28 New Planets Found Outside Solar System 258
elkcsr writes "The San Jose Mercury news reports on the phenomenal discovery of 28 new extra-solar planets out there in our galaxy. All of them are outside of the band scientists consider necessary for supporting life as we know it, but the solar systems analyzed should still be quite familiar to those of us in this neck of the woods. System layouts feature small rocky planets towards the star and gas giants further out. The biggest difference seen is a preference for elliptical orbits, instead of generally circular orbit we enjoy. ' For example, the team also described new details about one specific exoplanet, discovered two years ago. This planet, which circles the star Gliese 436, is thought to be half rock, half water. Its rocky core is surrounded by an amount of water compressed into a solid form at high pressures and low temperatures. It makes a short, 2.6-day orbit around Gliese 436. Based on its radius and density, scientists calculate that it has the mass of 22 Earths, making it slightly larger than Neptune. "The profound conclusion is, here we've found yet another type of planet that is already represented in our solar system," Marcy said.'"
Cool (Score:4, Interesting)
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Yeah, I'd love to be around for the first shipment of Unobtanium as well.
Re:Cool (Score:4, Insightful)
You never know where technology will take us, even in the near future. Some say that we might experience technological singularity [wikipedia.org] within the next 20 years. Then it might be a rather short time until FTL, or at least the ability to prolong one's life/consciousness. Then again, it might also be a rather short time until our extinction.
Re:Cool (Score:4, Funny)
As far as my dad is concerned, we passed the technological singularity a while ago.
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Me too. Unfortunately, I'm also 99% certain that I won't be able to afford them.
This is probably a good thing, because we can't sustain a world in which everyone lives forever.
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Re:Cool (Score:5, Insightful)
Strange... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Strange... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Oh, and there's Klingons off the starboard bow!
Earth-like, Please (Score:2)
We should want more Earths, so that we can have more green pastures to graze in and enjoy ourselves on. We can't get there from here anway, you say? Bah, where there's a will, there's a way. Once people see there are other places worth getting to, they'll set about finding ways to get there.
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What confuses me, is why scientist believe that having conditions the same (or very close to) those on Earth is necessary for life. For all we know, life could be able to live at thousands of degrees hot. You just don't know.
I'm still amazed at how much stuff was created in just 6000 years. Another 28 planets! The miracles never cease...
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I also wouldn't want to do it naked either as we sometimes portray aliens that visit earth as naked beings (CE3K, War of the Worlds, etc...)
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Wouldn't this be easier than exterminating them? Either way, they had no right to evolve on our planet before we got there.
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Yes I do [resa.net].
Chemistry. (Score:3, Informative)
Chemistry works the same way, regardless of which solar system you are in. While it might be possible that life exists on planets that are slightly colder or slightly warmer than Earth, the chances of it existing on places as cold as Pluto or as hot as Venus/Mercury are infinitesimal
Prove it. (Score:2)
Prove it.
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Alien Chemistry (Score:3, Interesting)
Primordial plasma (Score:5, Interesting)
Sure we know. Life won't survive at thousands of degrees because organic molecules fall apart at those temperatures, unless it's based on some element we don't see in the periodic table. A few thousand degrees means a good part of an eV per particle. Most chemical bonds will break in such an environment. Other elements don't behave right for life- they either form little molecules with a dozen or so atoms, or long simple polymers like asbestos. At thousands of degrees you won't even see that. Oxygen and fluorine can produce stable compounds with high bond energies but even those will break, and ceramic-based life has generally been a non-starter. Carbon itself will for the most part only exist in a free state although carbon monoxide (surprisingly stable) appears in stellar spectra.
Of course the definition of "life" is abstract in a general sense and doesn't necessarily involve electron chemistry at all. But if there's life anywhere on the sun, it's the sort of life that college-age geeks imagine existing at some level in the cellular automata programs they write for homework.
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The reason we're looking so hard to find earthlike planets is NOT that we think they're necessary for life.
It's that WE HAVE NO IDEA HOW TO FIND OTHER KINDS OF LIFE. If there is life that lives outside our oxygen+water environment, we haven't seen it. So we can't look at planet X and planet Y and say "Ahh, planet X is a lifeless rock, but planet Y is just right for methane/silicon life!". We've never seen any methane/silicon lif
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Several good reasons...
1) We assume anything complex enough to be called "life" is made
of some kind of complex molecules. In general complex molecules
break down into simpler components at high temperatures. I think it is safe to assume the laws of chemistry are the same everywhere.
2) We observe that life here is based on common chemicals found everywhere in space. Life everywhere is likely based on "what's
around" and the same
So how many are we up to now, in total? (Score:5, Interesting)
And how many systems have we looked at? It seems with the rate we're finding new planets nowadays, we might be able to start narrowing down the possible values of fp [wikipedia.org]
(Side note: I really wish Slashdot would allow <sub> and <sup> tags. I know only a subset of HTML is allowed to prevent abuse, but there's nothing harmful about subscripts and superscripts!)
249 Planets Total (not including dwarf planets) (Score:5, Informative)
More impressive? (Score:2)
* Consider a planet like mars that could one day be terraformed or colonized by people from Earth.
* Let's call that a planet suitable for life as we know it.
* Then there is Earth where we do already live.
What does that give us? 2 of 241 or 249 planets in the known universe that could possibly
harbour life as we know it. That is a startingly high percentage.
High percentage (Score:2)
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percentage of them can harbour life as we know it. Any percentage above
0.000000001 is extremely high given our understanding of the universe just
ten years ago.
I said nothing about how this holds up in comparison to the number of stars,
galaxies, chickens, functioning walkmen or bottles of aftershave in the universe.
1/8, not 2/9 (Score:2)
Before the first exoplanet was discovered the fraction was 1/8 (or 1/9 if you're referring to what we called planets at that time). Still, your point is valid as the fraction is now down to 2/249. Neither Mars nor Venus lie in the habitable zone, although they are both close.
For those not keeping up with the news, Gliese 581 c [wikipedia.org] is the other planet we know of that is in a star's habitable zone.
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we are not alone (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:we are not alone (Score:4, Interesting)
Habitable planets mean just that: there's probably life on them, but not life you would ever think twice about. Many of those planets, if habitable, wouldn't look like they're life-bearing at all. Sure, they might have oxygen atmospheres which we could breath, and they might have liquid water, but toss in your fishing pole and you wouldn't catch any fish (or fish-like animals).
I'm really getting tired of all the sensationalist journalism that reports on findings like this. Sure, there's most likely habitable planets out there, and sure, there's probably life on them, but when you explain to a layperson what kinds of life, they say "oh, is that all?". Science fiction has embedded itself into our consciousness so that the only life we think about is animal life. Unless there are little green men running around on those planets, most people simply don't care (which is sad).
I can't wait until we find signs of life on Mars or Europa. Even bacteria would be the most important discovery in the history of humanity, but the mindless masses with simply shrug their shoulders and flip the channel to something a bit more their level.
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Define "most important discovery in the history of humanity" please.
I consider fire to be rather important. Electricity, atomic energy, microbiology, genetics, radio waves, etc. Plus all the neat inventions which make uses of said discoveries.... Bacteria
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I don't know about that. Every single planet we've ever found life on so far has also evolved intelligent life. Coincidence, perhaps, but that's a pretty good hit ratio.
The catch is that perhaps 50% of that intelligent life will take billions of years to evolve, and the other 50% of that intelligent life evolved intelligence billions of years before we did.
Given the quantity of habitable planets
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Initial construction of reproducing cells from raw chemicals is more difficult than millions of years of mutation-selection leading to intelligent life.
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Re:we are not alone (Score:5, Interesting)
And covered with and permeated with, too! The healthy bacterial flora of the skin and digestive system; and even more amazingly the mitochondria in each cell. Most scientists now accept them to be specialized bacteria that became symbiant with primitive cells so many millenia ago, which is why they have their own genes and genetic code, distinct from the host, i.e. you. Though they're as much a part of me as my cells, I sometimes like to think of some percentage of my body weight being made of little creatures living literally in every part of me, processing glucose and ketones into ATP or whatever to keep me going. Kind of creepy but kind of cool.
It's not that simple (Score:5, Interesting)
E.g., look at Venus. It's in the right band too, but it's hell. The slow rotation speed means it has almost no magnetic field, and the solar radiation stripped away all hydrogen. The result is a world without water, and with an atmosphere of almost pure CO2. (Well, ok, and a little nitrogen.)
E.g., look at Mars. We're finding that it used to have water, but the world is so small that it didn't manage to retain an atmosphere. Not only the low gravity means that gas has a hell of an easier time escaping, but the core already froze and it ended up without much of a magnetic field again. So solar winds helped strip it of whatever atmosphere it hadn't already lost.
Earth itself paints an even scarier story.
See, Earth started with an atmosphere of mosthly methane gas. That's a _very_ powerful greenhouse gas, about 200 times more potent than CO2. But that was ok because the sun also was a lot less hot. Without the methane, Earth would have been a deep frozen snowball and life would never have evolved.
But then the sun gradually got warmer, very gradually over billions of years. And Earth would have eventually become a hell worse than Venus.
Luckily some of these new (at the time) bacteria had started doing photosynthesis for a living, and turned the atmosphere into lots of oxygen and nitrogen, which doesn't quite act as greenhouse gasses.
And incidentally that _did_ cause the planet to turn into a deep frozen snowball in the process. Luckily a new batch of carbon got spewed into the atmosphere and thawed it again. It took some tens of millions of years for that to accumulate, though, because we're talking a _lot_ of carbon in the air to defrost as snowball Earth. As in, at least one estimate says 13% carbon dioxide. And that was the first scary skirting with complete extinction.
And from there it's been riding a bit of a thin line between turning into hell and turning into a snowball. E.g., if you look at the massive coal deposits from the Carboniferous era, they had to come from _somewhere_, and that somewhere is almost certainly the air. Without the right conditions for this (e.g., the lower sea levels and the recent event of plants whose wood couldn't be broken because bacteria which can digest lignin didn't yet exist), would Earth have eventually turned into Venus?
So basically if you look at it, 10% of the planets being in the right band still paints an over-optimistic picture. You also have to have the right conditions and the right timing. E.g., if the oxygen production had come a billion years later, Earth would now be pretty much the same as Venus.
Are we alone? Maybe not, but don't get that optimistic based on that 10% figure.
Re:It's not that simple (Score:4, Insightful)
This doesn't even comprehend accidental or intentional sterilization of the globe with some new biological weapon or experiment not yet comprehended.
It's possible that over the long term, only the not-as-smart-as-us lifeforms survive.
We'd have to find each other not just in space, but in time as well. And the realities of time in space travel mean there may no longer be a welcoming committee there by the time we put down the gangway.
Are elliptical orbits easier to detect? (Score:2)
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The only problem I see, is space travel. It's a long long long way to the nearest exoplanet and we will probably never be able to travel that far thanks to the laws of the universe.
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I think they mean "more elliptical." Or rather, orbits where the foci of the ellipse are much, much further apart.
I guess the assumption is that a very elliptical orbit would produce too much variation in the planet's climate to sustain live and allow it to evolve very far, although I'm not sure what the basis for that is. Seems that, with the right ingredients, you could get all sorts of interesting forms of life that could withstand
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Re:Are elliptical orbits easier to detect? (Score:5, Informative)
A circular (or near-circular) orbit should be extremely rare. It is the special case of an elliptical orbit where the speed is very very close to the theoretical speed required to orbit at that distance from the sun and the direction of motion is very close to being at right-angles to the sun.
The Earth is an intriguing case - the original third planet collided with a planet the size of Mars, resulting in part of the crust being blasted off into space forming a mass that is now our moon and a debris ring. A collision on that scale - two almost equally massive objects slamming at an angle - must have resulted in a change in velocity. Since Earth is now on a near-circular orbit, it would seem not unreasonable to assume it started off on a much more elliptical path.
Virtually all of the known objects in the Kepler Belt follow extreme orbits - some varying by 300+ AU in distance from the sun. However, these are all very old objects. They have not been subject to many collisions and are almost in their original state.
On the basis of our extrasolar observations to date, plus the Kepler Belt observations, plus the Earth enigma, I would conclude that elliptical orbits are the norm for younger solar systems and that more circular orbits become slightly more common in older systems where there is a chance that collisions will have averaged things out better.
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Well, not that rare. You make it sound as if there is a cosmic crapshoot between all values of ellipticity, ergo the subset of low ellipticities should be small according to the vagaries of chance. However, the for
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Since the collisions are down to chance, and planets probably don't form simultaneously, there must surely be a timeframe in which the probability of a high-speed collision that would destroy a planetary mass is low enough that the planets are traveling in a more-or-less random direction. As the timeframe increases, the number of significant masses would presumably increase, and the probability of any two masses colliding would also incre
Circular orbits are default (Score:3, Informative)
There's more than that. A planetoid in an eccentric orbit will be moving faster than the surrounding medium when it's closest to the star and slower than the medium when it's farthest. This means the orbit will be circularized, because the proto-planet will be slowed down by the dust in the accretion disk when its speed is highes
Ok, I'm convinced (Score:2)
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You sound quite sure about that. This is still a hypothesis. Also I don't see what it has to do with the eccentricity of Earth's orbit.
the Earth enigma
What about the Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus enigmas? They all have fairly circular orbits (some more than Earth)
the Kepler Bel
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I can't understand why we would make the assumption that these planets might have orbits similar to ours - I mean, they are observing planets with very short orbits so
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Can any astronomers out there clue us in? Is this just observational bias or are elliptical orbits more common than our more circular ones?
Well, IAAA. There are no strong observational biases going on here regarding the eccentricities of the orbits of exoplanets. If anything, we're somewhat less likely to detect orbits in extremely eccentric orbits (but it turns out those are rare, anyway). It is a mystery why the planets in the Solar System are on nearly circular orbits when most of the exoplanets are in more eccentric orbits. Most of these planets are not much like those in our Solar System -- the median mass is 1.7 Jupiter masses and t
Happy New Years! (Score:5, Funny)
Equinox Parties (Score:2)
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here? (Score:2, Informative)
Surely he means 'hear'?
also:
You mean... ice?
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He probably means one of the weirder kinds [wikipedia.org] of ice.
Re:here? (Score:5, Interesting)
Depends (Score:2)
It's new! Just like the other one! (Score:2)
Yet another type that's already represented? I guess it's not "another type," then.
Exotic ice. (Score:5, Interesting)
Gliese 436 b is supposed to be at a surface temperature of 520 Kelvin. The phase diagram of H2O [lsbu.ac.uk] indicates that for certain "exotic" forms of ice to form at that temperature, you need more than 10^9 Pascals of pressure. It would be interesting to calculate the gravitational force on the surface of the planet, and at what depth pressures of 10^9 Pa can be created by gravity, from the known data about the mass and size [wikipedia.org] of the planet.
OMG! (Score:2)
I, for one... (Score:2)
Elliptical? (Score:4, Informative)
I assume the article meant "elliptical" in the qualitative sense, that their orbits "looked" like ellipses while our orbit "looks" like a circle.
When's the auction? (Score:2)
Considernig... (Score:2)
I do.
TLF
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Must be. (Score:2)
Dupe?
What you're seeing... (Score:2)
...depends very much on what you can see:
System layouts feature small rocky planets towards the star and gas giants further out. The biggest difference seen is a preference for elliptical orbits, instead of generally circular orbit we enjoy.
Yeah, but that's because the state of the art can only detect rocky planets when they're really close to the star, but can detect gas giants when they're further out; and planets with elliptical orbits are much easier to find than circular orbits, so a disproportionate number of those appear.
Some of these solar systems could have a thousand earth-like habitable planets in the multiple A.U. range, and we wouldn't even know they were there.
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What I really wo
2007: (Score:2)
"Oooh!"
"Urgh!"
"Urgh!"
"Urgh!"
"Urgh!"
"You can cancel one research program:"
"Get lots of money immediately"
"Build a decoy ship"
-Lasse
Methodology? (Score:3, Interesting)
Star mass calculations (Score:5, Informative)
Mass of the star can be calculated from its spectrum and brightness. We have models for star formation, based on studies of the nuclear reactions that happen at the core. These stars are all relatively near, so the distance to several of them can be measured directly from the parallax. Knowing the type of the star and the distance, the mass can be calculated from the brightness.
This book [willbell.com] shows in an introductory way how it's done, with examples of all the calculations in BASIC. It's a very interesting book, highly recommended.
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My guess (Score:2)
I also think it's a statistical certainty that we'll not find any in our lifetimes. And sometimes that makes me sad.
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Maps? Charts? (Score:2)
I've also often wondered why we don't have Eve Online-style maps of our own galaxy. Even if we don't know distances for some stars to any meaningful degree of accuracy, surely we could come up with a best guess, or represent stars as lines representing the range of possible distances.
Come on. Whats going on ? (Score:2)
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Patents? (Score:2)
Did anyone else read the headline as "28 New Patents Found Outside Solar System"?
I gotta stop reading all these GPLv3 drafts....
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Space offers solutions to many of those problems. Some problems are related to lack of resources and others to social problems. Space offers unlimited resources compared to what we can get here on Earth. Projects like asteroid mining and space-based solar power are not all that far off from today's technology and they could solve some of our major problems. On the social side, exploration of space can be a unify
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However, if it's possible for life to develop in other environments, then it looks like there's going to be a lot of company in this little galaxy of ours.
Re:We ARE alone (Score:5, Interesting)
think about it for a minute:
A whole minute? Might make brain hurt!
And people who do this for a living have thought about it for far longer than a minute, and have arrived at the exact opposite conclusion as you.
A planet needs to be at a precise distance from a star based on its chemical makeup.
How precise? NASA folks think Mars might have once supported microbial life (maybe still does based on the methane readings). That's two planets in one solar system at a precise distance. They even theorize about life under Europa's ice. That's pretty loose precision. And don't get me started on extremophiles.
A planet needs a trigger in order for life to emerge.
The formation of the first protocells is a hotly debated topic. Who knows how often the "trigger" occurs or how amenable our universe's physics are to it's happening?
The Miller experiment in the 1950's showed you can get the basic organic molecules from the fundamental gasses and some lightning bolts. Organics have also been observed, via spectra, in comets and nebula. They're everywhere.
That life needs to be able to somehow sustain itself.
Isn't that one of the definitions of life?
That life has to be able to survive celestial events.
There some that feel that early Earth microbes surivied the massive collision that created the Moon. All subsequent cataclysims resulted in extinctions, but never a complete erasure of life. I think life has been proven empirically to be rather hardy.
Odds that such a planet exists anywhere is astronomical. Earth is really one of a kind place.
We have absolutely no idea what the probability is.
That reminds me. When the heck does "Spore" come out? :-)
Where are they? (Score:2)
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As a matter of fact, I did first see the word "patents". It's a shame, too, as I was just getting ready to be all indignant and such.
Not that I'd put it past something like the RIAA to try and claim 28 patents on the recording disk attached to the Pioneer spacecraft and sue NASA for their p2p (that's planet-to-planet) file sharing.
MeRe: (Score:2)