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Space

Astronomers Have Found a New Planet Like Earth Orbiting a Star Like the Sun (technologyreview.com) 82

Posted by EditorDavid from the Earth-2 dept.
A reader quotes MIT's Technology Review: Three thousand light-years from Earth sits Kepler 160, a sun-like star that's already thought to have three planets in its system. Now researchers think they've found a fourth. Planet KOI-456.04, as it's called, appears similar to Earth in size and orbit, raising new hopes we've found perhaps the best candidate yet for a habitable exoplanet that resembles our home world. The new findings bolster the case for devoting more time to looking for planets orbiting stars like Kepler-160 and our sun, where there's a better chance a planet can receive the kind of illumination that's amenable to life.

Most exoplanet discoveries so far have been made around red dwarf stars. This isn't totally unexpected; red dwarfs are the most common type of star out there. And our main method for finding exoplanets involves looking for stellar transits — periodic dips in a star's brightness as an orbiting object passes in front of it. This is much easier to do for dimmer stars like red dwarfs, which are smaller than our sun and emit more of their energy as infrared radiation. The highest-profile discovery of this type is near our closest neighboring star, Proxima Centauri — a red dwarf with a potentially habitable planet called Proxima b (whose existence was, incidentally, confirmed in a new study published this week).

Data on the new exoplanet orbiting Kepler 160, published in Astronomy and Astrophysics on Thursday, points to a different situation entirely. From what researchers can tell, KOI 456.04 looks to be less than twice the size of Earth and is apparently orbiting Kepler-160 at about the same distance from Earth to the sun (one complete orbit is 378 days). Perhaps most important, it receives about 93% as much light as Earth gets from the sun.
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Astronomers Have Found a New Planet Like Earth Orbiting a Star Like the Sun More

Astronomers Have Found a New Planet Like Earth Orbiting a Star Like the Sun

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  • Great! (Score:3)

    by DontBeAMoran ( 4843879 ) on Sunday June 07, 2020 @12:37PM (#60156360)

    Now let's launch hundreds of spaceships to colonize that planet!

    We'll be there in... what... a few dozens generations?

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Well, that's assuming we can travel at the speed of light. If we travelled at the fastest a spacecraft has travelled at to date, it's roughly a 13 million year journey.

      • What about "going to warp" or "jumping into hyperspace" that I keep hearing about?

      • If the ship travels close to the speed of light, it's a bit more than 3000 years from our perspective, but not nearly as long on the ship. If the ship can come up to 2.997*10^8 m/s (just a hair less than c), then it's about 75 years on the ship. Of course you'd need ridiculous amounts of energy to get up to speed, and you'd also have to decelerate. Ideally, you accelerate at 1g, prepare everybody for the "great turn", and then deccelerate at 1g. I'm not sure how the calculation work out for that scenari

        • Re:Great! (Score:5, Interesting)

          by fafalone ( 633739 ) on Sunday June 07, 2020 @03:59PM (#60157034)
          At a constant 1g acceleration, then at the midpoint decelerating constantly, 3000 light years would be a 15.6 year journey to those on board. You'd get to a lot more 9s closer to c, that's why it's shorter, not longer (99.99998% of c). Constant 1g acceleration is wild, you could cross the entire galaxy (~30kpc) in what would be experienced as a mere 22.5 years, and you'd get to the Andromeda galaxy (~778kpc) in 28.6 years, inclusive of the deceleration time.

          • Oh that's awesome. I guess I under-estimated how quickly 1g would get you so close to c. Of course it's still fantasy, but at least it's plausible fantasy with the right power source.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by sfcat ( 872532 )

              Oh that's awesome. I guess I under-estimated how quickly 1g would get you so close to c. Of course it's still fantasy, but at least it's plausible fantasy with the right power source.

              But the problem with all of that is that's the time from the perspective of those on the ship. From the perspective of those on earth, it would take much, much longer. That trip across the galaxy would take billions of years from our perspective. So its possible that they arrive about the time the star they are visiting would be ending it lifespan even though it might be a young system when they left. Its also possible that an entire species of intelligent life could arise and then die off in the time b

              • I believe your calculation of the time to cross the galaxy is slightly off...like by four orders of magnitude. At 1g, you get up to .99c in a year or so. The galaxy is around 150k light years across, so at .99c it would take 150k/.99, which for all practical (and impractical) purposes is 150k years of time from our perspective. Well, from our descendants' perspective, if they're still around.

            • Assuming, of course, that you and your entire ship don't blue shift into oblivion. Though it almost seems counterintuitive that the kinetic energy of every atom in your body would be at its highest while time is at its slowest. Forget about sending text messages back to earth though, they'd have so little energy that there's practically no signal left, unless you slow down each time you send a message.

          • And now calculate the energy to get that constant g acceleration, the speed required for the cited dilatation factor, and the reserve of fuel required using a rocket derivative equation. I am magnimous today, you can even assume the fuel is anti matter and assume a payload of only 1 ton. And you will see why most of us think this is a pipe dream knowing that physic *imposed* asymptotic limitation the more we learned about it.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

            Of course the problem is generating enough energy to accelerate significant mass at 1G for 15.6 years.

            Say your ship is 10^4kg, fairly small for such a journey I think, about 1/4th of the ISS. To accelerate at 1G you need

            F = ma
            F = (10^4 kg) * (10 m/s^2) = 10^5 N

            So how much energy do you need for the whole trip? 3000 light years is approx 28,382,000,000,000,000,000m.

            (10^5 N) * (2.8382e19 m) = 2.8382e24 J

            Let's say you use the most energy dense material known as fuel, antimatter.

            E/c^2 = 2.8382e24 / 8.9875518e16

            • That's honestly less than I would have thought. 31,500 tons? Sounds entirely do-able if we ever came up with a good way to generate and contain it. Compared to some of those estimates of theoretical warp engines where you'd need entire planets or stars worth of fuel. Some container ships are 200,000+ tons.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

                31k tonnes just to shift the 100 tonne ship, you need even more to shift the propellant itself.

      • Well maybe we've got this all backwards. What if instead of trying to go fast, we build a craft that can simply stop moving relative to the CMB?

    • We'll be there in... what... a few dozens generations?

      LOL! Umm... no. Maybe a few million generations.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sfcat ( 872532 )

        We'll be there in... what... a few dozens generations?

        LOL! Umm... no. Maybe a few million generations.

        From the POV of us on Earth yes, from the POV of those on the ship, only a couple. Special relativity is weird...

        • Do you have some secret technology that could get a ship moving even a fraction of C? An antimatter drive is really what we need and some way of producing sufficient of antimatter.

          • Well...yes. I do it all the time in fact, even when sitting down I'm moving at a fraction of C.

          • We have technologies on the drawing board that will get up to the order of 10% of c, for a travel time of a few tens of thousands of years.

            Payload is limited to a gram or so though, so your passengers will need to be fairly thinly sliced. And radiation-proofed.

    • I hate to break it to you, but something over 3000 of our years ago (slightly fewer of their years), the Koids set out in our direction. They've been decelerating for the last 1500 of our years, and their colony ships will settle into orbit next April.

      • Their telescopes were good enough to see the glories of the Babylonian empire, and they were impressed enough to travel to see it.

        I'm back to my Babylonian archaeology text books to try to figure out what they saw. Just maybe they saw some electroplating - an interesting option for making telescopes like ... the one they used from a kpc to see the Babylonians.

    • Send the politicians, lawyers, bureaucrats, hairdressers and telephone sanitizers first...

  • What would happens if we can find another habitable planet like earth? Would it make any difference?

    • Re:Massive Universe! (Score:4, Insightful)

      by MightyMartian ( 840721 ) on Sunday June 07, 2020 @12:47PM (#60156398) Journal

      Did making frog legs jump with electrodes make much difference in the 18th century? It sure did in the 19th century.

      • Mankind would have survived and moved on with or without electricity. Not everyone is a moron, you know?

        • Mankind would have got on with without writing as well. What exactly does that have to do with what I wrote?

          • Are you for real?? It means one cannot imply that finding a new planet makes a lot of difference because someone in the 18th made frog legs jump!

            • My mistake. I now realize you were willfully missing the point.

              • Go ahead, and explain your point. I'd like to see you try.

                • My point is that we don't know where basic research will lead us. That maybe we don't need any great discoveries is rather a moot point. If we were still hunter gatherers with no technology more advanced than a spear that we would still probably do alright is, well, rather besides the point. Would you like to live in a world without the wheel, writing or grain crops? Your view is either intensely nihilistic or just willfully ignorant. I'm not sure which. You type your defense of scientific nihilism on a mac

        • Half of people are of below average intelligence.

    • We would probably destroy its ecology within a few hundred years - just as we are doing with our own planet.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by cusco ( 717999 )

        Probably not, a multi-generation ship would need to be a balanced ecosystem, anything out of whack would need to be adjusted back to balance quickly. They would also have the concept of long term planning deeply built into their concept of how to live. There is little doubt that they'd bring the same ethos to whatever ecosystem they arrived in.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by ebvwfbw ( 864834 )

        We would probably destroy its ecology within a few hundred years - just as we are doing with our own planet.

        Don't be silly. As long as you talk to just the purple people you're fine. They've run the planet for a million years, no problem. The green people are just stupid.

        LOL, Wouldn't surprise me if there is some kind of BS going on there too. Star Trek had an episode on that.

        Whatever it is out there it might not even be there any more.

      • Be fair - we've been damaging the environment on Earth for several thousand years. The Roman's expansion of lead and mercury mining in the early years of the Common Era is detectable in Greenland ice cores for example. The Chinese and Indians have been damaging their environments for the same sort of time, and recent discoveries in the Amazon suggest that they've been destroying their soils and rendering their larger habitations unsupportable for millennia too.

  • raising new hopes? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by bb_matt ( 5705262 ) on Sunday June 07, 2020 @12:42PM (#60156380)

    Perhaps I'm being a muppet here - and please correct me if I am - what exactly does "raising new hopes" mean?

    In a single Galaxy with as many as 250 billion stars and countless billions of planets, there's absolutely going to be earth like planets - it's a given.

    As for "raising new hopes" - 3000 light years is a very very long way off.
    Yep, so, we know how long it would take to get there at the speed of light, so obviously, that's not the point of the statement - so what is?

    Confused...

    • Help me! You're my only hope!

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUaxXsqGeFI

    • Re:raising new hopes? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by beheaderaswp ( 549877 ) * on Sunday June 07, 2020 @12:56PM (#60156438)

      Well... I like to take the long view...

      Considering the advances over the last 100 years it is not unreasonable to project that the exponential growth in scientific knowledge will continue.

      Assuming we don't destroy ourselves first.

      But if we make another 100-300 years at the current rate of discovery- who's to say that interstellar travel is not possible? In fact probable?

      History tells us that a whole bunch of things we take for granted today were considered impossible just 100 years ago.

      I'm hoping to see man on Mars before I die. That was considered impossible for 20 centuries until the Apollo missions.

      Have faith.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • The kind of travel you are alluding to is akin to beaming there.

          Even beaming there would take 3000 years.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by cusco ( 717999 )

            Only if you're limited to the speed of light. Einsteinian physics says that nothing can achieve or exceed the speed of light, and so far that holds true. Quantum physics on the other hand posits anywhere from 7 to 29 other dimensions that we're currently unable to view or use. If any of them allow us to go from Point A to Point Z without being anywhere in between then the issue of very long distance travel changes to how we use those other dimensions rather than how we power a spaceship.

            • Quantum physics on the other hand posits anywhere from 7 to 29 other dimensions that we're currently unable to view or use.

              That's because they aren't cartesian dimensions, they are variables in a linear equation added to make the math easier.

            • I asked that kind of question once of someone who knew a lot more physics than I did. The response was that because those dimensions are compactified, going somewhere in those dimensions might move you a fraction of a nanometer in our 3 dimensions.

      • Re:raising new hopes? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by cats-paw ( 34890 ) on Sunday June 07, 2020 @02:45PM (#60156824) Homepage

        Considering the advances over the last 100 years it is not unreasonable to project that the exponential growth in scientific knowledge will continue.

        The sum total of knowledge may be increasing exponentially, but "breakthroughs" are not growing exponentially, and never were really.

        And i would argue that the curve is asymptotic not exponential. doesn't that make sense ? the more we learn the closer we get to bumping up against limits dictate by physics and just generally discover things that aren't really that significant. Note that i'm not arguing for a ridiculous "everything is known, discovered, etc..." sort of thing. I make a distinction between, for example more accurate characterization of systems or the natural world vs discovering a fundamental breakthrough.

        There's much more to be learned in biology, i would even agree that our knowledge of biological systems, _significant_ knowledge will grow exponentially. That's because biological systems constitute a complexity problem and not a fundamental physics problem. We may get to useful quantum computers in the not-too-distant future. AI, true AI, not the glorified classification systems we have now, may also not be too far off.

        But space travel is already known to be up against a hard physical constraint that is the speed of light. it's extremely unlikely that in 1000 years, even with exponential growth in scientific knowledge, the trip to that star will take any less than, or equal to, 3000 years. Our knowledge of how to go across interstellar distances will require a fundamental physics breakthrough and not just "more knowledge". Curing cancer, for example, is a problem that may eventually be solved simply due to an increased level of knowledge.

        • It's only asymptotic until it's not. And I'm not being pedantic. A lot of this is speculative, but the potential brought in between quantum computing, light-based circuitry, and improving computer code lends to the idea that some breakthroughs are still coming. What if (big if) AI finds a way to make the Alcubierre drive a reality for energy less than or equal to a small fission reactor? Or if a cryosleep method becomes plausible? Might never happen, but we never accomplished anything new by saying it was i

      • Another point is that it creates an interesting set of potential destinations for when/if we can send probes/people.

      • Back before Apollo, someone did an extrapolation of the sort you're referring to. Specifically, they looked at the advances in speed that man (this was in the 60s, so yes, man) had made, starting with running, then horses, steam engine trains, propeller-driven airplanes, jet planes breaking the sound barrier, and finally space ships (I think Gagarin held the speed record at that point). Clearly each successive jump took less time than the previous jump; and by extrapolation, this proved (I believe the aut

        • The one I always liked was that up until the advent of the Railroad, no human had ever gone faster than the speed of a horse- unless they were falling off a cliff.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Bongo ( 13261 )

      You can hope to reincarnate there where people are nicer and smarter and far enough away to not be bothered by earthers.

    • It's not about knowing there is, it's about knowing where it is.

  • 2 Peter 3:13

  • How many millions needs to be shoveled into refining instruments before we can get an analysis of the atmosphere on these exoplanets? Lots of candidates, now let's see if any of them have life. Even if it's just microbes.

    Do we need a giant space telescope? I'm happy to see some of my tax money go that way.

    • How many millions needs to be shoveled into refining instruments before we can get an analysis of the atmosphere on these exoplanets?

      If we haven't been able to do that for Mars what makes you think we could do it for a planet 3000 LY away?

      • Not sure what you mean by "not able to do this for Mars". We are able to measure the composition of Mars's atmosphere and can see that it doesn't have substantial free Oxygen.

        The attempt to look for tiny amounts of methane is different, and does not seem practical for exoplanets. I think the hope is to see a planet similar to Earth where life has drastically changed the atmosphere's composition.

        • It's a lot more complicated than that - there are non-biological processes capable of producing the levels of methane and oxygen being argued over on Mars. So ... are those detections accurate remains a question, and even if they are accurate measurements, do they indicate an active biosphere?

    • Re:Need spectroscopy. (Score:4, Informative)

      by joe_frisch ( 1366229 ) on Sunday June 07, 2020 @02:28PM (#60156746)

      There are a number of proposed space telescopes to try to observe exo-planet atmospheres. James Webb telescope might be able to do it. Proposed future telescopes like HABEX, and Origins will have this as part of their mission.

      Its extremely difficult so these projects will take years and billions of $, but its possible, and I think the discovery of extraterrestrial life would be exceptionally interesting.

      There are a lot of exoplanets, and probably a lot of terrestrial ones. We have no idea of the probability of life so we don't know if we just need enough sensitivity for the few best targets (if life is very common) or need to survey thousands or millions of worlds (if life is rare).

  • Maybe lure the Mormons into financing the Nauvoo?

  • When I read something like this I always oddly think about a line from Robert Service

    There's a whisper on the night-wind, there's a star agleam to guide us,
    And the Wild is calling, calling . . . let us go.

  • "The new findings bolster the case for devoting more time to looking for planets orbiting stars like Kepler-160 and our sun,"

    How does it "bolster the case"? We can't actually do anything with the information. I would assume that, if we ever get advanced enough that we can act on the information, we'd also be advanced enough to be way, way better at locating habitable planets.

    If, on the other hand, it's knowledge for its own sake... then we should be looking for all sorts of planets - gas giants, dwarf plane

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