China is planning its first satellite mission to search the Milky Way for exoplanets orbiting stars just like the Sun. The mission goal is to find the first Earth-like planet orbiting in the habitable zone of a star just like the Sun. Such a planet, called an Earth 2.0, would have the right conditions for liquid water and have the potential to harbor life. Although more than 5000 exoplanets were found with NASA's Kepler telescope before it ran out of fuel in 2018, none fit the definition of an Earth 2.0.
Exoplanets are found by looking for stellar brightnesses to dim as a planet passes in front. An Earth 2.0 candidate would have an orbital period of about a year and would thus pass in front of its star once a year. You want about three passes to get a decent determination of the oribit, so you need to be observing the same stars for more than three years. The Kepler mission suffered a failure early in its mission that prevented staring at the same spot for long periods of time, so it wasn't possible to determine precise orbits for the explanets it discovered. This new mission will search the same patch of sky with more telescopes gather more data to allow orbits to be calculated.
With Earth 2.0, astronomers could have another four years of data that, when combined with Kepler's observations, could help to confirm which exoplanets are truly Earth-like. "I am very excited about the prospect of returning to the Kepler field," says Christiansen, who hopes to study Earth 2.0's data if they are made available.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 13 2022, @09:17PM (6 children)
I'll wait for Earth 2.11
(Score: 2) by Revek on Wednesday April 13 2022, @09:38PM
I'm waiting on Earth 95 OSR2
This page was generated by a Swarm of Roaming Elephants
(Score: 4, Funny) by acid andy on Thursday April 14 2022, @12:21AM (4 children)
It's all very presumptuous. How do we know our own planet isn't Earth 2.0 and the other one to be found is 1.0?
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 14 2022, @01:10AM (3 children)
That's the acid talking, right? :)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 14 2022, @07:56AM (2 children)
i thought we were populated by the B Ark, making this 2.0
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 14 2022, @04:19PM (1 child)
That explains so much. In particular the level of stupidity we demonstrate. Screwing the whole planet over with a lab grown virus? Waging war on a peaceful neighbour? How low can we go?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 20 2022, @07:00PM
A friend believes it actually an H6 or H9 bird flu that had begun circulating in Russia or eastern Europe that was the bioweapon. The Covid strain was merely a less deadly innoculant against the far deadlier straiin which was used both as an excuse for isolating without drawing attention to that more aggressive strain and as a method of inoculating against it until a vaccine was developed.
There are a couple different theories on the whys, but the simplest one was that the initial virus was mean to 'purge' the excess and unemployable population in order to help shore up employment numbers as more people lost jobs due to recent advances in automation combined with diluting currency in favor of the wealthy (look into why so many wealthy are leveraging debt...) Furthermore the US was already at the time (see https://nscai.gov) [nscai.gov)] discussing proposals for how to move the US economy fully digital in order to spur on advances in digital commerce which could be marketed in the developing world to half China's progress there.
Combined with everything else going on there is plenty of reason to suspect (but not to assume) that one or more governments or powerful organizations might have enacted such a plan to shift the balance of power in their favor, or to reduce the risk of civil unrest that might compromise their positions.
Now given all that, the Ukrainian bio-weapon lab narrative being pushed isn't very believable. But there are a number of biolabs all over that region dating back to the Soviet Union, and the US, Russia, and China have all mishandle biological specimens, even if few or none of them got out.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Wednesday April 13 2022, @09:44PM
There are similar missions like NASA's TESS [wikipedia.org] and ESA's PLATO [wikipedia.org]. The interesting part is that China is increasingly launching their own science missions.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 13 2022, @10:23PM (1 child)
He would have spent a fortnight on Creation.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 13 2022, @10:32PM
*Fortnite [epicgames.com]
Source: God
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 13 2022, @10:34PM
FUCK YOU JAMES KIRK YOU STOLE MY WIFE AND I’LL NEVER ACCEPT HER BACK SHOULD SHE COME CRAWLING.
YOU STUPID MOTHERFUCKER YOU GOT AIDS FROM FUCKING SPOCK AND NOW SHE HAS IT TOO I BET.
FUCK YOU, KIRK YOU DUMB MOTHERFUCKER I’LL PISS ON YOUR GRAVE.
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 13 2022, @10:42PM (1 child)
WHY DO YOU TAKE MY WIFE TO THE CARNIVAL AND FUCK HER ON THE CAROUSEL WHERE EVERYONE CAN SEE
YOU FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT JAMES T. KIRK I WILL SHIT AND PISS ON YOUR GRAVE AND EJACULATE INTO YOUR MOTHER'S MOUTH
FUCK YOU, KIRK I HOPE YOU KNOW MY WIFE HAS HERPES AND I'M GOING TO DIVORCE HER AFTER YOU'RE DONE FUCKING HER
I'LL DRESS UP AS A CLOWN AND FUCK YOUR SISTER AND MOTHER.
IN SHORT, FUCK YOU KIRK.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 14 2022, @12:18AM
Finnegan, is that you?
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 14 2022, @12:15AM
Runaway is AC spamming again in his childish attempt to get more IP bans.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 14 2022, @01:22AM (3 children)
The article implies that the Kepler malfunction was the cause of it finding no Earths, but it wasn't. Engineers were able to work around the problem. The problem was that it of the ~5000 planets it found, none of them were Earthlike.
If there was a "problem," it was that they assumed that G type stars would all be pretty much the same as the Sun, and they weren't. Turns out that the Sun is pretty unusual. When they plugged in the actual behavior of Sun-like stars into their estimation algorithm, it turned out that the expected number of Earths they would find dropped from fifty all the way to... one. So them not finding any wasn't such a surprise after all.
There's a whole breakdown of the mission, including interviews with one of the scientists who worked on the project here [youtube.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 14 2022, @01:37AM
And by "interview" I actually mean "press conference" but even so
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 14 2022, @01:56AM (1 child)
Kepler did find Earth-like planets. It's just that Earth-like is a matter of degree and follow-up observations are needed to find out how Earth-like these planets actually are. Also, it is much easier to find planets that aren't Earth-like, such as ones that are Jupiter-sized or close to their parent star.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 14 2022, @03:30AM
Earthlike isn't a matter of degree here.
The criteria were:
0.9 to 1.2 times the mass of Earth (maybe you could extend the lower mass limit down a bit because Venus might be geologically good enough... but it wouldn't have mattered)
Orbiting a G, K, or cool F type star
Within 20% of the Earth's orbital distance
And what they found was not "here are a hundred candidates and we need another mission to actually confirm them" because this WAS the mission to confirm them. What they found was 5000 planets, and none of them fit even this simple criteria. There were two "maybe, but probably not" candidates and that's it.
And that's excluding all the other things that a planet would need to be actually Earthlike (even if it's not a place you'd want to live) like actually having water, having an atmosphere that isn't like Venus's, having a halfway reasonable temperature, etc etc. They weren't even concerned with this stuff. And they still came up empty.
NASA launched the TESS mission anyway. Although not all the data from TESS has been analyzed, it hasn't found any Earthlike planets either (it did find an Earth-mass-ish planet in a liquid-water-possible orbit, TOI 700 d, but it's orbiting an M dwarf).
(Score: 3, Touché) by PiMuNu on Thursday April 14 2022, @09:56AM
Nice that they can use the Kepler results, and enhance them with new/better tech. Isn't open science great!
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 14 2022, @12:30PM
Not sure that finding 2.0 or any version thereof is going to help us here in reality.