Kepler Finds Five More Exoplanets 102
Arvisp was one of several readers to send news of five new exoplanets discovered by the Kepler space telescope. In addition to the new "hot Jupiters" — the easiest targets to find — Kepler's early data has turned up some oddities, including something that is too hot to be a planet and too small to be a star. And one of the exoplanets is so fluffy that "it has the density of Styrofoam." The real news is that Kepler works as designed, and the scientists running it are fully confident that it will find Earth-like planets in some star's habitable zone, if they are out there to be found. Here is NASA's press release.
yay ! Science :) (Score:1, Insightful)
Yay a new planet :)
Re:But Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, finding habitable planets is cool. But what are they going to do once they've found one? Tick a box? Celebrate humanity?
Perform spectroscopy experiments to see if the planet has more in common with ours than just mass and relative distance from its star?
As part of the long, long process of answering one of the most amazing questions in humanity's existence: Are we alone in the universe? Is life unique to our planet, extremely rare, or as common as the stars themselves?
You might have you own theories one way or the other, but a theory isn't an answer. This is about evidence.
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No it wasn't. I was looking for the non-technical common-English word "theory". Because the (colloquial sense) theories of most people and I'm certain the OP regarding alien life are not as well-formed as a scientific hypothesis.
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Why bicker? We know what was meant, get a life.
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Obviously we don't, otherwise the word "hypothesis" would not have been suggested, now would it?
Actually that implies that you do understand my meaning, and thought "hypothesis" was a better word for expressing it.
If you like data . . . (Score:5, Interesting)
--Greg
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Uh. Oh yeah. That's the stuff. Graph that flux, baby. Graph it good.
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We can always go to other planets.
I dunno what else we can do with this stuff, but DAMN it's cool to know :)
Maybe this will help us better understand earth?
Re:But Why? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:But Why? (Score:4, Funny)
Actually...yeah. I mean, assuming the image is any good. How'd you manage to keep the chromatic and spherical aberration bearable at that aperature?
can think of two main reasons (Score:5, Insightful)
Obviously the reason it makes headlines is that the question of how many human-habitable planets there are, and what kinds of properties they have, is tied to the question of whether anything vaguely like earth-like life exists elsewhere in the universe.
However a good deal of astronomers are also just interested in everything about the cosmos: what's out there, how does it work, how does it relate to other things, what kinds of variations are there, etc. From that perspective, this particular kind of thing, "exoplanet", is a class of far-away object we don't have a lot of examples of and can't give particularly confident accounts of (how and how often they form, their distribution, etc.). Even if there was no tie-in to human habitability, there are a number of astronomers interested in collecting more data on and clarifying our understanding of basically any class of "thing we don't yet know everything about".
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Exactly. The people who don't get this should go back to Digg.
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If there are not many planets that show signs of possible life at all, then there are going to be very few where life has even possibly developed our kind of intelligence. There would be even fewer where there might be a technological civilization. Looking for a signal or sending one becomes a real needle in a haystack operation. If we could afford to send just a few signals, say by high powered laser, there would still be no point in funding it, because we would still need to send those signals to literall
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Technological civilizations*
With all the complications brought by extinction-level events and lack of capability to spread.
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Due diligence (Score:5, Funny)
something that is too hot to be a planet and too small to be a star
And I'm guessing they've already ruled out the obvious [wikipedia.org]?
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Not fire lord, space lord [youtube.com].
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Time lord?
Conservative Approach (Score:5, Interesting)
As they get more verified examples under their belts, I expect they'll get a bit bolder. I certainly hope so, anyway. Earth-sized planets will be hard to double-check (Hubble could do it, but nothing on the ground), and large outer planets can't be double-checked at all, since they just make one pass and the next could be decades away.
--Greg
Re:Conservative Approach (Score:5, Interesting)
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think they need to see two transits to see the complete dip of light and a second for confirmation and orbital period. As the project has been running for six weeks, they have only results for planets that orbit their star in 3 weeks or less. Detecting Earth size planets in the habitable zone could take years before they make two transits. Detecting Earth itself would take 2 years.
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According to the fine NASA press release, they want to see 3 transit events so more like 3 years for a planet in the habitable zone around a Sun like star.
They've found it!!! (Score:2)
The Clangers home world! [youtube.com]
Yeah,uh... (Score:5, Funny)
The one with the density of styrofoam actually is styrofoam. Thats the one I worked so hard on my sophomore year for Mr. Nixs earth science class.
It turned up missing and I got a D for the quarter. I actually don't need it anymore so you're welcome to use it as a planet or whatever.
I doubt it will sustain life, but it will hold a hatpin, which I suspended it from.
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In the 80"s i was promised (Score:1)
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Dude, chill. Check a couple stories back and you'll see they're just getting around to the flying cars everyone was promised would be here by now back in the 50s and you're bitching about 80s promises!
Relax and check back in another 20-30 years.
If You're At All Interested In Not Knowing (Score:2)
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There's actually quite a few lecture series for Astronomy (and lots of other topics) on iTunes University. I'd highly recommend it.
Truthfully, this to me seems like an EXCELLENT idea for government funded projects. Tons of Universities receive public funding - seems like it shouldn't cost too much to just have the lectures for various topics filmed in this style and released free to the public. If bandwidth was a problem then this would be the absolute perfect place for Bittorrent. You won't get a degre
What about what we don't know yet? (Score:2, Interesting)
Good to see that we're keeping a nice and closed mind about any lifeforms that might be outside the box. Just because we're so stuck on the definition of life that works here on our planet doesn't mean we won't find a lifeform that completely redefines "habitable zone".
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My point is that our definition of habitable is going to change dramatically as we get more information. My knee jerk reaction to the summary was how limiting the thinking was to narrow what was possible to a tiny fraction of what was out there. Our concept of lifeforms and "earth-like lifeforms" are distinctions of their own and I hope I'm around to see how they get applied to whatever is discovered.
Re:What about what we don't know yet? (Score:5, Insightful)
> My point is that our definition of habitable is going to change dramatically
> as we get more information.
In the meantime, however, we must work with what we have. How likely are we to find anything interesting if we just look around randomly?
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They're looking for any and all planets they can detect. The habitable-to-life-as-we-know-it ones are interesting for obvious subjective reasons, and also because if we've got any chance of detecting evidence of life from this far away it's not going to be some kind we haven't ever thought of before.
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Thing is - you don't know what to look for, so you don't know if you find it or not. So why not concentrate on the things you already know before broadening the horizon when it comes to stuff like this?
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You know, this particular thing comes up quite often around here when the topic of looking for exoplanets comes up, and it always strikes me as somewhat silly.
Yes, of course, there could be life forms 'outside of the box' of the habitable zon
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density of Styrofoam (Score:2, Informative)
IIRC the density of the planet is not the same throughout. If that is the case, the comparison is pretty misleading. It could very well be a rocy core with a very thick layer of some light gas.
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Mote Exoplanets will always be found. (Score:2, Interesting)
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Actually, there is a very good philosophical reason to suspect exoplanets should exists: the mediocrity principle [wikipedia.org].
That is, we are not a very special and unique snowflake. We're not in a privileged position in the universe. There are billions of planets just like ours.
Re:Mote Exoplanets will always be found. (Score:4, Insightful)
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The problem is we haven't found billions of planets just like ours - only a handful so far - and 'like ours' in a very vague sense. We are yet to find a planet that is within say 10% of all the parameters of ours. I don't know if there is a reason to suggest that our planet is unusual but until we can find another one the philosophers get to wax lyrical.
I'd say we haven't found them because our technology has just gotten to the point were we are able to detect planets. Just be sheer numbers of possible starts, we're bound to find a lot more.
I can't wait until they definitively discover life (hopefully intelligent) so I can go to these young earth creationists and say 'in your face, you nutbar. In - your - face!'
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So other planets and the rest of the universe have bee around for billions of years but we've only been here for 8000?
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Re:Mote Exoplanets will always be found. (Score:4, Insightful)
Honestly, we can only see the nearest handful of stars compared to all planets in all galaxies. If we found even just one planet like earth, the fact that there are two such planets within proximity of each other is strong evidence there really are billions. We're finding lots of the planets that are easy to detect, what you're saying is a bit like searching through the sand with a coarse masked net and concluding there's only big rocks. Even an earth-style Jupiter would be very, very hard to detect despite its size because it has an orbital period of 12 years. They'd like 3x for confirmation, that's 36 years at the earliest. An earth-like planet goes faster but requires a lot higher resolution, and 3x1 year for confirmation is not particularly fast. I imagine by 2100 they'll look back at this discussion and laugh, of course there's pebbles where there's rocks. The only real reason not to think so is that some people have a very strong emotional investment in the earth and humanity being special.
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Kepler also requires the orbital plane to be just right in relation to Earth so the planet occludes the star. More distant planets would require even more precision in the orbital inclination to do so. Something the disance of Jupiter would need almost a precise 90 degree orbital plane of the system to Kepler angle.
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Because we can only see so many from our vantage point and with our current technology.
Since there's billions and billions of galaxies, each will billions and billions of stars, and we can't see into any of them, we have no way of looking there. We're looking at stuff that (on a galactic scale) is relatively close. That's kind of like standing on a street corner in a small town in rural Iowa and claiming that people with different skin colo
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However, I'd say that that principle is mooted as far as the existence of planets by the anthropic principle. Assuming life requires a planet to develop on (we have no counter-examples to state otherwise,) then of course we have planets here, but thats no guarantee that they are common. Even if there were only 1 star in the entire galaxy with planets, we'd still develop on that one and think of planets as 'normal'.
Given the sheer scale of the universe I'm sure no one seriously thought there were no other
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The amount of planets similar to Earth is not subject to philosophical reasoning. Either they are out there, or they aren't, principles won't make any difference.
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Good lord, the Moties are real!?
WooHoo! (Score:3, Funny)
Now we might actually have a chance of finding intelligent life in the universe!
And if we can get them to come to Earth, we could even have intelligent life on Earth!
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Heh, reminds me of an old sig I used to have "Most people are looking for intelligent life in space. I haven't given up Earth yet." or something to that effect.
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Something I don't understand about the hot one. (Score:2)
They say they know it is hotter than the star because the light curve dips more during occultation than during transit, but how do they know which is which other than by which dips most?
Wait... I guess I see how they *might* be doing it.
But it won't work for an object hotter than the primary. Hmmm.
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If there was a smaller body in front of the bigger body, the spectrums are added ( or spectrum of big one * (size of bigone - size of small one) + spectrum of small one * size of small one) which might move the peak wavelength slightly. This would work for both a hotter and colder small body, and tell you size and temperature, given sufficient precision in wavelength and amplitude.
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As I understand it they aren't doing spectra: just light curves (on 145,000 stars at once!)
Kepler [wikipedia.org]
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Ok. I see it now.
Known Earth-Like planets (Score:2)
Just to throw this out there: there are already some known reasonably Earth-like planets out there [wikipedia.org]. Here's the best one [wikipedia.org]. Of course, so far there aren't that many...
Fluffy the Planet... (Score:1)
Density of styrofoam? (Score:2)
Styrofoam planet a Jupiter brain candidate? (Score:1)
Quoting wikipedia:
Jupiter brain
A Jupiter brain is a theoretical computing megastructure the size of a planet. Unlike a matrioshka brain, a Jupiter brain is optimized for minimum signal propagation delay, and so has a compact structure. Power generation and heat dissipation are formidable concerns for a Jupiter brain implementation.
While a rigid solid object the size and mass of a rocky planet or gas giant could not be built using any currently known material, such a structure could be built as a low-density
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And it's even very close to a star for efficient energy capture...
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