Super-Earths Discovered Orbiting Nearby, Sun-Like Star 242
likuidkewl writes "Two super-earths, 5 and 7.5 times the size of our home, were found to be orbiting 61 Virginis a mere 28 light years away. 'These detections indicate that low-mass planets are quite common around nearby stars. The discovery of potentially habitable nearby worlds may be just a few years away,' said Steven Vogt, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UCSC. Among hundreds of our nearest stellar neighbors, 61 Vir stands out as being the most nearly similar to the Sun in terms of age, mass, and other essential properties."
mmmm (Score:2, Funny)
61 virgins...... drool.....
Re:mmmm (Score:5, Funny)
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sure. the diseases are a free bonus.
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If you've got 61 virgins to trade, I'm sure someone on here could hook you up with 8 hookers in no time flat.
Re:mmmm (Score:5, Funny)
FWIW, the two major inputs to their tastes are diet and sanitary practices. I heard vegans taste better.
(Just trying to think outside the box)
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I was thinking of cannibalism. What the heck were you thinking of?!
Re:mmmm (Score:5, Informative)
How's that? I'm sure that it's possible to find at least 61 virgins on /. In fact, I think you are the right place if you're looking for virgins.
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I never said I was straight.
of course since it's the internet, I'm actually a 12/f/CA.
Re:mmmm (Score:5, Funny)
/me puts on his robe and wizard hat.
72-Virginis (Score:3, Informative)
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You misunderstand... that one virgin 72 years old
Wait until Osama Bin Laden finds THAT out!
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what till he finds out all the virgins in paradise were all porked out thousands of years ago, what the faithful get now is refurbished virgins. Kind of like retreads on a truck tire.
Yes, nearby (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, a mere 28 light years away. So all we need to do is get in the fastest spacecraft we've ever built and we can be there in just about 150,000 years.
Who's coming with me?!?!?
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Not so much a problem for the folks on the spacecraft, relativity can make the journey very manageable for them. They better not think about returning home to see Grandma though...
Re:Yes, nearby (Score:5, Funny)
Not so much a problem for the folks on the spacecraft, relativity can make the journey very manageable for them. They better not think about returning home to see Grandma though...
So space will be colonized by people with dysfunctional families?
Re:Yes, nearby (Score:4, Funny)
So space will be colonized by people with dysfunctional families?
Sorry folks, planet's closed. The six legged moose like creature out front should have told you.
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Sorry folks, planet's closed. The six legged moose like creature out front should have told you.
We shall take this planet from Moose and Squirrel.
Re:Yes, nearby (Score:4, Funny)
Why should space be any different?
Re:Yes, nearby (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Yes, nearby (Score:5, Funny)
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What relativistic effects are you expecting at .0002c ?
Re:Yes, nearby (Score:5, Funny)
At .0002c, it would take about 14000 years to get there, but the lucky astronauts would only experience 13999.99972 years. Sign me up!
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Re:Yes, nearby (Score:5, Informative)
That is an ion engine. My back-of-envelope calculations say that accelerating to .0002c and back to rest requires an Isp of about 5300 if you assume a mass ratio of 10:1. (Which is about as high as you can expect with current technology.) You can do a little better with staging, but not orders-of-magnitude better.
If you can improve your Isp to, say, 50,000, which is well beyond current technology, then you could accelerate to almost 0.002c. Relativistic effects won't be really evident until well over 0.2c (at that speed it's only a 2% time dilation). We're not close to rockets that can attain such speeds.
Improving the mass ratio is even less helpful, btw, since that's a logarithmic factor. An Isp of 50,000 with a mass ratio of 100 still only gets you to 0.004c. I suppose it's conceivable that an interstellar ship that needed almost no structure could have an extremely high mass ratio, but you can see how ridiculously high it has to be to matter.
The only way we're going to send starships at relativistic speeds is to use (i) some form of non-rocket propulsion, like solar sails or those reactionless Casimir-effect thrusters or some other exotic method, (ii) something with a truly enormous Isp. Current ion engine tech tops out at about 30,000 s, and even nuclear pulse tops out at 100,000 s.
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Ummm, I think not? An ion engine provides tiny amounts of thrust. A VASIMR, the most efficient ionised propellent engine built so far, as a thrust of 0.5 netwons. The next gen one operates at 5x the power levels, so legs be generous and say that it gets 20 newtons of thrust somehow. They predict it will weigh about 1 tonne when finished. So lets assume that the ship, and the 1MW nuclear reactor to power it, weigh nothing. 20 newtons / 1 tonne = 0.02 m/s^2. To reach .1 c, still a crawl considering th
Re:Yes, nearby (Score:5, Insightful)
Not so much a problem for the folks on the spacecraft, relativity can make the journey very manageable for them.
I think we're a long way off building a spaceship that can achieve the speeds where that effect would make any difference.
Re:Yes, nearby (Score:4, Interesting)
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Not so few as you might think. At 0.01G, we're talking about
Re:Yes, nearby (Score:4, Interesting)
If we stick with only 1.0G, then we wouldn't need artificial gravity for the people on board. We could maintain 1.0G acceleration on the way there, then spin the ship around (so the floor is pointing towards the destination) and maintain 1.0G deceleration for the second half of the journey.
The problem is, even if that means the people on board only experience 5-25 years, how much time will pass on Earth before we found out what this exploration team discovers there? (Remember, once they get there after however many years (hundreds? thousands?), they'd have to send their data by radio at light-speed, which would take yet another 28 years.) If we were to pony up the money to finance a mission like this, we, our children, our grandchildren, and our great-grandchildren would never find out the results, if any. We'd probably develop FTL in that time and have a colony already established on any viable planets in the 61 Virgo system before this team even arrived!
As far as I'm concerned, the only way any mission to another star system at low sub-light speeds makes any sense is if you're going to launch a "generation ship", a giant ship with an entire colony on board with everything needed to be self-sustaining indefinitely, so that this ship can travel from star system to star system, radioing back what it finds in each one and continuing until they find a place worth stopping at and establishing a permanent colony. But a ship like this would in itself be a major leap in technology, since we certainly don't have the capability to build such a massive space-based structure that can travel long distances through space, be self-supporting indefinitely, and able to handle any problems it might encounter (micrometeors?).
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"If we stick with only 1.0G, then we wouldn't need artificial gravity for the people on board."
Considering their new home has five earth masses at the very least, they might as well get used to 5.0G. Ouch.
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With 5.0g, I think they better prepare for a round-trip journey, as this is only going to be a sightseeing journey.
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Umm, no. Five Earth masses at the same density as Earth means about 1.7G.
Double the density, and the planet pulls about 2.7G, but has stopped being Earthlike (density as high as silver?! ouch!).
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It doesn't really scale that way - you also have to take the density into account. The planet would likely have a larger radius, meaning you're higher up in the gravitational field when you stand on the surface.
Consider that Mars has a mass around 10% of Earth's, but a surface gravity of nearly 0.4g.
Hell, Uranus has a mass 14.5 times Earth's but surface gravity is still less than 1g. (As much as Uranus can be considered to have a "surface" as opposed to just a really thick atmosphere)
Re:Yes, nearby (Score:4, Interesting)
1G = 7 years internal time, 30 years as time is measured on Earth. So you'd be getting messages back with 60 years.
0.01G = 100-odd years internal time, 107 years as time is measured on Earth. Messages back about 210 years after departure.
Note that 1G sustained isn't going to be practical for a very long time, but that 0.01G sustained (for 100+ years) is a maybe within the century.
Note that if we launched a 0.01G ship day after tomorrow, then sometime around 2185 we launched a 1G ship, the 1G ship would get there first.
On the other hand, I don't think a generation ship is entirely beyond the realms of possibility within the next 50 years. Yes, it would require some incredible engineering to get it done. But it wouldn't require as much new technology as one might think - the sheer size allows you to get away with things that aren't practical in a smaller ship. Like lakes, fields, forests, that sort of thing.
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Note that 1G sustained isn't going to be practical for a very long time, but that 0.01G sustained (for 100+ years) is a maybe within the century.
The problem here is that 1G sustained means your ship will be liveable by humans for those 7 years with no problem. 0.01G is not liveable at all; humans can't survive long-term in microgravity. Not only that, 100 years is too long; no one will live that long (assuming you launch them when they're 20-25). They could have kids along the way, but that's probably g
Re:Yes, nearby (Score:5, Interesting)
And of course it would be impossible to spin the ship, right?
Any ship big enough for a 100 year trip will be more than big enough to spin so that the rim of the ship experiences enough gravity to keep the crew healthy.
I take it you've never heard of the "generation ship" concept?
And who ever suggested a small spacecraft? If I were designing it, it'd be 20 km long and 5-6 Km in diameter. With a crew of about 100,000.
So you DO know about generation ships! Great!
Hint: you don't build a generation ship from Earth. You start with an asteroid, and stock pretty much everything except the lifeforms aboard from other sources than Earth.
Note also that "incredible engineering" really means "expensive". It doesn't necessarily mean "difficult".
Spin it. If it's six km in diameter, you have to spin it at 0.55 rpm to get 1G on the rim. And note that you have 360 km^2 worth of rim on the ship I described above. With a deck every 100 meters, we're talking a couple hundred thousand hectares at > 0.9G.
Alas, the likelihood of humanity building a generation ship is miniscule.
What passes for government here on Earth can't look far enough ahead. If we KNEW there was an alien species living there, and that they would be willing to give us the secret of FTL if only we sent someone there to collect, we'd still never get one built...
But the only real difficulty with doing so is the drive - the lifesystem, the physical structure, that sort of thing is almost trivial in comparison.
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And of course it would be impossible to spin the ship, right?
Any ship big enough for a 100 year trip will be more than big enough to spin so that the rim of the ship experiences enough gravity to keep the crew healthy.
Whoops, forgot about that. It would need to be a fairly sizeable ship though, so the gravity at a person's head isn't noticeably different than the gravity at their feet (so a ship like the Discovery One in 2001 is out).
And who ever suggested a small spacecraft? If I were designing it, it'd
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You need an asteroid of about the right composition and size/shape.
Drill a hole down the center long ways and fill with mostly water and cap the end, then set spinning and focus sunlight on it with big mirrors. After a bit it gets hot and soft as the water inside boils providing the pressure to expand the now soft asteroid.
There is a
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A generation ship wouldn't just be an epic feat of engineering, it would be an epic feat of engineering that has no p
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The main problem with that kind of effort isn't the engineering, it's the motivation. Yes, it might be possible to build something like that within a century, but that would mean many trillions of $, the concerted efforts of thousands of scientists, the work of dozens of countries pumping a significant portion of their GDP into a cooperative effort, etc.
Politically, that's pretty much impossible. You're
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Not so few as you might think. At 0.01G, we're talking about 100 years as measured by clocks on the ship.
I think the bigger problem is that 10 years after we launch that one, technology will improve and we'll be able to send one at 0.02G, which will overtake the first one.
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No one wants to spend tons of money to send a group of people on a dangerous mission to a place that far away. Even if they survive, and assuming they can make it in their lifetimes due to relativistic effects, thousands of years will pass on Earth before we finally receive radio transmissions back from this team when they reach 61 Virginis. For all we know, during that time, someone will develop FTL technology. By the time the people inside reach their destination, they'd find an Earth colony or researc
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I don't know about that. You'd probably get some people who'd sign up for it, but it's a big gamble: spend a decade or two cooped up in a spaceship bored out of your mind (there's no internet out there), hoping to see something interesting at your destination. You probably won't find a nice, habitable world there to stay on, just some giant planet with 5g's of gravity, so you stick around a bit and take readings and photos, send them back to Earth by radio, wondering if anyone's still listening back there
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I hate every ape I see,
From chimpan-A to chimpan-Z.
No you'll never make a monkey out of me!
Oh my god, I was wrong.
It was Earth all along.
You finally made a monkey
Yes, we finally made a monkey
Yes, you finally made a monkey out of me
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Protip: for easy comparison of VLNs, make sure they are in the same units (although anyone on slashdot should know that 1 Joule is equal to one Watt-Second).
But anyway, your numbers make the answer quite clear. We need a nuclear fusion
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Also, in another 10 years we'll be able to build a better probe that would probably overtake the one we sent now anyway...
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Pebbles hurt at lightspeed.
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Two things: money and time. Even with $1 trillion (the cost of the Iraq War) to spend on such a project, it would take some time to develop the necessary technologies, which are only theoretical at this point. Even with massive funding, it took almost a decade for the Apollo program to reach the moon, and at the point the program was begun, chemical-based rocket engines had already been invented, tested, developed, and used for numerous launches into space and for military purposes. You're talking about
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I'd also bet that there would be no shortage of volunteers for a no going back, one way, first contact trip
I'd wonder that anyone who would volunteer for such a trip might not be mentally stable enough to qualify.
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Not so much a problem for the folks on the spacecraft, relativity can make the journey very manageable for them.
Populate it with those /. virgins in the earlier thread and I think we have a winner.
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Yes, a mere 28 light years away. So all we need to do is get in the fastest spacecraft we've ever built and we can be there in just about 150,000 years.
I suggest we go faster than that. It'll only take me 18,000 years to properly pimp out my hardcore Diablo character. What am I going to do with the rest of the time?
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fat (Score:2, Interesting)
Some water would be nice too.
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That depends on the density of the planet.
A core made of materials with lower density than liquid iron and nickel could be larger but of overall less mass. The result would be a bigger planet with the same or lower gravity.
Fishy... (Score:3, Funny)
Something tells me that these astronomers are keeping Virginis 1 through 9 to themselves. Grab your torches and pitchforks, kids.
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dissapointing (Score:5, Interesting)
I'll get excited when we find a planet about 93 million miles away from its star, the proper solar light properties for blue skin and near earth gravity. I've always had a thing for blue skinned alien girls.
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I for one, am a little nervous about meeting our flying, heat-vision-wielding overlords from Super-Earth.
Mr Shatner! (Score:2)
I've always had a thing for blue skinned alien girls.
Mr Shatner, I didn't realise you were a slashdot user! Nice to talk to you! Please don't write any more Star Trek films though. Star Trek V was enough.
Wow, a confirmation (Score:5, Informative)
Anyway in case anyone hasn't RTFA (or noticed the light-gray on white links at the top of the oklo.com page) you yourself can help them search for nearby earths by downloading the tool at http://oklo.org/downloadable-console/ [oklo.org] while you're still unemployed.
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Why is everyone surprised that super-earths are orbiting other stars? I've always wondered that.
Because the the term "super-earth" is intentionally used to misled the general public into thinking that those planets have a Earth-like habitat, which imply the possibility of colonization.
If the title was instead "Heavier than Earth rocky planets found outside of the solar system" no one would read it.
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There is nothing in the article to support the title, "First Super-Earths Discovered Orbiting Sun-Like Stars". First they say "These detections indicate that low-mass planets are quite common around nearby stars." and then later "The inner planet of the 61 Vir system is among the two or three lowest-amplitude planetary signals that have been identified with confidence". and finally, "The researchers said they cannot tell yet if HD 1461b is a scaled-up version of Earth, composed largely of rock and iron, or
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Because "micro-Jupiters" would be incorrect. A "Jupiter"-like planet is a gas giant. A "micro-Jupiter" would be a small gaseous planet. The planets they're finding now which everyone's so excited about are not gaseous at all, they're rocky, like Earth. Detecting rocky planets is still rather new (= 5 years); back when exoplanets were first detected, all they could detect were gas giants, usually even bigger than Jupiter. While that's interesting, it's not really something we could even think about send
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I could be mistaken, but I thought they were able to infer that they were probably rocky based on the size and density readings.
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Why is everyone surprised that super-earths are orbiting other stars? I've always wondered that.
I think it has to do with the fact that finding exo-planets, especially ones only a few times larger than our planet, is still something new. We've only been able to confirm extrsolar planets for 17 years, and it has only been in the last 5 years that we've been detecting anything even remotely as small as Earth. I agreed that as time goes on these will be less note worth, as we are getting better at detection, at least until we find something in the .8 to 2.0 Earth masses range which would be quite the new
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at least until we find something in the .8 to 2.0 Earth masses range which would be quite the news.
Wake me up when you find a .8 to 1.2 Earth masses with oxygen and water.
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Super War (Score:4, Funny)
I say it is high time we develop a warp ship capable of carrying the combined military might of the entire planet to this system.
We'll move quickly, from one "Super" Earth to the next, conquering indigenous peoples and enslaving them to toil in our mines until the planet is naught but a smoldering husk, a shadow of what used to be.
Then we'll see who is "Super".
Who's with me!?!
28 light years (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, a mere 28 light years away. So all we need to do is get in the fastest spacecraft we've ever built and we can be there in just about 150,000 years.
Well, maybe not us, but bacteria could. Or... maybe bacteria came from there, and landed here. Betcha didn't think of that.
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Bet that bacteria did not think about that either.
You know... cause they’re bacteria! ^^
Duh! (Score:2)
And if so, why don't we see any evidence of these great astronaut bacteria today?
Because that bacteria killed off all of the dinosaurs who then fell down on them crushing the bacteria.
Bacteria are really tiny, you know, and dinosaurs were really big.
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Bacteria are really tiny, you know, and dinosaurs were really big.
And you're the result of millions of years of evolution since then? I'm disappointed.
Drake's Equation (Score:2, Interesting)
Is the estimation of Drake's equation getting better now with the discovery of more plants? Does anyone have an up to date estimate?
Re:Drake's Equation (Score:4, Insightful)
From the progress of exoplanet searches so far, it does seem likely that some planets will be found that could support life in an earth-like sense (terrestrial with liquid water, at minimum). So, maybe four variables with potentially supportable estimates (and exoplanet searching is in its infancy, so that estimate will develop over time).
But the other variables in the Drake equation? What fraction of "habitable" planets actually develop life? What fraction of those develop intelligent life? Intelligent life that sends out detectable signals into space? And what is the expected lifetime of such civilizations? Values we might assign to those variables would be pure conjecture, with our only evidence being our own anecdote of existence.
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But the other variables in the Drake equation? What fraction of "habitable" planets actually develop life?
Almost all.
What fraction of those develop intelligent life?
Almost none.
The other two questions are irrelevant, because the probability of evolving specifically human-like, machine-building intelligence is so close to zero as to make everything else moot.
Specifically human, machine-building intelligence of the kind that builds radios, writes symphonies, creates industrial civilizations are almost certain
The 'verse (Score:2)
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Let's start with FTL or at least relativistic-speed conventional propulsion instead.
If we have FTL travel, finding a habitable planet becomes a fairly trivial task.
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I don't know about "trivial" but certainly a lot more realistic. Remember, even with a ship capable of traveling 1c, it would take 28 years to get to 61 Virginis to check it out close-up to see if there's anything habitable there. Sure, the people inside would only age a few months or less, but the rest of us here on Earth waiting for word on what's in this system would have to wait 56 years, unless they develop some type of communications technology allowing for communications much faster than c (in whic
blast off to awaiting Virginis (Score:2)
"size" = mass (Score:2)
Mass, not size -- summary is wrong (Score:2)
Since I haven't seen anyone else mention it yet...
"Size" and "mass" are two different things.
Size has to do with physical dimensions, whereas mass is an intrinsic property of matter. TFA clearly states these super Earths are 5 to 7.5 times the mass of Earth, not the "size." Summary is wrong.
When to go Visit (Score:2)
World energy use is increasing about 2% a year. Speed of a vehicle goes as the square root of the kinetic energy. Therefore if the speed of a vehicle depends on the energy you have to throw at the problem, you can expect your spaceships to get faster about 1% a year.
Therefore any trip over 100 years, you would expect a faster ship launched later to overtake you. So any spaceship heading for alpha Centauri (4.3 light years), you may as well wait till you have 4% of lightspeed ships or better.
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but if you build it with the ability to engineer and modify/fabricate faster/newer engines as they go based on the real time data obtained in flight, then even without the resources of earth they should be able to increase their own speed. maybe not at the full 1%, but still.
So lets dial the startgate and go there. (Score:2)
So lets dial the startgate and go there.
61 Viginis (Score:2)
Relatively geeky crowd, orbiting dead cat, Contact.
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