'Einstein's Planet' Becomes First Exoplanet Discovered Using New Method 81
cylonlover writes "Due to their relative faintness compared to their parent stars, most known exoplanets have been discovered using indirect detection methods – that is, detecting the effects they have rather than observing them directly. There are numerous indirect methods that have proven useful in the detection of exoplanets and now yet another, which relies on Einstein's special theory of relativity (abstract), has joined the list with the discovery of an exoplanet known as Kepler-76b."
Re:How many of these planets are habitable? (Score:5, Informative)
There are some numbers in this newest comic: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1584 [phdcomics.com]
Re:How many of these planets are habitable? (Score:5, Informative)
From the article:
"Einstein's planet," formally known as Kepler-76b, is a "hot Jupiter" that orbits its star every 1.5 days. Its diameter is about 25 percent larger than Jupiter and it weighs twice as much. It orbits a type F star located about 2,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cygnus.
The planet is tidally locked to its star, always showing the same face to it, just as the Moon is tidally locked to Earth. As a result, Kepler-76b broils at a temperature of about 2000 Kelvin.
Planets discovered by General Relativity (Score:5, Informative)
This planet was discovered by Lorentz boosting, the theory of which predates Einstein. Meanwhile, 20 exoplanets [exoplanet.eu] have been discovered to date using gravitational lensing [scholarpedia.org], an application of General Relativity (a theory created by Einstein ) that was itself first predicted by Einstein. Somehow, the press release (and thus all the subsequent press) failed to mention these "Einstein planets."
Re:How many of these planets are habitable? (Score:4, Informative)
How many of these planets are in the goldilocks zone? Sure we can find them; but which ones are livable for Carbon based lifeforms?
According to the catalog [upr.edu], 10 (out of 885) are confirmed so far. From the catalog, "Gliese 581d, Kepler-22b, Gliese 667Cc, Gliese 581g, Gliese 163c, HD 40307g, Tau Cetie, Kepler-62e, Kepler-62f, and Kepler-61b are the only known exoplanets that might be considered potentially habitable or object of interest for the search for life.
There are a further 18 (out of 2716) unconfirmed Kepler candidates that (if they are not false positives) also may reside in their habitable zones. These should be confirmed (or rejected) in due course. Of course, "potentially habitable" does not mean you want to start considering a new vacation home. If Venus and Mars were reversed (i.e., Venus was in Mars's orbit, and Mars in Venus's), each would probably be nicely habitable. As they are, not so much, at least, not without a considerable amount of planetary engineering.
Re:How many of these planets are habitable? (Score:5, Informative)
I'm not sure it's understood to be truly 'infinite', but 'so damned big as to be infinite for purposes of discussion'.
And there was a time (not even all that long ago) when it was thought that planets around other stars would be very rare and uncommon.
In university I hung out with a bunch of astrophysicists, and the idea of finding exoplanets was still something we weren't sure of, and it was assumed there was a relatively small number of stars which would have planets.
It's only just over 20 years since we confirmed the first one, and in that time the rate at which we detect them keeps going up at a pretty staggering rate. To the point now that if you look at Drake's equation, it's hard not to conclude that, somewhere, some form of life has probably evolved elsewhere in the universe, and probably even intelligent life existed at some point.
Admittedly, the distances and time spans are so vast as to make it highly unlikely we'd ever find them. But, to me at least, it just seems so improbable that we're the only life to have evolved anywhere in the entire universe.