's enough "practicality" for me, and I sure do hope my little boy learns this in school and not just from me.
Re:Okay then... (Score:5, Insightful)
Secondly, seeing as how the ping time between solar systems is in the order of thousands of years, there will never be any meanfull interaction or exchange between planets. I mean we can watch them and they can watch us, but since it will be centuries before a response comes back, there is no real chance for real communications. Transportation is even worse. If you really wanted to, you could travel across the universe and end up in a place completely different than it was when you left, and every one you left has been dead for centuries. So it would be the most awesome retirement ever, but you can throw out any concept of trade or diplomicy between planets.
It's one of those cruel ironies, that after years of dreaming about space creatures, we found out nearly simultaneously that statistically they are certain to exist, and physically they are certain to never play any role in our lives.
Unless we find some big loophole that allows us to get around relativity, the earth really is an island to itself, and while it may be one of millions, it is the only one that will ever have any significance whatsoever to us. That makes it pretty darn important in my eyes.
-jackson (don't have my password to 'pavon' at the moment)
Re:The mighty galaxy (Score:5, Insightful)
If nobody had ever worked on areas that have no immediate practical purpose, we'd still be focused on optimizing the designs of pointed sticks and stone hammers.
Rant time! (Score:2, Insightful)
It appears to me, at this moment, that the entire US spacd program is becoming as mismanaged as the Russian one. Useful projects are threatened with mothballing, deorbit, and cancellation, while white elephants like the ISS are allowed to suck dollars. Now that I think of it, it is an absolute disgrace that no backup to the manned shuttle program was considered, in the event that disasters like Challenger and Columbia stalled major projects like the ISS and Hubble upgrades. At least the Russians have a working capsule transport system that can carry people to and from space.
I've been led to understand that the proposed Crew Exploration Vehicle will be closer to a single-use capsule than a reusable spaceplane. It occurs to me, after considering the problems caused by the Columbia disaster and the presence of an ongoing, if rickety and bankrupt, Russian transport system, that maybe the old Apollo or Gemini designs should have been dusted off and updated years ago, for just such a situation like this. There is much to be said for a reusable transport system like the shuttle, but diversification is the key for the health and survival of... well, damn near anything. Relying on robots is good in terms of safety and learning how to remotely manipulate machines in space, but if we're going to travel to the Moon, and eventually Mars (and beyond?), we must get people into space, the more the better, to continue learning how to survive and travel in that harsh environment for extended periods.
Despite the hard work of the scientists and engineers at NASA, it seems to me that the American program is in disarray, buried under years of budget cuts and pointless rhetoric from various bureaucrats and politicians. The Russian program will be something of a writeoff until that agency is given a degree of stability and sure access to resources. China's program may very well lead the way to the moon again, but I have no clue just how well that program is being handled, or whether it would survive a collapse of the current authoritarian regime. Europe seems focused on unpiloted probes like Cassini, which as I said is perfectly KO, but for the lack of human interaction. India... who knows, crossing my fingers. Ultimately, we can guess what living on the Moon and during interplanetary transit will be like. We can even make some solid predictions based on our current knowledge ands cience. But, we simply won't know what is really involved in such a massive project as an orbiting construction platform, or a moonbase, until we try it. By "try", I mean dedicate the resources necessary, not the resources demanded by political convenience and pork, which is far less and more wasteful. Some of the nongovernmental efforts may also help keep people going to the stars, freed from the constraints of government bureaucracy and state inertia.*
I'm tired of dicking around, scrambling for dollars while we, as a species, waste billions trying to kill each other. What the hell, might as well launch the nukes now and get it over with. If you want to call me nuts after reading this, you're the ones trying to rationalize the wholesale immolation of millions for... what, exactly?**
Ok, rant over
* I'm not exactly talking about privatization and dividing of space here. I actually hope some non-monetary-profit projects get started. After all, there is more to wealth than dollars and lines on a map (or a contract).
**The "you" in this refers to anyone, in any set of borders, who would rather spend money on guns and bombs than food and exploration. I'm starting to wonder if there is a collective, subconscious psychosis developing among our species. The dolphins may want to make their move soon, whatever that turns out to be.
Re:yay more Planets (Score:3, Insightful)
BTM
Sunspots? (Score:4, Insightful)
Some of the stars observed were seen to dim slightly in brightness. It is thought that a planet passing in front of the star is responsible for the dip in its light output.
Couldn't this "dip" be caused by sunspots?
Re:Woohoo! . . . . (Score:1, Insightful)
Stop that, it's annoying and won't earn you any mod points.
Re:Too bad... (Score:3, Insightful)
Tell you what. When JWST sees first light, I'll be first in line to press the "deorbit" button on Hubble.
Until then, remember that you're not just dealing with an engineering problem (namely, a successful launch and deployment - which isn't rocket sci- oh, wait...), but you're also dealing with a political problem, namely "will JWST get the axe because some guy in Washington doesn't think it gives his constituents enough pork?"
Deorbiting Hubble in hopes of JWST replacing it is a direct violation of the first rule of wing walking: Never let go of what you've got until you've got a hold on something else.
Re:The mighty galaxy (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm glad there are still teachers with this attitude out there. Cries of "what practical use is that?" are disheartening. I don't know if it's just that I'm getting older and more cynical, but it seems to be more common. If there isn't an application for a discovery in the next quarter, no one's interested in it.
It's not just the things we may discover that we can't predict that are important, the process of discovery and learning is important. Without the process, we wouldn't have science as we know it. Just a bunch of people running around with alchemy sets and healing crystals.
We need to preserve and pass on the sense of awe and wonder that comes from pursuing knowledge for it's own sake. It teaches us to think, gives us perspective, and allows us to see humanity in a broader context than profits and dominance.
So, from someone who had too many teachers that answered that question with "It will be on the test", thank you.
Re:yay more Planets (Score:5, Insightful)
You certainly can argue that planet searches are less significant than the origin problem for the whole universe, but then, what isn't? NASA being reluctant to break promises to researchers or go to further extremes in favoring one type of research over all others is a sign they are considering their mandate to serve the public properly. I don't want my state university to stop awarding PhD's in astronomy to anyone who isn't working on cosmology related projects, I dont want other tools, like the Keck scopes on Mauna Loa, to be scrambling to fit in a load of projects, all considered NASA rejects, and so I don't want NASA thinking like the only astronomy worth doing is cosmology.
Re:It'll be interesting... (Score:1, Insightful)
And, oddly enough, they are all on the same street.
Don't worry you'll get your pretty pictures (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Planets passing in front of stars? (Score:3, Insightful)
Luckily, I don't think the astronomers are looking one star at a time for only an instant - it's probably a computer comparing a helluvalot of observations of a large area and looking for variations in the illumination of any stars in that area. You're still limited by the plane of the system, but in terms of transit, you're limited only to planets with an orbital period less than or equal to your observation period.
Re:Okay then... (Score:4, Insightful)
Heck - they may have spent a thousand years of a large governmental program sending "signals to aliens", just to give up. And that was 600 million years ago.
Re:Okay then... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Okay then... (Score:3, Insightful)
whenever I read something like this, I think of what somone living a couple of millenia ago would have thought of the Earth with its unreachable distant lands and mysterious and endless oceans. They would have thought that their village was isolated, and anyone from even a few hundred miles away was a strange outsider. They would have imagined distant lands filled with strange creatures. Sound familiar? Now we can communicate almost anywhere in the world in a few seconds, and travel around the globe in less than a day.
To say that the Earth is 'the only one that we will ever have' seems a very arrogant statement, as it suggests that we now know all we will ever know about the cosmos and space travel.
Even with relativity, the nearest stars are only years away. Sea voyages of years were common centuries ago. Even with what we know now, there is nothing to stop us exploring the nearest stars, and once we have started there....
Here there be Dragons (Score:3, Insightful)
Unless we find some big loophole that allows us to get around relativity, the earth really is an island to itself, and while it may be one of millions, it is the only one that will ever have any significance whatsoever to us.
Of course, six hundred years ago everyone was convinced that the earth was flat, and that if you sailed too far you'd fall off the edge.
I'll grant that science plays a significantly bigger role these days than it did back then, and that we know a bit more now about how much we don't know, but I still argue that we don't yet know enough to disclaim the possibility of faster-than-light communication or travel.
That said, I'm not overly optimistic about the chances of figuring out FTL in my lifetime, and only slightly more optimistic about the chances of figuring out a way to extend my lifetime until we do figure out FTL (or its impossibility). At the moment I'd put my money on us blowing ourselves up before we get that far . . .
Fear, the Moon and Mars (Score:3, Insightful)
We have a viable space system gathering dust because of a paralyzing fear that something might go wrong on another shuttle mission. Do you think Russia, China, even India are holding their collective breaths waiting for us to make a decision on our space program?
The Apollo fire proved that from crippling failure success can be born. We picked ourselves up, analyzed what went wrong and forged ahead. The crew of Columbia were well aware of the risks of space flight and took those risks willingly.
We've mourned long enough, it's time to fix what's wrong and honor the memories of Columbia by renewing meaningful space science again without fear.