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Subscribe to RSSNASA's Kepler planet-hunting mission has confirmed the existence of 26 more planets beyond our solar system. Msnbc.com's Alan Boyle explains how the confirmations were made.
The science team for NASA's Kepler planet-hunting mission nearly doubled their list of confirmed planets beyond our solar system in one fell swoop today, announcing the discovery of 26 planets spread among 11 star systems. Their sizes range from just a little bit bigger than Earth to super-Jupiter-size, but they're all closer to their parent stars than Venus is to our own sun.
The accelerating pace of discovery is matched by the diversity seen in the worlds discovered so far, one of the Kepler mission's co-investigators, Harvard astronomer Dimitar Sasselov, told me today.
"There is more diversity out there than our limited imaginations could come up with, which is good," he said.
The $600 million Kepler mission, launched in 2009, now has a list of 61 confirmed planets, and another 2,326 planetary prospects that have yet to be confirmed. At this rate, Kepler's worlds could soon account for the majority of the exoplanets detected beyond our solar system — a tally that now stands at more than 700.
"Prior to the Kepler mission, we knew of perhaps 500 exoplanets across the whole sky," Doug Hudgins, Kepler program scientist at NASA Headquarters, said in a news release. "Now, in just two years staring at a patch of sky not much bigger than your fist, Kepler has discovered more than 60 planets and more than 2,300 planet candidates. This tells us that our galaxy is positively loaded with planets of all sizes and orbits."
The Kepler space telescope searches for other worlds by staring at more than 150,000 stars in that fist-sized patch of sky, straddling the constellations Cygnus and Lyra. Kepler's instruments can detect the faint dips in starlight that occur on a regular basis as a planet passes over the disk of its parent star, as seen from Earth. By analyzing the patterns of those passes, also known as transits, Kepler's scientists can figure out the orbit and the size of a potential planet — but not its mass.
An alternative method has to be used to confirm that Kepler is actually looking at a planet rather than something else, such as mutually eclipsing binary stars. The mission's early discoveries were confirmed by looking at the candidates' stars with ground-based telescopes and checking for the telltale gravitational wobbles that are caused by big, close-in planets.
Transit timing variations
Most of the planets added to the list today were confirmed using a different backup method. The Kepler mission's astronomers analyzed subtle changes in the intervals between the transits, caused when multiple orbiting planets exert gravitational pull on each other. The resulting data on acceleration and deceleration can be used to confirm the planets' existence and calculate their masses.
"By precisely timing when each planet transits its star, Kepler detected the gravitational tug of the planets on each other, clinching the case for 10 of the newly announced planetary systems," said Dan Fabrycky, an astronomer at the University of California at Santa Cruz and the lead author for a paper confirming four of the planetary systems, known as Kepler-29, 30, 31 and 32.
Other newly confirmed planetary systems include Kepler-25, 26, 27 and 28, described in a paper with Fermilab's Jason Steffen as lead author; and Kepler-23 and 24, which was the focus of research led by the University of Florida's Eric Ford. In today's release, Ford said the transit timing variation method "dramatically accelerated" the pace of planetary discovery.
Yet another study, led by Jack Lissauer, a planetary scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center, detected five planets around Kepler-33, a star that is older and more massive than the sun. Those five planets range in size from 1.5 to five times the width of Earth, and they're all closer to their parent star than Mercury is to our own sun.
"The approach that was used to verify the Kepler-33 planets shows that the overall reliability of Kepler's candidate multiple transiting systems is quite high," Lissauer said in today's release. "This is a validation by multiplicity."
Five of the newly confirmed planetary systems (Kepler-25, 27, 30, 31 and 33) contain a pair of worlds that are bound together in a 1:2 resonance. That means the inner planet makes two circuit for every one circuit made by the outer planet. Four other systems (Kepler-23, 24, 28 and 32) have two planets that are linked in a 2:3 resonance, like Pluto and Neptune in our own solar system.
"These configurations help to amplify the gravitational interactions between the planets, similar to how my sons kick their legs on a swing at the right time to go higher," Steffen said.
Fifteen of the 26 planets announced today are Neptune-size or smaller, and the orbital periods range from six to 143 days. The planets' distances from Earth range from 623 light-years (for Kepler-25) to 4,064 light-years (for Kepler-29).
Great expectations
Sasselov, who has just come out with a book about the Kepler quest titled "The Life of Super-Earths," marveled that so many of the newfound worlds are in multiple-planet systems. He recalled that when the Kepler mission was proposed to NASA, more than a decade ago, "there was one little sentence that said maybe two or three of the systems will have multiple transiting planets."
None of the planets announced today would be conducive to life as we know it, because their orbits are so close to their parent stars. It's likely to be just a matter of time before Kepler achieves its main goal — confirming the existence of Earth-size planets in Earthlike orbits around sunlike stars. Unfortunately, it may be a matter of more time than initially expected.
Funding for the Kepler mission is due to run out in November, but the mission's scientists "don't have enough to statistically complete the core goal of the mission," Sasselov said. It turns out that the data collected by the telescope is "noisier" than expected. That means more observations will be required to confirm the mission's trickiest planetary finds.
The Kepler team has applied for a four-year extension, and is currently waiting for a decision from NASA executives.
More about the planet search:
- 160 billion planets in the Milky Way?!
- Three newfound worlds are smaller than Earth
- Flash interactive: How other worlds are found
- Two new 'Tatooine' planets with two suns
- SETI researchers check signals in exoplanet study
- Cosmic Log archive on planets
The planetary confirmations are described in four research papers:
- "Transit Timing Observations from Kepler: II. Confirmation of Two Multiplanet Systems via a Non-parametric Correlation Analysis'' by E.B. Ford et al., The Astrophysical Journal.
- "Transit Timing Observations from Kepler: III. Confirmation of 4 Multiple Planet Systems by a Fourier-Domain Study of Anti-correlated Transit Timing Variations," by J.H. Steffen et al., Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
- "Transit Timing Observations from Kepler: IV. Confirmation of 4 Multiple Planet Systems by Simple Physical Models," by D.C. Fabrycky et al., The Astrophysical Journal.
- "Almost All of Kepler's Multiple Planet Candidates are Planets, and Kepler-33 5-planet System," by J. Lissauer et al.
Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.
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Kepler should have its funding extended.
assuming there are many habitable planets out there...
it took the universe some time to make the essential elements for life so most life would not have started right away and at some point in the future the universe will cool down to much for life.
given this it stands to reason there would be a bell curve to the number of civilization's .
it is statistical probable that we exist at the top of the bell curve with would mean rite now is when most civilization's are happening.
I think this gives us some hope
Who would have 'thunk-it?"
The rationality of other worlds revolving around their mother suns, by the millions, was something most casual onlookers would never consider. With our human heads buried in the sands of our home planet since early scientists pointed out the truths of their observations. And the fact that many of those knowledgeable men were attacked as heretics and non believers by Papal Inquisitors, we languished through several hundred years of denial and the repression of facts. Today, scientists have the tools to affirm their observations and count our sister planets in the cosmos. With 160,000,000 mathematical probabilities existing in JUST the Milky Way alone, our fertile imaginations have plenty of room to run wild! Therefor, Vegas odds determine that even a small fraction of those orbiters have some form of life. It's now even more probable to say that some may contain anything from from early advanced life forms to sentient beings with much less technical abilities as ours our much more advanced technologies than ours. Certainly the possibilities are endless just in our galaxy alone.
Good Hunting...........
There is one fact that everyone seems to miss: We can only find planets associated with stars whose plane of the ecliptic, if extended out, slices through the satellite plus or minus an incredibly small fraction. But we must look at virtually all stars because, until we find a planet, we don't know that star's plane of the ecliptic. So we are looking at hundreds of thousands of stars when we know that only a handful will be oriented so that a planet passes exactly between the satellite and the star itself. That simple obstacle makes the discovery of so many planets hugely more awesome!
The major issue involved in finding life on planets in other stars' planetary systems is not so much an issue of suitability or non-suitability, but one of timing. If you look at "civilization" on this planet, it is an incredibly short part of the history of the planetary system. For us to find life it would have to be at precisely the right point in the geological age of the planet. And from the looks at what passes for civilization in this planet, that amount of time is likely to be incredibly short.
Using Earth as an example, it is about 4,578,000,000 years old, with "civilization" existing for less than 15,000 years of that length. That means that man has been here .000003% of Earth's history. Of that about 5,000 years were such that a contact with us would have been possible, reducing even that short history by two-thirds.
What that means is that if were were to spot a suitable planet in a "nearby" star and that planet was found to be producing some sort of artificial rediation (such as radio) that would indicate intelligent life, and we threw all the Earth's resources behind sending a probe to that planet, it would be very likely that, considering the amount of time that it took the transmission to reach us, the length of time to build such a craft, and the amount of travel time to get there, it would likely exceed the pitifully short lifetime of any life form that was detected. The distance and times involved are simply "astronomical."
Absolutely Kepler should have its funding extended.
@CHRIS
there is a problem with your math yes the planet is 4,578,000,000 years old but it was not a viable place for life all that time.
considerthat we are in an arm of the galaxy, the apparent arm is in actuality an wave of star formation.
this means most of the stars in are local area are near the same age and had a similar amount of time to develop.
given the earth as an example it takes about this long be for macro life comes about something like 4 billion years from the beginning of planet formation.
your math would ONLY apply if the age of the stars was random over the life of the universe in are local area
Comments like "Nasa should have its funding extended" is about the most ignorant thing I ever heard. Nasa releasing the discoveries in a time of budget planning is a ploy and apparently people are buying it. I would rather spending money on affordable healthcare, tuition, and border security, which I guess is only important to me. If only I lived in a country where people paid for they own Star Trek fantasies instead of taking the money out of my pocket. Also saying Nasa benefits humanity is truly false. Nasa's technology only helps our military to get a shiny new tool of destruction.
also seems to me NASA employees are doing P.R in the MSNBC comment section
Obviously you have NO IDEA of the total monies involved. Nasa's budget is miniscule compared to the monies ALREADY spent on programs you mentioned. Here's the thing you miss... Nasa's dicoveries/advancements are a PLUS to humankind. Social programs that keep parasites(and by that I mean welfare)alive DO NOT benefit mankind as a whole. Therefore your statement is about the most 'Ignorant" thing that I'VE heard.... touche !!
Thomas, the first line of your comment is actually pretty ignorant, sorry to say.
There is no ploy or conspiracy here - if you'd been paying regular attention to the Kepler program, you'd know that Kepler's discoveries have been coming in at a steady and constant rate for over the last two years. As soon as results are confirmed, they're released.
This is not an expensive program relatively speaking. The entire cost of this 3.5 year program comes in at $600 million dollars (which the our military spends every 6-8 hours on average). You have to put it into perspective.
The cost of extending this program would be peanuts, because most of the cost (R&D, assembly, launch and program start up costs) have already been paid.
That would be like buying a new Ferrari, then literally giving it away after two years because you don't want to pay for gas anymore.
@ Thomas Smith:
"Nasa releasing the discoveries in a time of budget planning is a ploy..."
A 'ploy' to what end?
"...and apparently people are buying it. I would rather spending money on affordable healthcare, tuition, and border security, which I guess is only important to me."
You speak as if these things are mutually exclusive. Government does many things at once with our money. It's supposed to.
"Also saying Nasa benefits humanity is truly false. Nasa's technology only helps our military to get a shiny new tool of destruction."
Right. The Department of Defense really cares about planets hundreds of light-years away...
Sadly, it means even less to you.
Sorry, a little off topic, but where are the articles about Newts plans for the Moon.
Any cost projections? Purpose?
Go comment on one of those articles instead of trying to troll this one.
Here are a couple of stories, D:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/46153995/ns/technology_and_science-space/
http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/01/25/10237875-gingrich-promises-us-moon-colony
I'll do more on this tomorrow, but I think the cost projection would be on the order of $100 billion or more, unless Gingrich could somehow persuade private enterprise to do it for the $10 billion prize he's mentioned. The purpose of all this is a good question. Has to be more than grandiosity.
just in case no one noticed...newts statement was buy the end of his 2nd term....this means if he dose nothing it will not mater because his presidency would be over its the perfect way to lie.
step 2 tell a lie that you cant be called on and you deflect topic's that you don't want to talk about
it was a well thought out strategy on newts part.
Well, you DO know how to tell is a politician is lying, right? It's pretty easy. Just watch the lips. If they move, the politician is lying.
@D-1129384,
Newt made the 2020 Moon base/Mars announcement to a couple of hundred NASA employees. There are NO such plans in existence and it is just a pipe dream. The major problem with a permanent base on the Moon is exactly the same as for a manned trip to Mars. While we have the technology to send robotics to these places, and even return them with samples, we simply DO NOT HAVE the capability to keep people on the Moon for any significant duration and do not have the capability to send men to Mars. And at this point we are clueless as to what new technologies it would require and have surprisingly little data to even kick-start the research.
The issue is not the rocketry, it is man himself. Because the military prevailed on NASA to confine major manned activities to low Earth orbit, we got the Space Shuttle and the ISS, both of which were a "compromise" between manned spaceflight and the military's desire for a cheap, agile, reusable weapons and reconnaissance platform.
While scientists wanted big dumb lifters that could throw the largest possible payloads at the lowest price and with the highest reliability to the Earth-Moon LaGrange Point, the Pentagon decided that this was a silly idea and that it would be much more fun to bomb the Russians and Chinese from LEO. So we ended up with a space vehicle that was the rocketry version of the Nissan Leaf --- good only for very short trips. And we ended up with the ISS that had virtually no potential for science. When it becaus obvious that these teo projects were white elephants of the first magnitude, the Pentagon took its budget and walked away.
The main problems are twofold: 1) We do not know how to forestall the bone loss and muscle atrophy that goes not only with weightlessness but with micro-gravity less than about .9 of that on Earth. 2) We do not know how to shield astraunauts' DNA from the bombardment of cosmic radiation, not only in space, but also on the surfaces of the Moon and Mars.
You have to remember that very little data is obtainable from the ISS because it is not entirely weightless as most assume. It actually is within the Earth's gravity field. If you drop your pencil on the ISS (and there are no air currents) it will very slowly fall to the "floor" that is nearest Earth. That is the dirty little secret of the ISS and why there has been virtually no science conducted there. In fact, there have been NO scientific experiments not connected directly with the ISS and its support, that could not have been done more quickly and less expensively with conventional rocket-launched satellites.
The ISS, the Moon, Mars, and travel to and from Mars all have one thing in comon. They would subject crews to partial weightlessness during travel and on the surface of both the Moon and Mars. The result would be bone loss and muscle atrophy. We can do a little to slow it, but nothing to prevent it. And it is a much, much problem than most suppose. If we flew men to Mars, using conventional technology, they would arrive unable to withstand the forces of a landing or takeoff from the planet. If a man were on the Moon for a long duration, say a year, he would be most likely unable to withstand the return to Earth because of brittle bones and atrophy of that necessary muscle, the heart.
The travel and being on the surface of Mars or the Moon would subject the astronauts to cosmic radiation far above what would be dangerous. This is because the Moon has no significant atmosphere and that of Mars is very, very thin and so offers no protection. Also the Moon and Mars have no magnetosphere, which tends to help a lot as well. The ISS does not have this problem nearly as badly as someone on the Moon would because the ISS is still within the Earth's protective magnetosphere. We do know how toshield astraunauts, but the mass of material required would be so great as to triple or quadruple the weight of a spacecraft. The most likely outcome of a trip to and from Mars moons would be cancer.
The idea of a permanent colony on the Moon is just a pipe dream at best, is not achievable for at least 40-50 years, would cost a fortune and yield almost nothing in return, but was just the thinkg to say to low-level NASA employees to get a sound bite on TV.
That's why, if you pay attention, they talk about "microgravity" rather than "weightlessness".
$100 billion???
Hardly, no mission to the moon will be approved unless it is part of a grand scheme plan to go to Mars, and vise versa, sadly.
Hence, any honest and serious feasibility study will show that you cannot have a successful manned landing missions to Mars without first establishing and testing the technologies on the moon base first.
A tremendous amount of material and fuel need to be established on the Martian surface before any manned mission can take place. The infrastructure and logistics will be 10 to 100 orders of magnitude more than the shuttle and space station combined.
Two important points with this premise:
First, obviously, the cost will be so high that not one nation can do it alone. Hence, like the space station collaboration between many more nations need to be established. Not an easy task in today's global economy. It isn't even clear if the European Union will survive this recession. And even a fool like Newt Gingrich would understand that it will be impossible to build the required political bridges with Russia and China.
Second, I put the range of the estimates between 10 and 100. That is a very large range, so large that it is just impossible to even consider such a mission at present. The rational for this range is based on our present model of our engineering capabilities. Space programs cost 10 times to similar military programs which in turn cost 10 times to similar commercial programs. Hence in order to pull this out we will need the learning curves (confidence of doing things) of the commercial levels and the reliability (confidence of achieving things) of the human spaceflight level. This matrix could be any where between 10 to 100 times more complex than what we used to deploy the shuttle and space station combined.
Maybe in 100 years. Today it is only a pipe dream.
I beg to differ on the point of radiation... we know that we can build under ground on the moon, stopping a majority of that radiation you so glibly speak of. As far as monies are concerned, yes, costs would be (pardon the pun) astronomical, but hey where else ya wanna spend it?? keeping multi-generational welfare types alive??? My vote is for scientific advancement!! let those losers find their own way.... or die!
Chris
you must have gone to school in the 60"s or had very old book's not to mention you come off as a conspiracy theorist.
first there are very few places in the universe with O gravity IE:one million miles from earth directlybetween earth and sun.so why would we need to know what happens there ??? also the micro gravity is far less than .9 of earth.
do we have the tec to build a moon base "YES YES YES!!!!!"
I think you must be imagening some on the surface city, that is not how it will be done. a Small entry way on the surface is all that you need the majority will be in the ground to block out the radiation .
sense the moon has 20% the earth G a dalie trip to a large centrifuge is all that is required it will not take all that long to find the required time in the "artificial gravity" to stay healthy.
and finally micro gravity what can I say you apparently know NOTHING about it .9 my a$$ that would be 90% of earth micro G is more like .01%.
better find something else fast, planet earths got bout 300 years left to support life, what do you think has been keeping it warm all these years, don't worry about it just keep bilking all that oil and gass out of the ground and fill it back up with water, did you know water freezes... mankind is f@##$ed..
Correction: 300 years left to support HUMAN life.... as with every other mass extinction event in Earth's history, the majority of life will continue along just fine without whatever was there before it.
Huh? Where did 300 yrs come from?
^ Also a good question...
Oil and gas in the ground is what keeps the planet warm? Hunh?
So, by this hypothesis, petrochemicals and hydrocarbons are undergoing some kind of subterranean combustion process, which heats the magma in the mantle layer and also, I suppose, the core itself... but, if we "fill it back up water", all this combustion will stop, as if we've put out a fire and we'll freeze to death.
/palmface/ Homeschooled much?
First off, combustion doesn't happen without free oxygen, and although there's plenty of oxygen chemically bound in the rocky material of the mantle it is not free to interact in the process of combustion, even if there's oil or natural gas present. This is why oil well fires do not travel back down the tube and blow up the whole planet. Or in other words, it isn't the burning of oil and gas which keeps the earth warm. Beside that, we're only extracting oil from the shallow layers of the crust itself. This would have no effect whatsoever on the deeper mantle or the core.
So what does keep the Earth warm?
To the best of my recollection from high school geology, two factors contribute to the heat content of the inner earth... First the heat generated by formation and pressure as the Earth coalesced from the circulating dust of the early solar system, as the pressure increases temperature increases... secondly, nuclear fissionable materials reacted together and liberated much heat and energy as well. All of this heat accumulated in the deep core and mantle layers and is apparently still added to somewhat by the latter process. This residual heat continues to drive the circulation of the mantle layers, powering volcanos, plate tectonic movements, and geothermal processes.
Some of this heat is radiated out into space, but most of it is insulated by the crust layer and is retained. Also, absorption of sunlight energy compensates for some of the radiated energy at the surface level. I don't know off the cuff how long this slow radiative cooling process is projected to last, but I would bet the sun is due expand into a red giant and swallow us up long before the residual heat of Earth's formation is dissipated.
Any geologists out there? Am I somewhat on track with this? I thought just for fun, I'd give it stab without any wiki-peeking. How'd I do?
From my "amateur" geologic research/ learning,I 'd say your guesses are not far off...--S-
There is also the contribution from the Moon. The constant tugging and bending of the crust adds a little heat as well.
What are some ages of these parent stars? It seems to me that these systems must be rather old due to the close proximity of the planets. Supposedly planets migrate inward as the orbits decay over billions of years. Are the stars of the main sequence variety? Are these solar systems twice as old as ours?
@Mike: The vast majority of the stars are main sequence variety. Kepler purposely selected what are called "FGK stars" which are the types most similar to ours (The sun is a G star, and F and K are the two most similar types). Also, planet migration is a process that occurs during planet formation, but these orbits tend to stabilize into mostly circular orbits over billions of years. The planets should stay in mostly the same place after the first half a billion years or so. It's hard to pin down the age of a star with great precision, but these stars are expected to be distributed all across the main sequence, from some younger than ours to some older.
Good questions, but I'm guessing that a lot of the planet placement theories are going to need major adjustment now that we have a plethora of other systems to observe.
Good point Brokin, MY guess is that we DO NOT have a great handle on all processes involed.....YET!!!--S--
Extend the funding and fund bigger and better detectors for the near future.
Need to bring back the terrestrial planet finder for sure.
Wouldn't it be nice if we could take about half the defense budget and just shift it over to space and science research?
oh!!! if ONLY!!!LOL!
Mikey, it would be 'nice,' but irrelevant. Cutting Defense in half would go to service the deficit. Period.
Besides, even NASA can have too much money...
"Those whom the gods would destroy, they first give unlimited resources."
- Twyla Tharp
...and you would seriously need to ask just how it would be spent. Don't throw money blindly and unconditionally at any government agency.
This is fantastic! We're learning more about our world (and then some) each day...
When you warp space the distances are not so far.
Sorry Cap'n, the dilithium crystals canna hold Warp 6 much longer!
The Kepler Mission WIll be a milestone of our civilization for a long time.....we'll have big telescopes on the moon and large sturctures out past jupiter AND STILL refer back to the data collected by this mission....IF this mission IS generating real data AND needs more time to complete it's core data gathering mission....HAVE AT IT!!!....it would only be the idiocracy of congress to kill it in november, which would not surprise me. The future will bring more streamlined and better equipment to the task, and with luck WE, THE USA, will lead the data gathering task and profit from the processed information, lest of course we capitulate and just hand over space exploration to china, which is what I gather some of my fellow americans desire (some, not all, thankfully). We can build a moonbase, We will build a moonbase and WE MUST build a moonbase....everything else is just a shortcut, even our beloved keplar mission.....now, would it not be nice to examine some of the closer stars for planets? If you dare ask why, I need you to leave the country right now, go somewhere where freedom is only a dream, but you best not dare and keep it (freedom) from them, same as you best not keep this dream of civilization expanding into the realm of space from me. A lot of americans run at the mouth. They say things like can't and never. At least that makes it easy for me to see which americans really do not understand our culture, our history, our dreams, OUR VERY OWN DECLARATION OF INDEPENDANCE!!! (I decided to post the same thing in two different threads since they ARE related.)
I'm a big fan of space exploration too, but I've got to ask...
What profit is there in this knowledge? Do you seriously think we're going to be sending a mission to any of these planets to perhaps mine for diamonds or something anytime in the next 1,000 years?
Distance and time factors aside, we've got a whole lot of space based industry to develop right here in our own solar system, perhaps even including a moonbase, before we even contemplate going 'outside'.
RAY... I love you!! You dream the right dreams!! Now we just need leaders with the right gumption!!!!!--S--
Mikey, the word 'profit' can be used figuratively, too...
Cool stuff! I vote we spend the money. Prolonged observation is needed to find the planets with bigger orbits and continued research would hopefully lead to improved methods of detection.
Good news, at list humanity got a place to move in the future when the earth goverment destroy it
As exciting as all this is, I still cannot help but think that some of these "planets" will be discovered to not be.
But, saying that, there will be many others that we do not find using these techniques.
I'll be much happier when we can image some of these extra-solar planets.
Actually you might want to read it again. The ones they are declaring are the ones that have already been confirmed. There is a much larger number of possibles that have yet to be confirmed. Those will have some that will not pan out. They are being very careful, just to be sure not to get people like you all riled up.
No matter how much confirmation there is, they are still not getting visual confirmation for most. I still take these as "potential" planets, and that they will find that a large number (maybe not most but a large number) will be found to not be planets. I don't want them to stop, because discovery requires a few mistakes.
Still, it is an exciting time.
I'm not riled up, I'm a bit skeptical. Skepticism is good in science.
Besides, I'm a bit "old school". Neptune and Pluto were "discovered" mathmatically, though they were not truly discovered until someone caught them in a telescope.
Does anyone know what an "Alien Planet" is? Other news stories mention finding 26 new alien planets, but isn't it obvious that they would be alien, unless Kepler keeps rediscovering Earth, like a bird looking in a mirror.
The technical term in the science community is Exo-planets simply meaning planets outside of our solar system just to distinguish them from planets around our sun (star). I guess they dumbed it down to "alien planet" for the general non-technical audience.
I wonder what the religious implications will be once life is found somewhere other than Earth?
The churches will invest a lot of money in space flight so we can send missionaries to convert them.
Then the tea party will bring them here to clean their houses.
They will do as they have in the past with scientific discoveries. Make some statements to it's pointed out in their book.
Well, what usually happens is you get this "New Revelation" that will just "happen" somewhere. Then the people who believe in it will think a different way, while those who don't will call them blasphemers and either stone them or burn them at the stake. This will cause the 2 groups to split apart and one will feel good about their new and more perfect faith while the other will sit smugly in their orthodox self-righteousness. They'll hate each other for a thousand years or so, but then start to realize that they're not too different at all - as long as they don't attend each others services. Just about the time that everything settles down, then there will be a new revelation...
What I want to know is what happens when the aliens start sending their missionaries here to try and convert us?
Your comment reminds me of a joke my friend tells. When extra-terrestrials finally visit Earth, they are amazed that Christ appeared here, as well as on their home planet. "That's great!" they say. "We made him cookies; what'd you guys do?"
The Scientologists will all declare, "See! We told you so!"
Not many implications at all. Indeed, the Catholic Church is already ahead of the curve on this 9for an historical change). Other religions will adjust as needed. no one wants to say their god(s) isn't gig enough to encompass anything new that we learn...
I wonder how this might relate to the search for Dark Matter. Is it possible that there is enough planetary matter orbiting - or rogue to account for the distribution of dark matter in the universe?
The mass of the stars are so much greater than the planets orbiting around them, that the additional mass if every star did have several large planets is significant on the smaller scale but that would still only account for maybe less than 1% more mass than estimated and that's a drop in the bucket compared to the 70% or whatever mass that is attributed to dark matter.
I really wish they'd called it dark mass instead of matter, since it is the mass we're actually talking about, but religious people probably wouldn't have responded too well to scientists using the term "Dark Mass".
"Dark Mass" celebrating Beelzebub, perhaps? That's funny.
Regarding planetary masses as a portion of the purported 'dark matter' which is supposedly need in order to explain the rotating motion of far off galaxies, I've often posed the question on other threads of whether or not unaccounted for dust and rocks and crap could make up the difference, as well as contributing to a diminution of the radiance of the existing stars, thereby leading to miscalibrated estimates of total mass, but everyone always tells me I'm off my rocker. I guess they prefer to accept the existence of strange new undetectable kinds of stuff, but I for one remain skeptical.
Ah Mikey,
Didn't we cover this before? :-)
It doesn't need to be new stuff, could be just more of stuff we already know about.
Skeptical is fine, but some of your posts lean so much into the "I'm not buying it at all" category that you no longer are skeptical but in the camp that flat out refuses to accept the possibility.
Mitchell
Someone did once tell me that years ago when they were visiting a library in the Vatican, that they did see a bible opened to Genesis, and read "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earths . . .".
Hmmm. Bad Latin translation, Italian translation or English translation?
The woman was only english speaking. Also, dozens of versions of the bible have been made over the centuries.
What is truly amazing is that neither the "wobble" nor "blinking" techniques would identify, accurately, the numbers of planets orbiting these stars. I would think it obvious that there could be three to four times as many planets yet to be seen in these systems as have been identified by our technology. As our abilities improve, so will the numbers.
Everything is there.... just waiting for our discovery
What scientists and Kepler are finding is interesting. Yet nothing will be found until scientist and machinery can nail down the aspects that make Earth unique and then go hunting. For a planet to support mankind a soup has to exist and the recipe for carbon based life may be more complicated than people think. Just think of the exact percentages an atmosphere must have to allow for DNA to form. Then the planet needs to be in right zone, needs a magnetosphere toshield for radiation. The right size and age sun turning out the right amount of heat. Then take a look at solid body of the planet. It needs an active core containing enough radioactive material to keep the inner core liquid. The radiation cannot be to high because it will create too many mutations or burn up all plant and animal matter or to little where no mutation will go on and eventually cool to the point of a planet like Mars which is dead. In the latest movie of the Earth Stood Still, Klatu makes the statement that there are few Earths in the universe and they need to be cared for. I think that his statement is closer to the truth. We may be more unique than we think.
As an after thought. The ancients stated that their gods came from the star Sirius or from the Pleidese. You would think that is where Kepler should go first.
Which ancients would that be, please?
Not true. It is not so much the small deviations of all the parameters required to create and sustain life but rather the degree of complexity (infinite variations of interactive functionality) of the system.
If a planet exist else where with as many forms of phases of matter then it has a high probability for creating genetic algorithms and life.
Foundations of Genetic Algorithms, (Volume 1) ... By Gregory J. E. Rawlins
http://books.google.ca/books?hl=en&lr=&id=Df12yLrlUZYC&oi=fnd&pg=PA53&dq=theory+of+convergence&ots=isw0yE2rZ2&sig=ADYAwGwoCVznINJQnWiD1MB5af4#v=onepage&q=theory%20of%20convergence&f=false
There are many strong indications of non-human intelligence
Though many UFO may be unidentified military craft, we cannot claim that ALL UFO are military craft, consider the following:
July 29, 1952 USAF orders pilots to "shoot down" flying saucers over white house, google search "air force flying saucer shoot"
AA guns around airports to protect against "flying saucers", google search "air force flying saucer latimes"
April 7, 1952 LIFE magazine in cooperation with the USAF makes the case for ET visitation, google search "april 7, 1952 LIFE Magazine google" PAGE 80.
Note conclusions 3 and 4
Conclusion 3: These objects cannot be explained by present science as natural phenomena-but soley as artificial devices, created and operated by a high intelligence.
Conclusion 4: Finally, no power plant known or projected on earth could account for the performance of these devices.
March 3, 1989 Shuttle Discovery astronaut radios to Houston "we have the Alien Spacecraft under observance", youtube search "Prove che gli astronauti NASA". An Italian speaker posted the video.
Project Blue Book Special Report 14 (a scientific study of UFO by the US government) indicated that of all the UFO cases they studied about 22% were unexplained AND the more information they received of those 22% the LESS they were able to be explained. Wikipedia search "Project Blue Book Special Report No. 14" click on the "section" link.