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.
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NASA Retires Kepler Space Telescope
After nine years in deep space collecting data that indicate our sky to be filled with billions of hidden planets - more planets even than stars - NASA's Kepler space telescope has run out of fuel needed for further science operations. NASA has decided to retire the spacecraft within its current, safe orbit, away from Earth. Kepler leaves a legacy of more than 2,600 planet discoveries from outside our solar system, many of which could be promising places for life.
"As NASA's first planet-hunting mission, Kepler has wildly exceeded all our expectations and paved the way for our exploration and search for life in the solar system and beyond," said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. "Not only did it show us how many planets could be out there, it sparked an entirely new and robust field of research that has taken the science community by storm. Its discoveries have shed a new light on our place in the universe, and illuminated the tantalizing mysteries and possibilities among the stars."
Two astronomers at Columbia University have suggested earthlings could use lasers to conceal the presence of Earth from intelligent life on other planets:
RAS [Royal Astronomical Socitety] notes that several prominent scientists, including Stephen Hawking, have cautioned against humanity broadcasting our presence to intelligent life on other planets. Other civilizations might try to find Earth-like planets using the same techniques we do, including looking for the dip in light when a planet moves directly in front of the star it orbits.
These events — transits — are the main way that the Kepler mission and similar projects search for planets around other stars. So far Kepler alone has confirmed more than 1,000 planets using this technique, with tens of these worlds similar in size to the Earth. [Professor David] Kipping and [graduate student Alex] Teachey speculate that alien scientists may use this approach to locate our planet, which will be clearly in the "habitable zone" of the Sun, where the temperature is right for liquid water, and so be a promising place for life.
Hawking and others are concerned that extraterrestrials might wish to take advantage of the Earth's resources, and that their visit, rather than being benign, could be as devastating as when Europeans first travelled to the Americas.
[...] According to the authors, emitting a continuous 30 MW laser for about ten hours, once a year, would be enough to eliminate the transit signal, at least in visible light. The energy needed is comparable to that collected by the International Space Station in a year. A chromatic cloak, effective at all wavelengths, is more challenging, and would need a large array of tuneable lasers with a total power of 250 MW.
Previously:
Narrow SETI Targets by Looking at Places Where Earth Transits can be Seen
Kepler Extended Mission Finds More Exoplanets
NASA's Kepler Mission Discovers Earth-Like Planet In Sun-Like Star's Habitable Zone
(Score: 3, Interesting) by c0lo on Friday July 24 2015, @09:40AM
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 4, Funny) by Bot on Friday July 24 2015, @09:56AM
- "Good news everyone!
we found a planet just like ours whose climate is even more f*cked up than ours!
Man the spaceships!"
while the shiny metal ass guy says
"Hey, better make it a male-only crew. If that planet is more massive than earth we don't want all females complaining about their weight increase, do we?"
Account abandoned.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Thexalon on Friday July 24 2015, @01:46PM
The thing is, we found one much closer to home already: Venus. It has a similar size to Earth, at one point had extensive liquid water, and quite possibly life. Then a runaway greenhouse effect happened about 600 million years ago, and probably killed anything that was alive down there.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 3, Funny) by Geotti on Friday July 24 2015, @05:53PM
and probably killed anything that was alive down there.
Everything? No. A highly advanced humanoid species known as amazons manned a spaceship and flew a few million kilometers to the next planet, where they discovered animals quite similar to them in their DNA structure. The girls genetically reengineered some of them to more closely resemble themselves (mostly for their amusement), the rest is history.
(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.