Kepler-62 Has 2 Good Candidate Planets In the Search for Life 79
astroengine writes "About 1,200 light-years from Earth, five planets are circling around sun-like star Kepler-62, two of which are fortuitously positioned for water, if any exists, to remain liquid on their surfaces — a condition believed to be necessary for life. The discovery, made by scientists using NASA's planet-hunting Kepler space telescope, is the strongest evidence yet for more than one Earth-sized planet existing in a star's so-called 'habitable' zone. 'We're particularly delighted to find that there are two planets in the habitable zone,' lead Kepler scientist William Borucki, with NASA's Ames Research Center in California, told Discovery News. 'It sort of doubles our chances of finding that Earth we'd all like to find. When you think about Earth and Mars, if Mars had been a bit larger, if Jupiter hadn't been so close, we'd again have two planets in the habitable zone and maybe we'd have a place to go,' he said." There's also a third planet believed to be a good candidate for hosting water.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't know about "never" but you do bring up a point: space is so vast that finding life of any sort of life is going to be a very long process.
I've been let down by sci-fi. In a Star Trek:Enterprise, it was mentioned (Season 4, IIRC) that Vulcan was 26 light years away. In reality, how many planets that may under the most flexible standards support life within that distance?
As far as I know it's zero.
In sci-fi at "Warp" whatever, the universe is teaming with life.
IN real life even if we could travel a
Re:That's nice... (Score:5, Funny)
I've been let down by sci-fi. In a Star Trek:Enterprise...
Well, there's your problem right there.
Re: (Score:1)
I've been let down by sci-fi. In a Star Trek:Enterprise...
Well, there's your problem right there.
It's been a long road getting from there to here?
Re:That's nice... (Score:5, Insightful)
Human beings are never going to get outside the solar system, the distance is just too great to get them to even the nearest star as bags of cells in water. But there is a reasonable chance that we can both transmit and receive information from other civilizations - all be it completely asynchronously. If we get really good at robots we might be able to seed a few local stars with self repairing robots with a range of science fiction purposes, but we will probably never know if they make it. Our current lifestyle is more likely to lead to human extinction before such grand objectives are attainable however, we are doing a lousy job of ensuring our own long term viability on the earth currently and it doesn't look likely to change soon. Heck its good fun though!
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, we're just waiting for the ansible [wikipedia.org].
Re:That's nice... (Score:5, Informative)
"Man will never reach the moon regardless of all future scientific advances." --Dr. Lee DeForest, "Father of Radio & Grandfather of Television."
"The bomb will never go off. I speak as an expert in explosives." --Admiral William Leahy, US Atomic Bomb Project
"There is no likelihood man can ever tap the power of the atom." --Robert Millikan, Nobel Prize in Physics, 1923
http://rense.com/general81/dw.htm [rense.com]
Re: (Score:1)
Meh, failing predictions is easy. Real men destroy them.
"Think of the large computers (the mainframes and the minis) as the passenger train and the Apple personal computer as the Volkswagen. The Volkswagen isn't as fast or as comfortable as the passenger train. But the VW owners can go where they want and with whom they want. The VW owners have personal control of the machine" -- Steve Jobs, creator of the centralized-app-store-dependent iPhone.
Re: (Score:2)
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spin_(novel) [wikipedia.org] (it's a great book)
Re: (Score:1)
Current technology works by expelling atoms one side so the ship moves to the opposite direction. You are always limited to the speed said atoms are expelled.
Currently with ion propulsion the fast you could go that i know of is DS4G with exhaust speed of 130 miles per second. Comparing with Light Speed (186 282 mile per second) means 0,07 % the speed of light (6000 years to next star).
Not saying what you saying is impossible just referring to how hard it is and what our current technology allows.
see: http:/
Warp is fine... (Score:5, Informative)
IN real life even if we could travel at Warp speeds, there's hardly any planets - that we know of today - that can support life within a lifetime of Warp travel. Eight times - TEN times the speed of light is not good enough, I'm afraid.
We need THOUSANDs of times the speed of light to have a Star Trek or Star Wars type of intergalactic society.
Warp factors in Star Trek are not linear. The actual scales very a bit, and they're not always consistent between episodes and given distances + ETA, but if you take a look at the TNG section [memory-alpha.org], warp 1 is the speed of light, but warp 2 is the 10x the speed of light, warp 3 is roughly 39x the speed of light, and by the time you get to warp 9 we're talking 1,516x the speed of light. So, with Star Trek, the scientific advisors to the writers know that.
Re: (Score:2)
Perhaps they do Warp factors the same way cellphone carriers do "G" speeds; more as marketing terms than actual measurments of anything.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
IN real life even if we could travel at Warp speeds, there's hardly any planets - that we know of today - that can support life within a lifetime of Warp travel
What do you call "a lifetime"? Why do people not question "aging"? Why not grow to maturity (say 25 year-old) and then stay that way, basically forever? Right now people that support research into aging complain about the Earth not being able to support an ever-expanding population, etc. etc. And on the other hand people complain that things can't be done "in a lifetime".
If you are going to travel in space for an extended period of time, you will need a radiation-hardened body. Start researching. DNA re-se
Re: (Score:1)
"Vulcan was 26 light years away. In reality, how many planets that may under the most flexible standards support life within that distance?"
According to Kepler and collected data from all planets found it was estimated that at least 46% of M stars have a planetary system making 94% likely to find a earth like planet within 10LY (this for M-Stars only, not counting other star types).
Source: http://phl.upr.edu/projects/habitable-exoplanets-catalog
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
And even looking at them now would put them at the end of the Roman empire and the beginning of the Byzantine (when Christianity became more of a cult) to give you a reference point. We probably won't be receiving any radio transmissions (which would be the most likely evidence of an intelligent species) from them for another ~1000 years and that's if there is even an intelligent species there that developed as quickly as we humans did and even if they are sending out radio transmissions, would it be coming
Re: (Score:3)
Their sun is 7 billion years old which puts the at a more developed state than our 4.8 billion year old system
Re: (Score:3)
All of that assumes that life developed there like it did here, and started at the same time. For all we know their intelligent species could have been going for 10 million years before hominids showed up here. Those planets might as well be a billion years older. Maybe the planets have far more natural resources than Earth, and they never entered large wars like we did here. There's no reason to assume that we are looking at a planet that has a civilization on it equivalent to our civilization 1200 yea
Re: (Score:2)
To add to that, Wikipedia lists the age of the parent star at 7 billion years, plus or minus 4 billion. It could easily be twice as old as the sun.
Re: (Score:2)
And even looking at them now would put them at the end of the Roman empire and the beginning of the Byzantine (when Christianity became more of a cult) to give you a reference point. We probably won't be receiving any radio transmissions (which would be the most likely evidence of an intelligent species) from them for another ~1000 years and that's if there is even an intelligent species there that developed as quickly as we humans did and even if they are sending out radio transmissions, would it be coming from the right direction, have enough power and linearity to be differentiated from background noise.
You're forgetting something. The Earth is approximately 4 billion years old, but the Universe is almost 14 billion years old. That means there should be planets out there that are much older than Earth. So, you could have a planet that evolved at the same pace as Earth, but started millions (or hundreds of millions) of years earlier.
Re: (Score:1)
Re:That's nice... (Score:4, Insightful)
If i were an alien i wouldnt stop here if it was the last out post on life in the universe, except for to steal the precious species that are not like us on this planet. Futhermore if we as so much get out of our solor system i be they would send a big rock toward us or blow up our sun
What makes you so certain that intelligent, technologically capable alien races don't go through the same problems that we do? At a minimum, it is likely that interstellar travel requires mastery of nuclear energy and metallurgy across the entire periodic table, with all of the environmental risks that implies. Additionally, just to get to the point where they could develop nuclear power would likely require a period of industrialization using cruder organic sources of energy. It's very hard to imagine accomplishing this without any environmental degradation. Given the number of possible ecological catastrophies that could happen along the way, I think we're actually doing reasonably well so far.
Re: (Score:3)
And even looking at them now would put them at the end of the Roman empire and the beginning of the Byzantine (when Christianity became more of a cult) to give you a reference point. We probably won't be receiving any radio transmissions (which would be the most likely evidence of an intelligent species) from them for another ~1000 years and that's if there is even an intelligent species there that developed as quickly as we humans did and even if they are sending out radio transmissions, would it be coming from the right direction, have enough power and linearity to be differentiated from background noise.
You're forgetting something. The Earth is approximately 4 billion years old, but the Universe is almost 14 billion years old. That means there should be planets out there that are much older than Earth. So, you could have a planet that evolved at the same pace as Earth, but started millions (or hundreds of millions) of years earlier.
Technically, planets don't evolve, they form. But regardless, whether or not there is life on a planet does not depend on how old it is. Mars and Earth are both the same age and both in the goldilocks zone and yet one has life and one does not.
It is far simpler ot come up with all the obstacles to life evolving on a planet than the likelihood of all the right things happening at the right moment for life to actually evolve on a planet. Obviously, we are here, so it can happen, but it is not as simple as a r
Re: (Score:2)
"You're forgetting something. The Earth is approximately 4 billion years old, but the Universe is almost 14 billion years old. That means there should be planets out there that are much older than Earth."
But the earliest stars only had hydrogen to work on, and wouldn't have had any rocky planets. You have to wait for second and third generation stars (and their systems) before you get the heavy elements (anything heavier than iron has to be formed in a supernova)
It may be possible to have life (as we know i
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Pack the car (Score:1)
With current technology that puts these planets a mere half million years away.
Re: (Score:2)
If that's your constraint, this would probably be a bad place to go as the star is older than ours.
Terrestrial Planet Finder (Score:1)
Cool! Kepler finds planets by observing the slight dimming of a star when a planet transits in front of it. Which means that it only finds planets that are lined up right to see this from our point of view. Only a small fraction of planets will be lined up this way. So there are good odds that there are terrestrial planets much closer to us. It'd be nice if something like the Terrestrial Planet Finder could be built. That would find planets at any orbital inclination. Then we could build something bi
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Kepler will tell us planet statistics (Score:2)
Plus NASA is on the verge of approving a "super Kepler" for the 2020s that can observe several percent of the sky
there are dozens of clever probe proposals (Score:2)
power level of a detectable signal at 1200 ly ? (Score:2)
Cant find any calculations on the power level or bandwidth of a detectable signal - Seti Institute dont have anything. Any takers on an estimate?
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
As I said above, the current transmissions we may be receiving puts them somewhere in the beginning of the middle ages. We have only been transmitting stuff out that may be strong enough to be detected for ~100 years.
The Pioneer's have a transmitter of about 8W and are 0.001 lightyears away and one of them is dead, the other is barely discernible. If we take a very generous estimate and say maybe 5kW can be detected at 1ly - you will need several TW to be detectable that far. Not necessarily impossible but
Re:power level of a detectable signal at 1200 ly ? (Score:5, Interesting)
Interesting question. I'll try: we're just barely able to detect the signal from Voyager 1, which is currently about 18.4 billion km, or 0.0019 light-year away. I couldn't find the exact emission power from the antenna, but the Wikipedia page mentions that the electric generator has around 250W of power. Let's say 200W of that go in the antenna. Translating this to 1200 ly, using the 1/r^2 rule, gives about 76 TW.
That's a lot, about 5 times the total average energy consumption of the World, but not out of the realm of possibilities. So if there was an advanced civilization with a lot of energy and a very big, very directive antenna that desperately wanted to talk to us, we might just be able to pick it up.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Just take the flux limit of the telescope you are using. Multiply by 4*pi*distance^2 (the area of emitting sphere), and the duration of observation, and you have the power you need to put in at the emitter (assuming an uncollimated emitter, without any atmospheric loss -- which is acceptable in radio).
Lets assume 15 mJy for the Allen Telescope Array used by SETI, and 1 hour of observation. That gives you 70 MW [wolframalpha.com] to emit. The Arecibo Message [wikipedia.org] sent in 1974 was 1 MW, others are at the 150 kW level.
Re: (Score:3)
If the civilization is older than ours it may have detected our planet long ago and have a narrow beam width signal directed at us, a laser for example. This might affect the calculation about input power somewhat. Perhaps we should be thinking more about what power input we would need in a laser directed at them to be detected in 1200 years time using a laser? After all at 1200 light years distance they are never going to make it here using public transport to sell us fizzy drinks.
Re: (Score:2)
It's 100 MYW:
Let's make a couple of quick assumptions:
1. Lossless, perfect vacuum.
2. Height difference = 0 and line of sight.
3. Minimum detectable = 1mW.
4. Omni-directional antenna, since they aren't aiming at us.
5. Let's also simplify by assuming there are no equipment or connector losses.
6. We'll also go with a 20MHz transmission.
P(rx) = P(tx) - L(fs)
L(fs) = 32.45 + 20 x log(20MHz ) + 20 x log (1.1 × 10^16 km)
380dB loss.
Heh, that converts to 100 x 10^30 W. It might get a little warm near the transmi
Re:power level of a detectable signal at 1200 ly ? (Score:5, Interesting)
Or, they could use a star itself and modulate the light coming from it, like stellar semaphore.
One method that has been proposed http://www.iterate.com.au/SETI/SETI.htm [iterate.com.au] uses a swarm of self-replicating robots. Given raw materials to work with it could in time create a large enough structure or cloud in front of the star so as to be able to send a signal to a large percentage of the heavens. This would be detectable over much greater distances than 1200 ly.
Re: power level of a detectable signal at 1200 ly (Score:2)
A targeted transmission search would almost certainly use directed, non-diffracting beams (they exist - google it). Meaning the necessary power would be dramatically dropped, because they would only transmit to a small number of star systems that have a chance of hosting life.
However, it's fairly likely that an advanced civilization would use neutrinos, or some other weakly interacting matter, for interstellar communications, rather than simple electromagnetic waves. Non-the-less, life is out there - like i
Astronomy question (Score:2)
How long is it, if ever, before we are going to have a telescope that can definitively tell us that a planet has an atmosphere containing oxygen and large amounts of water?
Re: (Score:2)
The plans are on the drawing board right now, if you are young enough and the economy doesn't totally crap out the findings from Kepler should see them built in your very own lifetime..
already been done (Score:2)
H2O Obsession.. (Score:2)
I find it frustrating that with so many capable biologists on our planet, we have an obsessive belief in the theory that life cannot evolve or exit on planets where liquid water is available. I think it's a despicable thought process that's in desperate need of modification.
Re: (Score:3)
Life based on liquid water is the only one that we know of. Maybe other forms of life are possible, but we don't know what they are, so we can't search for them.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I think it's a despicable thought process that's in desperate need of modification.
I think it's ridiculous that every time the subject of extraterrestrial life comes up, a dozen clueless people post the same objection as if it's some stunningly original insight that biologists have simply missed due to lack of imagination.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
I host my water in the cloud (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
All right smarty pants, you figure it out.
We're waiting.