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NASA's Kepler mission has discovered a new batch of verified exoplanets, including nine that are potentially habitable:
NASA's Kepler mission has verified 1,284 new planets – the single largest finding of planets to date. "This announcement more than doubles the number of confirmed planets from Kepler," said Ellen Stofan, chief scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "This gives us hope that somewhere out there, around a star much like ours, we can eventually discover another Earth."
Analysis was performed on the Kepler space telescope's July 2015 planet candidate catalog, which identified 4,302 potential planets. For 1,284 of the candidates, the probability of being a planet is greater than 99 percent – the minimum required to earn the status of "planet." An additional 1,327 candidates are more likely than not to be actual planets, but they do not meet the 99 percent threshold and will require additional study. The remaining 707 are more likely to be some other astrophysical phenomena. This analysis also validated 984 candidates previously verified by other techniques.
[...] In the newly-validated batch of planets, nearly 550 could be rocky planets like Earth, based on their size. Nine of these orbit in their sun's habitable zone, which is the distance from a star where orbiting planets can have surface temperatures that allow liquid water to pool. With the addition of these nine, 21 exoplanets now are known to be members of this exclusive group.
Also at NPR and The Register .
False Positive Probabilities For All Kepler Objects of Interest: 1284 Newly Validated Planets and 428 Likely False Positives (DOI: 10.3847/0004-637x/822/2/86)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday May 11 2016, @04:13PM
aluminize mylar can be made quite thin and so lightweight.
Put of bunch of really large aluminized mylar disks in orbit around the sun, in such a way that they blink a sequence of prime numbers.
The planets aren't all in the same direction, so we would need a set of orbiting disks for each habitable planet.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday May 11 2016, @04:47PM
Well, assuming anyone was there to see it, and they were looking at us, that would definitely get their attention. That's not communication though, that's a unilateral bullhorn shouting "I am here" to anyone in the orbital plane. Communication requires being able to then modulate the signal so that you can transmit meaningful information, which is *much* more difficult. Still, if we saw someone else announcing themselves like that, it would probably be much easier to get the funding for the massive transmitters necessary to send them a signal.
On the other hand, I'm not sure there's much in the way of cost-savings to be had - even mylar gets massive (and massively expensive) in the sort of planet-sized sheets necessary to noticeably "blink" a star. After all you have to block enough light to stand out against the noise from the star itself. Plus you're going to have to equip them with station-keeping engines of some sort in order to compensate for the solar sail effect of all the light they'll be blocking.
Even a moon-sized sheet in an Earth-like orbit would be reflecting ~10^16W of solar power - that's a lot of force for something without much mass.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday May 11 2016, @10:54PM
It would get their attention if they happened to be looking at us at just the right moment.
But so would the last century or so of radio and television broadcasts that have leaked out into space. So why not just save ourselves a lot of time and money and not do anything?
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday May 12 2016, @12:55AM
What right moment? The "signal" would be sent over the course of a year, and repeat for as long as the shades remained in orbit, while being visible to any civilization conducting something like a Kepler-style planet-hunting program. It would get attention by virtue of the fact that there's an obviously artificial set of large objects orbiting the sun in an arrangement probably designed *specifically* to get that attention.
As for our radio broadcasts, there's a pretty good chance they wouldn't be detectable from even the closest stars. Certainly our own technology wouldn't be up to the job. The sun is simply broadcasting such immense amounts of radio noise that it would completely drown out our signals. It's not a major problem on Earth simply because the inverse-square law means that terrestrial signals are getting a hundred-million-fold effective amplification based on proximity.
From what I can find on Google, the most powerful TV and radio transmitters operate in the 100s of kW range, and the most powerful military radars in the range of a few MW. The 10^16W signal from a moon-sized sunshade shade would thus be around 10 billion times more powerful than our most powerful transmissions, and about 10,000x greater than the total human power consumption on Earth.
*Slightly* easier to detect at interstellar distances, to the point that the Kepler program would be able to detect it if someone else constructed one around a nearby star.