Author Topic: Earth-sized planet found outside solar system  (Read 431 times)

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Offline SwampThing762

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Earth-sized planet found outside solar system
« on: October 16, 2012, 03:05:15 PM »
Earth-sized planet found just outside solar system     Must Read?Yes     80          Email Story Print    By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP
 2 hours ago
    news-national-20121016-US.SCI.Nearby.Planet This artists impression made available by the European Southern Observatory ...
   WASHINGTON — European astronomers say that just outside our solar system they've found a planet that's the closest you can get to Earth in location and size.
It is the type of planet they've been searching for across the Milky Way galaxy and they found it circling a star right next door — 25 trillion miles away. But the Earth-like planet is so hot its surface may be like molten lava. Life cannot survive the 2,200 degree heat of the planet, so close to its star that it circles it every few days.
The astronomers who found it say it's likely there are other planets circling the same star, a little farther away where it may be cool enough for water and life. And those planets might fit the not-too-hot, not-too-cold description sometimes call the Goldilocks Zone.
That means that in the star system Alpha Centauri B, a just-right planet could be closer than astronomers had once imagined.
It's so close that from some southern places on Earth, you can see Alpha Centauri B in the night sky without a telescope. But it's still so far that a trip there using current technology would take tens of thousands of years.
But the wow factor of finding such a planet so close has some astronomers already talking about how to speed up a 25 trillion-mile rocket trip there. Scientists have already started pressuring NASA and the European Space Agency to come up with missions to send something out that way to get a look at least.
The research was released online Tuesday in the journal Nature. There has been a European-U.S. competition to find the nearest and most Earthlike exoplanets — planets outside our solar system. So far scientists have found 842 of them, but think they number in the billions.
While the newly discovered planet circles Alpha Centauri B, it's part of a system of three stars: Alpha Centauri A, B and the slightly more distant Proxima Centauri. Systems with two or more stars are more common than single stars like our sun, astronomers say.
This planet has the smallest mass — a measurement of weight that doesn't include gravity — that has been found outside our solar system so far. With a mass of about 1.1 times the size of Earth, it is strikingly similar in size.
Stephane Udry of the Geneva Observatory, who heads the European planet-hunting team, said this means "there's a very good prospect of detecting a planet in the habitable zone that is very close to us."
And one of the European team's main competitors, Geoff Marcy of the University of California Berkeley, gushed even more about the scientific significance.
 "This is an historic discovery," he wrote in an email. "There could well be an Earth-size planet in that Goldilocks sweet spot, not too cold and not too hot, making Alpha Centauri a compelling target to search for intelligent life."
Harvard planet-hunter David Charbonneau and others used the same word to describe the discovery: "Wow."
Charbonneau said when it comes to looking for interesting exoplanets "the single most important consideration is the distance from us to the star" and this one is as close as you can get. He said astronomers usually impress the public by talking about how far away things are, but this is not, at least in cosmic terms.
Alpha Centauri was the first place the private Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence program looked in its decade-long hunt for radio signals that signify alien intelligent life. Nothing was found, but that doesn't mean nothing is there, said SETI Institute astronomer Seth Shostak.
The European team spent four years using the European Southern Observatory in Chile to look for planets at Alpha Centauri B and its sister stars Alpha Centauri A and Proxima Centauri. They used a technique that finds other worlds by looking for subtle changes in a star's speed as it races through the galaxy.
Part of the problem is that the star is so close and so bright — though not as bright as the sun — that it made it harder to look for planets, said study lead author Xavier Dumusque of the Geneva Observatory.
One astronomer who wasn't part of the research team, wondered in a companion article in Nature if the team had enough evidence to back such an extraordinary claim. But other astronomers said they had no doubt and Udry said the team calculated that there was only a 1-in-1,000 chance that they were wrong about the planet and that something else was causing the signal they saw.
Finding such a planet close by required a significant stroke of good luck, said University of California Santa Cruz astronomer Greg Laughlin.
Dumusque described what it might be like on this odd and still unnamed hot planet. Its closest star is so near that it would always hang huge in the sky. And whichever side of the planet faced the star would be broiling hot, with the other side icy cold.
Because of the mass of the planet, it's likely a rocky surface like Earth, Dumusque said. But the rocks would be "more like lava, like a lava planet."
 "If there are any inhabitants there, they're made of asbestos," joked Shostak.


source:www.comcast.net
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Online Graybeard

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Re: Earth-sized planet found outside solar system
« Reply #1 on: October 16, 2012, 05:53:05 PM »
WOW! By all means let's get a probe headed that direction, then in a few tens of thousands of years if there is anyone still here on earth they can know the results.

I've seen shows where this planet was mentioned before. At this point it's kinda silly to be wasting tax dollars on something that with current technology would take multiple tens of thousands of years to get a probe to even assuming it survived the journey. Maybe the Chinese will loan us the money.


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Offline Anna

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Re: Earth-sized planet found outside solar system
« Reply #2 on: October 17, 2012, 09:08:27 AM »
+1 on that !  Some of these new planets they are calling earth like. Are three times the size of this
planet. The force of gravity there alone would crush anything we could send there .
Then there is the atmosphere, take Venus for instance.  Even though it is about the same size as the earth, anything that has ever landed there was cooked to a crisp in about five minutes .
Then boiled in acid, and we can just barely get to Mars right now.

Offline Buckskin

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Re: Earth-sized planet found outside solar system
« Reply #3 on: October 17, 2012, 12:14:48 PM »
Getting there is futile right now and problably ever.  What is so amazing is what they are discovering every day. The number of planets similar to earth, they have found 842 so far, almost all of them recently. And they assume that there are billions of them.  Billions! We are not even a gnat on a dog as far as the expanse of space is concerned.  Reading some of the discoveries of space is truely mind boggling...
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Offline BBF

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Re: Earth-sized planet found outside solar system
« Reply #4 on: October 18, 2012, 09:19:55 AM »
What is mind boggling is the fact that with so many stars(suns) and planets out there we would be the only one where the right mix of "soup" and depending on your belief, the magic touch was applied to start life. Possibly life much older than ours and capable of traveling astronomical distances.
 
For those that belief the Christian cosmology, I would ask this. Why and for what would God create such an enormous Universe if we are alone in it?
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Offline Blackhawker

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Re: Earth-sized planet found outside solar system
« Reply #5 on: October 18, 2012, 10:34:07 AM »
Swamp,
Do you have the link from where you cut and pasted this text?

Offline Curtis

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Re: Earth-sized planet found outside solar system
« Reply #6 on: October 18, 2012, 11:59:49 AM »
For those that belief the Christian cosmology, I would ask this. Why and for what would God create such an enormous Universe if we are alone in it?

The creation mirrors the creator, in other words a Large God equals a Large Creation.
 
I'm not saying there are not other of God's children out there somewhere, but who would know better than God just how far apart to place them that they would never discover each other's existence.  These are just my thoughts, I am not claiming (by any stretch) that this is in reality what actually is.  I'll be the first to admit that I don't know.
 
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Offline Anna

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Re: Earth-sized planet found outside solar system
« Reply #7 on: October 18, 2012, 12:21:32 PM »
What is mind boggling is the fact that with so many stars(suns) and planets out there we would be the only one where the right mix of "soup" and depending on your belief, the magic touch was applied to start life. Possibly life much older than ours and capable of traveling astronomical distances.
 
For those that belief the Christian cosmology, I would ask this. Why and for what would God create such an enormous Universe if we are alone in it?


BBF , perhaps we are the only ones who have a soul.  That would explain a lot of things .

Offline Buckskin

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Re: Earth-sized planet found outside solar system
« Reply #8 on: October 18, 2012, 03:13:50 PM »
What is mind boggling is the fact that with so many stars(suns) and planets out there we would be the only one where the right mix of "soup" and depending on your belief, the magic touch was applied to start life. Possibly life much older than ours and capable of traveling astronomical distances.
 
For those that belief the Christian cosmology, I would ask this. Why and for what would God create such an enormous Universe if we are alone in it?


BBF , perhaps we are the only ones who have a soul.  That would explain a lot of things .

 
I don't see what that would explain...
 
 
Too many mysteries of the beyond to even have a reasonable guess as to what is out there.  I don't think most people have no any idea of how expansive it is. Most don't even realize that each of those stars that we see in the sky is actually a sun.  Or that we only see a tiny fraction of the stars (hundreds of billions in the milky way) or that the stars that we can see are millions to billions of light years away and that what he are seeing is actually an image of what happened millions to billions of years ago. Crazy stuff.
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Offline BBF

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Re: Earth-sized planet found outside solar system
« Reply #9 on: October 20, 2012, 05:28:15 PM »
What is mind boggling is the fact that with so many stars(suns) and planets out there we would be the only one where the right mix of "soup" and depending on your belief, the magic touch was applied to start life. Possibly life much older than ours and capable of traveling astronomical distances.
 
For those that belief the Christian cosmology, I would ask this. Why and for what would God create such an enormous Universe if we are alone in it?


BBF , perhaps we are the only ones who have a soul.  That would explain a lot of things .

Hmmm, maybe ....however we can't even proof having a soul ourselves.
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