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from the when-are-we-gonna-invent-the-warp-drive dept.
NASA has announced today the discovery of Kepler-452b, an Earth-like planet in a Sun-like star's habitable zone:
Kepler-452b is 60 percent larger in diameter than Earth and is considered a super-Earth-size planet. While its mass and composition are not yet determined, previous research suggests that planets the size of Kepler-452b have a good chance of being rocky.
While Kepler-452b is larger than Earth, its 385-day orbit is only 5 percent longer. The planet is 5 percent farther from its parent star Kepler-452 than Earth is from the Sun. Kepler-452 is 6 billion years old, 1.5 billion years older than our sun, has the same temperature, and is 20 percent brighter and has a diameter 10 percent larger.
The Kepler-452 system is located 1,400 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by RedBear on Friday July 24 2015, @07:13PM
I'm somewhat shocked that this is halfway down the front page and there are only three pretty uninterested comments so far. Have we become so jaded to reality that we can't get excited that we have finally discovered a REAL Earth-like planet in the Habitable Zone? Even having spent my entire life reading and watching science fiction filled with wonderfully imagined foreign worlds, this announcement can still make my stomach do a little flip-flop when I realize that this place actually exists, and could actually support life similar to ours.
It's very sad that Soylent's reaction to this is, "Meh."
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
(Score: 2, Informative) by sparky on Friday July 24 2015, @07:37PM
Agreed. I've spent way too much time at work today coming up to speed on NASA's Kepler mission.
I really like this summary [nytimes.com] of results.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Immerman on Saturday July 25 2015, @05:12AM
I'm torn between agreeing with you, and observing that, even if this is a thriving Earthlike world teeming with complex life, it's unlikely to be even remotely relevant to anyone currently alive. At 1,400 light-years distant entire civilizations would rise and fall in the almost three millenia required to exchange even a simple "hello", and even the most powerful gravitational telescopes we could build are unlikely to resolve enough detail to be useful. About the only thing it would do is allow us to dramatically improve our estimates of the number of life-bearing planets in the galaxy.
I suppose it would also be a serious kick in the pants for various religious sects that claim we're alone in the universe, but I can't think of any major ones that make such a claim offhand. And I'm sure they could adapt in short order, if they didn't simply deny the evidence altogether.
Of course it's not impossible that they were transmitting interesting things in this direction ~1,400 years ago, with enough power (and/or at the right frequencies) to provide a decent signal-to-noise ratio with their sun, and a gravitational radio-telescope might pick up signals carrying world-altering information, and that wold be incredibly exciting. But unless/until there's evidence of such a thing it's not woth getting worked up about.