Kepler Discovers First Earth-Sized Exoplanets 179
ananyo writes "NASA's Kepler telescope has reached one of its major mission milestones: finding an Earth-sized planet outside the Solar System. What's more, it has done it twice in the same star system. Whizzing around the star Kepler-20, about 290 parsecs (946 light-years) from Earth, is not only an Earth-sized planet, but also something just a touch smaller — a Venus."
Good news (Score:3)
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There was - but Apple sued, saying that NASA's work infringed on it's patents...
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Re:Good news (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Good news (Score:5, Interesting)
What's most pathetic isn't that the US is totally dropping the ball on this stuff, it's that other nations that have the ability to take over this important work aren't bothering to do so. Why aren't the Europeans doing more space exploration? They have 50% more population than we do, many of their economies are stronger (just look at Germany's economy), so what's the problem? All they can manage is one little probe to the outer planets?
Everyone whines about how America is going down the toilet (which it is), but I don't see anyone else stepping up to fill in, except China (which is much farther behind technologically, so has more ground to cover to catch up).
Re:Good news (Score:4, Interesting)
Ok, you've named a few more projects, but then you admitted their budget is a paltry 1/3 of NASA's. Why is that? The EU has 1.5 times the USA's population, and economies that are in better shape, Greece notwithstanding. On top of all that, the EU doesn't waste nearly as much money on its military as the US does, and taxes are generally higher. What's the problem? The EU should be easily leading the world in space exploration given all this.
We need to mount an expedition (Score:4, Funny)
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"but also something just a touch smaller — a Venus."
If there's a Venus and no known Mars... then does that mean it's all women?
Sign me up!
Yea, they're sure to be really hot!
The smaller of the two planets, dubbed Kepler-20 e, is about the size of Venus, with a radius 0.87 times that of Earth. It orbits its star every 6 Earth days and sits at a temperature of 1,040 Kelvin — hot enough to vaporize any atmosphere and leave a solid hunk of silica- and iron-rich rock. Kepler-20 f, the larger planet with a radius 1.03 times that of Earth, has a 20-day orbit. As a result, it is a bit less scorching, at 705 Kelvin. At that temperature, says Fressin, hydrogen and helium wouldn’t survive in the atmosphere, but a shroud of water vapour might.
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Yea, they're sure to be really hot!
It's almost 1000 light years away. After a trip that long, *any* woman is going to look hot.
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It's in Kelvin, it can't be that hot!
Re:We need to mount an expedition (Score:5, Insightful)
hot enough to vaporize any atmosphere
Isn't an atmosphere already vapour kinda by definition?
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Yes, but after the atmosphere has been vaporized, the only way to get any messages through is to rot-13 them twice.
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sits at a temperature of 1,040 Kelvin — hot enough to vaporize any atmosphere and leave a solid hunk of silica- and iron-rich rock
Come on, I can't be the only one that has a problem with a reference to vaporising an atmosphere.
Re:We need to mount an expedition (Score:5, Funny)
"but also something just a touch smaller — a Venus."
If there's a Venus and no known Mars... then does that mean it's all women?
Sign me up!
Have you learnt nothing from all your years of watching Star Trek? The women are all blue or green, have 3 breasts, and want to KILL you!
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Re:We need to mount an expedition (Score:4, Interesting)
Have you learnt nothing from all your years of watching Star Trek? The women are all blue or green, have 3 breasts, and want to KILL you!
You know, I was ok with the transporter, and with warp drives going faster than light, but the idea that any outworld species would look anything like us whatever is ludicrous. And most movie and TV sci-fi does it.
I fight bad sci-fi with more [slashdot.org] bad sci-fi. [slashdot.org]
Oh, and you're confusing Star Trek with Total Recall or HHTGT; I don't remember ever seeing the triple breasted whore of erotica in Star Trek, but she was a Martian in Total Recall, but a Martian decended from humans who had three tits because she was a mutant. Far more believable than a Human-Betazoid hybrid (the subject is covered in the two linked stories).
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Did they seed it with early hominids? If you want to explain our relationship with earth's other life, they have to have seeded it with entire ecosystems including early hominids. Unless we're the original source of that life (meaning aliens aren't related to other life on their planet), which brings us to the Traveller setting.
If they only seeded it with prokaryotes, then it doesn't explain fertility between humans, Vulcans and Klingons in any way. (Why do they get capitals and we don't?)
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Not only that, there's a theory that the humanoid "form factor" is optimal in many ways, so any species that successfully achieves technology and spaceflight will also have a similar body shape. After all, it doesn't matter how smart dolphins are, without any opposable thumbs to manipulate things, it'd be very difficult for them to develop any kind of tools or technology.
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Sounds like my last two girlfriends.
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They have 3 breasts each or on total?
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Death by snoosnoo is overrated.
Again (Score:2, Funny)
Comme on, another planet, it has been a week since the last one, will my extensions work on this one?
dupes? (Score:2)
Note the previous /. article on the similar topic was about Kepler-22, so I'm thinking this report about Kepler-20 is actually going backwards in time relative to the previous article.
Once again SIMBAD and exoplanet.eu have nothing.
http://exoplanet.eu/star.php?st=Kepler-20 [exoplanet.eu]
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Apparently the number 20 was assigned earlier, when the larger outer planets were discovered in this system.
290 Parsecs! (Score:5, Funny)
Damn that's fast!
It could support life. (Score:3)
It could still have habitable temperatures if it was a tidally locked planet. The chances of that occuring increase as a planet approach it's star. Any life on such planets would certainly be interesting.
apparent size (Score:5, Interesting)
the apparent size of this planet is the same as an object of 0.5 mm on the moon.
Kepler is awesome! (Score:2)
Yes, it's obvious. (Score:2)
Whizzing around the star Kepler-20, about 290 parsecs...
Just to give you all a sense of scale, the Millineum Falcon would have to be 24 times faster to reach it!
Margin of error? (Score:2)
Pardon my skepticism, but is the margin of error on this really so small that they can really claim to differentiate between a Venus and an Earth sized planet?
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You don't mean margin of error I believe, but precision of measurement. And yes, the instruments are that precise.
Re:Margin of error? (Score:4, Informative)
Yes. These are transit measurements. They see the drop in light of the star, or not. If they see it, they can estimate how much the intensity changes, which gives them the ratio of the area of the star and the area of the planet. They can also time the duration of the transit, which, together with the period between transits and some information about the star, gives them the star's radius, and thus the planet's radius. If you can detect the transit at all, you should be able to get all of these things.
unless the aliens have built gigantic space flaps (Score:2)
to gather the gorgon rays from the oceanus spectre of alpha quad seven.
dont tell me youve never heard of gorgon rays. why, its simple as old cat man!
imagine a conical bath.
Imagine what a 66 ft. Telescope could see! (Score:2)
"So here's (link at bottom) a surveillance telescope that DARPA is proposing to provide CONTINUOUS (that's what's new) real-time coverage of any spot on earth at a resolution of 3m (the example given was to detect Scud launches). Of course in order to do this, it would need to be in geo-sync orbit which necessitates a whopping big lens, in this case 66 FEET ACROSS!
So how come I've never heard about this "membrane optics" technology before? (From the picture it appears to be able to make the "lens" extremel
Re:Imagine what a 1.4M km telescope could see! (Score:4, Informative)
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The Real Question (Score:4, Interesting)
Is not will we discover an earth gravity (size is meaningless, it's the gravity that's an issue) planet at earth temperature from it's sun, but when.
And more importantly, when will we find one with 25 light years from Sol.
NASA's primary focus right now IMHO should be giving out X-prizes for corporate achievement in space flight and endeavoring to devise means for reaching stars:
- how to get a probe up to near light speed.
- how to maintain communication with said probe (most likely via entangled diamonds)
- get us off this rock (within 150 years)
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- how to maintain communication with said probe (most likely via entangled diamonds)
Entangled diamonds are/aren't a girl's best friend.
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I'd like to see crowdfunding of research like planet-finding. Let's say 100 million people give $1/month for planet-finding. Every month, the money is distributed according to these rules:
- All money is distributed within the highest category of planets that has any confirmed planets in it.
-The money is divided among the 100 smallest (radius) candidates (promoting resolution) wit
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Or not.
The LARGEST one gets almost $2 million per month.
The smallest only gets $20 thousand per month.
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It seems a bit early for that, since there's nothing (based in any sort of reality) that we know of capable of doing any of these things. We're going to need a lot more hard science before we have a shot at even thinking seriously about it. Let's stick with the LHC and similar projects and see where that gets us.
Re:The Real Question (Score:4, Informative)
I remember (Score:2)
when the smallest exo-planet we could see was the size of Uranus.
Jupiter Sized, Low Density Planets (Score:2)
I'm hoping Kepler discovers some Jupiter sized planets, in radius and area, that are really low density, so their gravity is like Earth's - along with the atmosphere. They'd probably lack metals or any heavier elements, though they'd probably better have silicon if their crust is going to look like Earth's surface. If the planet has a moon or an asteroid belt nearby full of those missing elements, space mining might make for a really huge place for humans to spread out on in a familiar style.
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Well, I'm not at all sure we need rocky planets, since we'd be arriving from space and so likely technologically capable of using off-planet rocks for necessary materials, as I said. Also as I said, Earth gravity on a planet with no heavy elements would be proportionally larger in radius and area, though not as big as Jupiter. Since Uranus and Neptune have no cores, they're probably more diffuse and heavier than any planet with Earth gravity and a crust, so the upper bound is somewhere less than them.
A holl
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I loved _Ringworld_, too :).
I wonder what the actually largest (radius) planet would be with Earth gravity but low density (nothing heavier than silicon, and no helium or neon).
Trivial legalities (Score:2)
Re:Remember the good ol' days (Score:5, Funny)
Um, what? What exactly do you think Johannes Kepler [wikipedia.org] was, a washing machine?
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Um, what? What exactly do you think Johannes Kepler [wikipedia.org] was, a washing machine?
I don't know, I've never keppled!
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Hmmm...+1 for obscure reference but -1 for forcing the fit just because their names start with the letter "k". Finally, +1 for keeping your head about you.
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Re:Remember the good ol' days (Score:5, Informative)
Ummm ... as much as Kepler is the name of the device, Johannes Kepler [wikipedia.org] laid out the mathematics of orbits. You know, Kepler's Laws [wikipedia.org].
Naming stars Kepler-20 (or whatever) is naming them after important scientists ... and since it's looking for things which orbit, it's quite apt.
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Perhaps I'm being dense but why does the inclination of the target planet's orbit (relative to the other planets orbiting that star) matter? Can't a planet can be detected using the transit method so long as the orbit is one that causes the target to pass through our line of sight to the star?
Given the example of Pluto, I don't understand why it couldn't be observed by someone whose line of sight passes through both its orbit and the Sun. I must be missing something.
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I see, I think. You're saying that the difficulty in detecting Pluto comes not from its inclination, but from the very long period. That clears it up, thanks.
By the by, assuming a system where all the planets' orbits are on the same plane and given a sufficiently long observation, could one use something akin to Fourier analysis to determine the number, size, orbital period (and hence mass) of all the planets in that system? That's not even getting started on spectroscopy and all the other wonderful things
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Yes, that is a bummer, but consider the other things we have learned, primary among them the fact that solar systems do not always form like ours with the rocky planets closer to the sun. This has major implications for theories of solar system formation, see http://www.astronomy.org/astronomy-survival/solform.html especially point D. :-P
In addition we can all revise our estimates of the Drake equation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation)
Anonymous Astronomy Geek
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You want to revise everything based on 2 data points? Out of billions/trillions/way-too-many-for-2-points-to-matter?
Yikes.
Re:Zzzzzzz (Score:5, Insightful)
When you have a sample set of 1; then adding 2 data points is a fantastic expansion in scope even if we are quite positive that we do not have all of the potential information (soon to be discovered). At this early stage, finding a handful of other planetary systems has effectively multiplied what we know about planetary systems a thousandfold or more, even if we consider ourselves to be mostly blind still.
- Toast
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The current sample set is 8. Not 1.
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No, the current sample set is either four or five (earth, venus, and mars, plus these two exoplanets) or hundreds. Four or five for planets about the size of earth, depending on if you count Mars, or hundreds if you count all the known exoplanets.
Re:Zzzzzzz (Score:5, Informative)
The problem with this thinking is the presumption there is only two data points. There are currently at least 19 different planetary systems [wikipedia.org] with at least three or more planets which can be used for a comparison, and almost everybody involved with extrasolar planets knows this is just the beginning of discoveries. All told, there have been over 700 different planets [exoplanet.eu] which have been confirmed outside of our little old Solar System.
I would say that is enough to begin some statistical models and try to come up with some general trends based upon real data besides the single data point of the Sun and its planets. More significantly, this seems to indicate that planetary systems around stars are quite common to the point that stars without planets seem to be an exception... particularly if those stars are solitary stars rather than in systems of multiple stars.
Admittedly we are still mostly blind about what is "out there", but the Kepler survey seems to be providing some real statistical information about how common planetary systems might be, and since so many of the Kepler telescope candidates seem to be found in groups of multiple planets, it seems very likely that one common presumption of planetary formation being in a disc-like structure seems to be holding out very well. What the Kepler survey is really good at doing is identifying candidates which can then be studied with better telescopes now that we know some properties of these particular planetary systems, or even that they exist at all.
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You and I are in agreement. The poster I was replying to was indicating that we should not modify our theories until we get more data, I was countering that we definitely SHOULD be modifying our theories as we go, since we now have more than just the data on our own system. And when starting with just our own system, the next couple of systems discovered increases our available data by a phenomenal amount. Let the updating begin!
- Toast
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Better than basing all our theories on one data point, namely our own solar system, which is what we did before. Mostly still do in fact, since it is far better understood than any other system.
Want to revise everything based on 2 data points? (Score:2)
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I think the other problem here might be that our current detection methods have a hard time seeing a planet that's as small as Earth and as far away from its star as we are. It seems we're only seeing planets that are either huge, like Jupiter, or really really close to their star, or both.
Re:Zzzzzzz (Score:5, Insightful)
Zzzzzzz??? Really??
Twenty five years ago, finding an exoplanet was considered to be some forward looking science that might not ever happen, and the belief then was that planets were likely quite rare. Ten years ago we'd found some planets, but they were all gas giants.
Now, we find a planet which is close to Earth in size, in a solar system with 5 planets in it, 1000 light years away That's some heavy stuff.
If you're incapable of understanding that this is actually pretty significant, maybe you should go back to your coloring books ... the estimate of the number of planets there are likely to be in our galaxy alone has likely gone up by several orders of magnitude in the last 20 years or so.
We're quickly changing from "oh there's likely not many planets" to "the universe is full of them" ... it's hard not to think that even if it's not what we'd call intelligent life, there's likely more than a few places that have evolved some form of life.
The more we see stuff like this, the more we see just how vast and astounding the universe around us actually is.
Re:Zzzzzzz (Score:5, Informative)
We're quickly changing from "oh there's likely not many planets" to "the universe is full of them"
I wouldn't quite say that.
I don't really think that the estimates of how many planets there may be has increased. Instead, our technology has increased so that we can actually start finding the planets that we've always assumed were there.
The somewhat-dubious values that Drake used in 1961, according to Wikipedia, include:
fp = 0.5 (half of all stars formed will have planets)
ne = 2 (stars with planets will have 2 planets capable of developing life)
The value given for ne seems to be rather optimistic, but it's still too early to have reliable numbers. It will be a long time before we can take any arbitrary star, and see exactly how many planets it has.
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to be sure, until recently we thought we had nine.
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Twenty five years ago, finding an exoplanet was considered to be some forward looking science that might not ever happen, and the belief then was that planets were likely quite rare.
I am old enough to remember twenty-five years ago quite well, but I do not recall a belief that planets were likely quite rare. Rather the opposite, that unless there were giant planets orbiting a system (which we had a hope of detecting), there might likely be more smaller planets (which we had little hope of detecting at that time) than in our solar system.
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It probably depends on who you talk to and what crowds you hang out with. There's still tons of people who think any kind of extraterrestrial life is totally impossible. Of course, there's also a bunch of loonies who think the moon landings were faked.
Re:Zzzzzzz (Score:5, Interesting)
>We're quickly changing from "oh there's likely not many planets" to "the universe is full of them" ... it's hard not to think that even if it's not what we'd call intelligent life, there's likely more than a few places that have evolved some form of life.
The more we see stuff like this, the more we see just how vast and astounding the universe around us actually is.
And yet, if General Relativity is correct, there's still no conceivable way for a planet 1,000 lightyears distant to have any kind of communication with us, or us with them, without a two-millennia time lag. And that's just for extremely high-power/sensitivity radio signals, let alone any kind of matter-based probe. I for one find that picture of the cosmos incredibly depressing: there's potential neighbours all around, but no possible way to communicate until our civilisation crumbles.
That's really why I hope that General Relativity is not, in fact, correct in its pessimistic assumptions about lightspeed being the final arbiter of causality and that there's some kind of cosmic loophole which would allow interstellar trade and travel for beings with humanlike lifespans.
Otherwise, no matter how many exoplanets or other wonders we find in deep space, the sensible logical implication is that we should ignore them because they could never have any causal impact on our civilisation. (Other than downloading some alien DNA from radio signals and using it to breed an alien-human hybrid Hot Chick, which science fiction tells us is always an excellent idea with no possible complications.)
Re:Zzzzzzz (Score:5, Insightful)
What? It doesn't matter if we can have a direct conversation with alien life forms. The important discovery would be the simple fact that they exist. As of this moment our own planet is the only one in the whole of the universe that we know life exists on. Just finding a second one would be one of the great discoveries in our species' history. It's a bit silly on your part to suggest that such a discovery wouldn't in fact have a significant effect on our civilization.
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1) You don't need 2-way communication; at this point, we just need to find confirmation that intelligent alien life actually exists, so intercepting some 2-millenia-old radio signals would be good enough for that. Humans have been on Earth for far, far longer than 2 millenia, but most of our most interesting history and technology has only been within that narrow span of time; there's no reason that ETs on another planet might not have developed 20/21-century technology only 2000 years ago.
2) The humanlike
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The fact that you are annoyed that you'd be dead by then because you'd still see it as 2 thousand years and change doesn't matter much to them.
It would matter to them if they came back to find everyone they know dead, all their friends and family, and society remarkably changed. However, if anti-aging treatments come about that greatly reduce or even eliminate the aging effect, this would all change. You could come back 2000 years later and still find many of your family still alive, as long as they didn'
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Twenty five years ago, finding an exoplanet was considered to be some forward looking science that might not ever happen, and the belief then was that planets were likely quite rare.
And twenty five years ago I could never understand why they thought planets would be rare, since there were nine of them in our own solar system. If Earth was the only planet around our star, thinking that planets would be rare would have been logical, we have so many planets (and smaller rocks) that the logic isn't there.
Perhap
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That's exactly what it is. There's still people that refuse to entertain the notion that life (intelligent or not) exists on other planets, even though 1) we've already shown that exoplanets are quite common, and we still can't see the earth-size ones in habitable zones yet), 2) our galaxy alone has ~1 billion stars, and 3) there are many billions of galaxies that we can see. The numbers are truly staggering, and saying "ET life is impossible" in the face of all those stars and planets is just idiotic. Y
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I've never understood the thinking of those who assume that planets and life etc must be rare or non-existant elsewhere.
I've always subscribed to the Fullerist philosophy that the smaller something natural is, the more common it is in nature.
As such, there should be more stars than galaxies, more planets than stars, more rocks than planets, more grains of sand than rocks and so on.
It only goes that microbes and advanced like should exist elsewhere -- I don't think the lack of evidence precludes that. In fac
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Now, we find a planet which is close to Earth in size, in a solar system with 5 planets in it
We don't really know that; that's only 5 planets that we can see. There could easily be much more (heck, we didn't even know how many planets were in our own system until very recently, and if you count dwarf planets we're still not quite sure as there could be more out past Eris that we haven't seen yet). There could easily be an Earth-size planet in the habitable zone, and we just can't see it; right now, all we
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speak for yourself, but i'm amazed by mundane things on a regular basis. lots of "hooray for us!" stuff.
you guys are just butthurt that you got a 4S instead of a 5.
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Sadly, the Keplarians suffer near-endless civil war and discrimination, even of their own kind.
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The Kepler telescope only has a relatively narrow field of view compared with the entire sky. So most near by planets will not be called Kepler-nc.
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That's VOGON not vorgon.....
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Perhaps, but Vogons do hunt planets. Vorlons not so much.
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The telescope is "seeing" the planet as it was 946 years ago ... maybe it's not even there any longer
I know, planets these days are always picking up and vanishing without even saying good bye. First Ceres, then Pluto. Every morning I wake up I breathe a sigh of relief that the Earth is still here.
Re:Ancient history (Score:4, Insightful)
The telescope is "seeing" the planet as it was 946 years ago ... maybe it's not even there any longer
946 years on a cosmic scale is no more than a blink of an eye. The likelihood that any visible planet has merely vanished in that short a time is incredibly remote. Worrying about it would be like freaking out every morning before you go to work because the building just might have burned down overnight.
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Furthermore ... how the fuck is a planet supposed to vanish?
Seems your parent has very strange ideas about the laws of physics.
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Furthermore ... how the fuck is a planet supposed to vanish?
You should ask this guy [qntm.org].
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Maybe the intelligent beings in that star system pulverized it and used it as raw material to build a Dyson sphere. Of course, then the star would disappear as well, unless they weren't finished.
dude... man.. what if you are right? (Score:2)
what if the building just did burn down overnight? what about the night crew? are they ok? what happened to them? i need to call jimmy. jimmy, whats his fucking number? i had it here, i sweartogod i had it. its in my book, that .. no that other one. the black one. with the pen sticking out of it? what pen? shit... i err... nevermind i used that pen to write the rent check.
look, jimmy's last name was watson. how many jimmy watsons can there be in this city? i'll look him up on facebook.
jimmy... jimmy says he
Re:Multiple telescopes? (Score:4, Interesting)
Kepler detects transits - i.e., only planets that happen to pass in front of their stars as seen from Earth. That is going to be pretty rate. If you had two Keplers, you (or at least I) would point it at another patch of sky, to get more samples.
Here is a way to think about the math - the radius of the Sun is about 1/200th the radius of the Earth's orbit, so for some random observer in the galaxy (or for us, trying to find something like Earth), there is only about a 1 in 40,000 chance that transits will occur and, of course, for Earth they will happen once per year, so it's going to take 3 or 4 years to really confirm it (and get a good handle on the orbit). Kepler is looking at 145,000 stars with a nominal mission length of 3.5 years, so it has a decent chance of detecting one or a few Earth-like planets in Earth-like orbits, if almost every stellar system has such a planet. (That choice of mission parameters is, of course, no accident.)
Now, for these new Kepler-20 guys, the orbital period of the Earth-sized planet is 20 days, so you only have to wait maybe 60-80 days to confirm it, and the orbital radius is much smaller, so the probability of transit is much higher. (If the orbital radius is 10 stellar radii, this probability is about 1%, or hundreds of time larger than for a true Earth analogue).
So, putting all of that together, you would expect Kepler to spot hundreds of hot Earth's for every Earth analogue it seems (assuming both are more or less equally common out there) and that is, more or less, what is happening. (Of course, we won't know about the objects in Earth type orbits for a few years yet.)