Kepler Spacecraft Finds System With Multiple Planets Transiting the Star 136
rhaas writes "NASA's Kepler spacecraft has discovered the first confirmed planetary system with more than one planet crossing in front of, or transiting, the same star. They found two planets almost the size of Saturn, and possibly a third, small, very hot planet with a radius about 1.5 times that of Earth."
Exoplanets vs. inter-stellar travel (Score:5, Insightful)
The exoplanets search is the most exciting thing in space exploration since the moon landings IMHO for one important reason: one day, a project like Kepler will find an Earth sized planet orbiting within a foreign star's habitable zone. It's the stated goal of the project, yes, but when it actually happens, things will be different.
Imagine what the day will be like when we find something like that. We'll know it's there, we'll know it's the right size and at the right distance from its star, but we'll know little else. We'll know that life very probably *could* exist there, but without getting much, much closer to it, we'd never know for sure.
And we're not talking about the extremely remote possibilities of microbial life on Mars, or some kind of funky aquatic life on Europa's hypothetical subsurface ocean, we're talking about plants and animals. Maybe even intelligent animals like us.
What could possibly be a better motivator for our society to start pushing the limits of propulsion technology again? If we had something *tangibly* interesting to explore in a relatively nearby star system, like the ones Kepler is exploring, we might just get that extra kick in our pants we need to start innovating again.
WWII motivated us to enter a brand new energy age with the development of atomic power and the perfection (I'll use that term loosely ;)) of rocketry. Would discovering a planet in another star system with a high degree of habitability give us the motivation we need to efficiently produce and harness antimatter or some other next-generation power source?
Yeah, I'm being all misty eyed here. Relativity is a pesky little fucker, among other issues. But I can't shake the feeling that we're an amazing species of innovators when properly motivated. And I just don't think exploring other star systems has captured our collective attention the way landing on the moon did.
I desperately want to see us that motivated again some day. And I think finding a reasonably high enough probability of habitability on a planet orbiting a foreign star would give us back what we let slip away from us in the 1970s.
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Yeah, I'm being all misty eyed here.
Its not exactly like this is the first time we've discovered other solar systems with planets. And this discovery speaks nothing about habitability.
Its too soon to book your flight.
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Re:Exoplanets vs. inter-stellar travel (Score:5, Interesting)
Kepler is literally writing those first few galactic database entries for us. Some years from now, be it years, decades, or centuries, when our ancestors are poking around other solar systems, they are going to be pulling up a few scant words describing the likely surface composition and climate data of some of these planets. They will pull up the mass estimates and other numbers associated with each body before dropping onto the surface of the planet to update/verify the database. They will literally be using the information gathered by Kepler and its successors to give them some insight about what they are going to step into.
Does that register with anyone else? We are literally starting to compile a database on planets in other solar systems, so that one day explorers will have something, no matter how small, to refer to when stepping into the unknown. We are writing our own version of Mass Efffect's Codex. When that dawned on me today I almost crapped my pants. Sure folks, we joke about instant communication and flying robot overlords being signs that we literally are living in the future, but holy mother of crap, we have a spacecraft, on orbit, sending data down to us right now that is compiling data on systems that we hope to one day explore. That just makes my heart flutter to think about. Our infantile species, that leaped into orbit only half a century ago, can start to seriously consider studying, and maybe one day exploring, extra-system planets. Say what you will about how stupid and hopeless humans are, but I'll be damned if something like the Kepler mission doesn't make me gasp at how amazing a species we can be....
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Right now, I'd be happy enough if that compiled list would be used to find targets to point an even BIGGER freakin' telescope at. One that could give us data on those planets atmospheric composition, etc.
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Some years from now, be it years, decades, or centuries, when our ancestors are poking around other solar systems
^when choosing to say "when" (vs, "if"), I suspect it's better to also say "...centuries, or millenia"
Because, generally, do you see humans being used to gather more detailed data about planets, et al. in our own system? (a backyard, really) Hell, we even observe the Earth remotely / from space quite a bit.
Go a bit further (Score:3, Informative)
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Yeah, I'm still trying not to push depressive realism too much ;) - especially when journeys in the range of dozens or hundreds of thousands of years can be pretty much dismissed - apart from a basic problem of preventing any container from leaking everything stored inside, there's also the issue of finding motivation for such monumental project & allowing resource drain on the system. And why I suspect elsewhere how perhaps embryo colonization could be workable; or probably simply an organic spread tow
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The first thing we'll have to get over in our quest to explore other solar systems will be that there will be no such thing as a "round trip."
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You're wrong. The great trend of technology is that they will be better. *YOU* have no basis for saying they won't be since, by far, technology continues to make every means of transport more advanced.
Be a cynic all you want. No one really cares. But to say that something of this nature has no basis in reality is not a logical conclusion from what you can reach out and experience for yourself today.
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With current tech the nearest solar system is about half a century [wikipedia.org] away. Well, actually that's 40 years old tech, but you get the idea.
Yes, folks, we could build and send a starship to Alpha Centauri right now if we wanted to, and have it arrive within our lifetimes. We just don't want to, but would rather spend our resources to bomb the living shit out of some miserable desert state and pay bonuses to failed bankers. O how the
Re:Exoplanets vs. inter-stellar travel (Score:4, Funny)
when our ancestors are poking around other solar systems
I think you are confusing space travel with time travel.
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Here, let me take care of my own
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Some years from now, be it years, decades, or centuries, when our ancestors are poking around other solar systems, they are going to be pulling up a few scant words describing the likely surface composition and climate data of some of these planets.
Our ancestors will be poking around? Oh, you meant to say that time-travel would have been invented by then...my bad. Carry on.
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Kepler is literally writing those first few galactic database entries for us. Some years from now, be it years, decades, or centuries, when our ancestors are poking around other solar systems, they are going to be pulling up a few scant words describing the likely surface composition and climate data of some of these planets. They will pull up the mass estimates and other numbers associated with each body before dropping onto the surface of the planet to update/verify the database. They will literally be using the information gathered by Kepler and its successors to give them some insight about what they are going to step into.
... and then they will click by unthinkingly so they can go and blow some shit up.
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The entries in the galactic database, or whatever, were a few short paragraphs describing what conditions were probably like on the planet, but no explorers had ever returned to find out. I remember when I played those games I would click through the text unthinkingly so I could go blow some shit up.
Of course, the cynic in me sees the future human just clicking through that galactic database crap so they can go blow some shit up...
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when our ancestors are...
I know you were all excited and mentally living in the Star Wars Rebellion, but really, I don't think our ancestors are coming back to life anytime soon.
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Re:Exoplanets vs. inter-stellar travel (Score:4, Insightful)
I think our best bet at getting more information about these planets is pushing the limits of telescope technology again. As in having linked telescopes at opposite ends of the solar system and similar projects. That way, we won't have to make those pesky trips over tens or even hundreds of light years.
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To be fair, we're pushing it all the time - in recent times sort of more than ever (though yes, more resources being directed at such pursuits instead of at, well, waste would be nice). And I don't think aiming outright at system-wide interferometer would get us far; there are many very juicy and much smaller (viable within foreseeable means) projects to be made.
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A big radiotelescope and maybe a couple of optical/IR/UV ones on the far side of the moon would be a good start.
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Imagine what the day will be like when we find something like that. We'll know it's there, we'll know it's the right size and at the right distance from its star, but we'll know little else. We'll know that life very probably *could* exist there, but without getting much
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If your description of the premise is accurate, it seems like a not very rational thing to do... (within constraints of this discussion of course, when remembering about the realities of our Universe) A technology to build interstellar ark is available and not put to use towards better remote sensing methods / sending relatively cheap & small probes, which could get at the destination in a fraction of the time when using the same propulsion tech?
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While I agree that sending a probe is a good idea... This is a common theme in science fiction: Send a colony ship to a star system known to contain a potentially habitable planet, without knowing if the colony will be viable or survive. They might get there and find a virtual Eden. They might find a wholly uninhabitable planet offering little chance for survival (oops, did we send them to a planet whos surface is partially molten and atmosphere is toxic... oh well, we'll try somewhere else.)
Makes for
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Integral Trees for one. Made for a great book.
Re:Exoplanets vs. inter-stellar travel (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Exoplanets vs. inter-stellar travel (Score:5, Interesting)
People used to say that about the moon. "Escape velocity is impossible to reach!" they'd say. Escape velocity wasn't impossible. It was a puzzle to be solved. I prefer to look at Relativity and faster than light travel the same way. Maybe one day we'll solve those puzzles. I still have hope. I guess I'm an optimist.
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Actually, it was mostly a matter of building a BIGGER freakin' rocket.
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It was realised (by few) for quite some time how it seems possible - at the least, the physics didn't appear to work against our efforts too much. No such comfort with interstellar distances yet, and we can't assume it will come. [tufts.edu]
BTW, how's that inspiring part with manned lunar missions works so far?
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Stupid people said that. Intelligent people knew it wasn't so, and did it.
Reaching other star systems in a reasonable amount of time is actually impossible, given current and foreseeable tech.
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So people in the 1800s were stupid for thinking that reaching escape velocity was impossible given their current and foreseeable technology at the time? How is that any different than you saying reaching other star systems in a timely fashion is impossible given current and foreseeable technology?
Is there going to be s
Physical limits vs. technological limits (Score:5, Insightful)
The only limits in the 1800s were technological. Given enough development in stronger and lighter materials, escape velocity became possible.
The light of speed limit is an ultimate physical limit of the universe. The first hint of this limitation was found in 1887 [wikipedia.org] and has been confirmed many times in many different ways. Simply put, given all the experimental data we have, if faster than light travel were possible time would be bidirectional; causality would be violated.
This does not mean FTL is absolutely impossible, maybe we will one day find a flaw in our current understanding of physics that will let us travel faster than light. However, the resultant implications would be so huge that travelling to distant stars would perhaps be one of the least interesting things to do with our new physics.
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The idea that we have good understanding of the laws of the universe is laughable, even though many people believe it. Same mistake every generation has made.
There are many possible ways to break causality, ranging from additional dimensions to bending space time. Getting from A to B
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Stupid people said that. Intelligent people knew it wasn't so, and did it.
Reaching other star systems in a reasonable amount of time is actually impossible, given current and foreseeable tech.
This, of course, depends on definition of "reasonable". And that depends on motivation and physical form (mind in machine or extreme genetic modification) and state (hibernation) of the travellers.
Fusion reactor for energy, and inevitable destruction of solar system in the horizion for motivation (for example calculated head-on collision with currently undiscovered nearby brown dwarf in a few centuries). I'm confident that under this kind of threat and timescale, humanity would get into other stars.
And if i
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Faster than light travel would also be time travel, which would lead to causal loops, which is likely be logically impossible. This is very different from mere engineering problems of reaching escape velocity.
However, there is a solution: simply make yourself immortal. Upload your mind to a machine, or fortify your human body to take the decades of travel between stars e
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The problem is if the rules of the universe dont enable us to get there in any practical way.
Nonsense. The rules of the universe say we can get there in practically no time at all for the people actually doing the traveling; and that's just old fashioned 100 year old special relativity. Add in what may very well be quantum and/or GR shortcuts (tunneling drives or Alcubierre drives or whatever) and "the rules of the universe" practically give us the ability to go wherever we want.
Granted, we don't have th
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We really don't need new *physics* to reach the stars.
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What could possibly be a better motivator for our society to start pushing the limits of propulsion technology again?
The better motivator would be if it looked like the Russians/Arabs/Koreans/anyone-not-USA was going to get there first. If NASA wants to enter the space race again they need to start siphoning some money off to the competitors to kickstart their space race.
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I guess we'll just have to pick a fight with the people who live there.
Worlds War III (sic) should be motivation enough to invent the equivalent of nuclear power for propulsion.
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We know very little about exoplanets right now because they are detected by indirect means. When we find an earth-like planet in the habitable zone that will be a strong incentive to build a telescope capable of observing it directly.
The moment we start direct optical observations of a planet we will be able to analyze t
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Seeing in what style the moon landings were performed / how they ended, I don't think striving for similar approach of "exciting" & "capturing our collective attention the way landing on the moon did" would be a good thing...
Especially since we shouldn't expect any new physics (which would be required; "hope for" - sure, why not...but not "expect"). Without it (a strong possibility), any means of travel won't be very palatable to hopes of popular imagination of most of humanity. Moonshot had it easy, by
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I think the major hurtle for humankind is our inability to think/plan long term. Our puny lives are only 70-80 rotations of our planetary orbit. Our organizational systems do not seem to be able to handle 5-10 years let alone 40 or 50 years. 100 to 300 years?
As you say relativity is a bitch, which is likely why we haven't been contacted already. It is either impossible, or so difficult and life on average so short lived that the distances and time involved make it at the very least impractical. I also do th
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http://www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/technology/warp/scales.html [nasa.gov] Just an obligatory reference to the warp drive when: scales page to remind everyone just how far away even Alpha Centauri is. It turns out that the basic problem is one of fuel to accelerate us to a large enough fraction of c. The most practical choice seems to be an exceedingly large spacecraft built on Moonbase Alpha and ferried to the appropriate Lagrange Point Station manufacturing facility for further assembly. The only practical tech we hav
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Relativity is a pesky little fucker, among other issues.
But even with Relativity, it is possible to visit (at least near by stars) in a human lifetime...with enough money, of course...but money is all that is stopping it.
For example...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Daedalus [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Longshot [wikipedia.org]
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I don't know; humans weren't supposed to exist on the antipodes, remember? (admiteddly, how they were percieved as less advanced helped)
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...or demons.
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You heretic! God created the aliens. Who are we to question the workings of god?!
I can't seem find sarcasm tag so just assume it's there.
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Hmmm, I am not sure if you are only dangling a hook to see if anyone bites. However...
Nothing wrong with the earth. However it is the only place where humanity exists. If we get hit by an extinction level event (ELE), be it an asteroid, super volcano, or whatever, then that is that. We need to have a plan B. And forget about the moon or Mars. We do not have the know-how to create a self-sufficient environment there or anywhere else. We need a nice friendly planet in the Goldilocks zone.
And destruction is in
Re:Exoplanets vs. inter-stellar travel (Score:5, Insightful)
If I were to be, then my money would be on us reaching the technology to create a self-sufficient environment on, say, Mars much earlier than us reaching the technology to send anything other than a robotic probe over interstellar distances.
This is simply because travelling interstellar distances pretty much requires the technology to create a quasi-self-sufficient environment ... or warp drive technology.
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Unless we can figure out the kinks in Cryogenics. I mean keeping something frozen in space isn't all that difficult. All that's required is enough power to keep the timer online for the thousands of years it takes to travel the distance, and then wake up when the time is right.
With the advances in Medicine we've been seeing, and I mean that in the broad sense of bionics and stem cells and genetics and all that stuff, it's not unreasonable to think that we might reach a state where its possible for someone t
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You still need a spacecraft that stays functional for hundreds or thousands of years. That means it needs to be able to repair itself, etc. If you can do anything even close to that, creating a self-sufficient colony on Mars would
Re:Exoplanets vs. inter-stellar travel (Score:4, Interesting)
Thing is: for vast, vast majority of "ELE" type events, it would be best to dig - to survive here on Earth (or rather "under" it). Because, except for very few, your typical ELE still doesn't make the Earth less hospitable (especially when saving as many humans as possible within achievable effort - don't be surprised with "think of the children" especially in such circumstances) in comparison to what's probably nearby.
Yes, a backup of sorts will be nice eventually - but this bonus won't be why we'll do it. Not with huge distances, not with physics of this Universe (we cannot assume some breakthrough, even if it would be very nice to have); almost dictating that colonization will be only via hops to nearest systems (and probably via autonomous embryo ships at that; barely any "full" living humans actually making the journey). Or even without much directed effort at all - just via spreading, over many millenia, also to Oort cloud of our system...which at some point makes "jumps" to Oort clouds of nearby systems relatively easy.
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we cannot assume some breakthrough
And if you did, you can just as easily assume the same breakthrough would enable us to bypass the ELE right here: divert the asteroid, plug the volcano, or just build a massive orbiting space station. Life's easy once you assume that the laws of physics are negotiable.
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And as long as all we do is sit down here, we never will, either. The only way we're going to learn how to create a self-sufficient environment is by planting a colony somewhere out there where we have two choices: become self-sufficient or die.
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Permanent shutdown will happen a billion years from now, when our aging sun puts out enough luminosity to scorch Earth into a dry, lifeless chunk of rock. (Yes, the sun will do that 3 billion years before it goes red giant.)
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who is this "we" you keep talking about?
you don't speak for me.
you are NOTHING.
By "we", I meant people who happen to live on Earth. You're obviously off on your own little world, so apparently it doesn't apply to you. Carry on. :)
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so you believe i've already achieved everything you find is necessary for those you speak for, while you remain unable to provide it to them.
Quite the contrary. All you've been able to do is string words together semi-randomly. But your inability to understand science, history, or paleontology is of no concern to me, actually. As I said, carry on.
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Go on, rub it in why don't you? (Score:3, Funny)
Imagine how Pluto feels. You rotten, cruel bastards. Go on, rub it in why don't you?
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Pluto's no planet.
Did it sting?
Re:Go on, rub it in why don't you? (Score:5, Funny)
Stop anthropomorphizing the Trans-Neptunian objects.
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Stop anthropomorphizing the Trans-Neptunian objects.
They hate it when you do that!
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Imagine how Ceres feels! Same horrible fate as Pluto, but a bit sooner so nobody cares anymore.
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Size matters.
Perspective (Score:1)
It's becoming more obvious that planetary systems are the norm, rather than the exception. As our ability to detect smaller companions increases, we'll nostalgically look back on the time when we were amazed that we detected planets at all (like the reports of "canali" on the surface of Mars).
At that point, we'll realize that our situation- and our solar system- is not some snowflake like miracle, but rather a portion of a larger pattern. I think that will be good for us (or some portion of us that does not
Re:Perspective (Score:4, Insightful)
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We have already learnt some interesting things. The number of large Jupiter size planets that are in close orbits is much higher than expected. So migration after formation seems to be more important that first suspected (Uranu
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Actually, the most distant discovered is 20k light years away, and near the center of Mily Way to boot (so not really a case of local conditions; actually, the conditions might be better there, with higher metallicity); with a possible detection also in the Andromeda Galaxy and even in YGKOW G1, 3.7 billion light years away.
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Oh, okay, nevermind then, turns out I was right to believe it was the case
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Given that we can see stars very similar to those near us even in other galaxies, I don't think it's likely that the conditions in our neighborhood are so special. The planets are formed in the same process that formed the star, a star similar to ours should also have planets.
What does "first confirmed" stands for (Score:1)
7 month? (Score:1)
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Yes. The longer you look, the more longer-period planets you will find.
On top of that, would an orbit perpendicular to ours be detectible with this technique
Not with th
Title (Score:2)
Kepler Spacecraft Finds System With Multiple Planets Transiting the Star
Is there a special "Star" that I don't know about?
Can we detect planets in a perpendicular plane? (Score:2)
The Slashdot summary, talking about the objects passing in front of their stars, got me to wondering:
* Is there any probability that there are stars out there whose planets orbit in a plane which is perpendicular to our line of view (that is, the planets would never cross in front of their star, from our point of view, because we are sort of looking at the their orbits top-down? It would seem that this is likely, seeing as their are stars which, from our point of view, are at every degree of latitude and lo
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No. The orientations are random. Consequently most are probably non-transiting.
No.
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However, if the orientations are random, then the transiting planets we detect give us a good random sample of all planets and allows us to make a very educated guess about the abundance of planets in the galaxy.
No.
Yes. There's a way to detect planets that orbit perpendicular to our line of view (astrometrics - measuring the "wobble" this causes in the parent start), and one that detects planets that are almost, but not q
The first? (Score:1)
Re:The first? (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, all this means is they finally found a star system where they were viewing planets along (edge on to) the plane of ecliptic, and therefore able to measure multiple planets actually cross the disk of star.
Which suggest all the other multi-planet systems were viewed somewhat orthogonal to the ecliptic, because there are no shortage of multi-planet systems.
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But we can do that with the local one, too - two inner (relative to us) planets semi-frequently traversing our star, and there's also this one nearby which does that every few hours ;)
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You forgot the "In Soviet Russia"...
3 Step NOT 4 Step (Score:3, Funny)
You are hereby served notice regarding your improper use of the UGI patented "Steps to Profit Process". The UGI (Underpants Gnomes International) have established that all profit step processes must be a "3 Step Processes" and must take the form of
If you continue to use your bastardized 4 step process legal action may follow.
IAAUGL
Re:cheap replica handbag (Score:4, Funny)
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So what would Kepler see if a Ringworld happened to be on edge to us? (yes I know it's dynamically unstable).
Nothing, because the ring would be consistently blocking part of the star so Kepler would see a constant luminosity for that star. The inner day/night panels might show up as changes in luminosity if the ring were at a slightly oblique angle, though I'm not sure if Kepler is sensitive enough.
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If you look at the spectrum of the star, you might notice that something's odd about it (too much infrared). Don't know if Kepler can do a spectral analysis though.
This way, you could also find things like various implementations of the Dyson sphere.