New Planets Discovered By Kepler

I enjoy it as well.


Would love to be alive when there is confirmed life on another planet. Exciting times.
 
Someday....maybe.

Actually, it probably will be. It is awfully egotistical for us to believe that we are the only intelligent species that exists, especially considering the billions upon billions of stars and galaxies that are out there.

-John
 
Let's find some life and start a war with it!!!!!!!!
 
Let's find some life and start a war with it!!!!!!!!


Sadly this is the reality if we do find life that is less evolved then ours. On the other hand, we would still try to fight a lifeform that state of being is more advanced than our own based off of greed (or neccesity due to lack of resources on earth.) Obviously im getting ahead of NASA on that topic because we havent even found a microbe yet.... or have we?:hairraise:
 
Someday....maybe.

Actually, it probably will be. It is awfully egotistical for us to believe that we are the only intelligent species that exists, especially considering the billions upon billions of stars and galaxies that are out there.

-John
Kind of like crashing on an island that is several thousand square miles and assuming it is deserted. The possibility exists but is unlikely.
 
TThey are now looking for planets with liquid water in hopes they will find life.
I suspect the first order of business is to find out if the planet has solid surface (many of them are gaseous).
 
The new Kepler telescope has found 715 new planets rotating stars just out side our solar system. They are now looking for planets with liquid water in hopes they will find life.

http://www.google.com/webhp?nord=1#nord=1&q=Kepler+discovers+715+new+planets&tbm=nws

This stuff never gets old for me.
Neat stuff, but I wouldn't call any of them "just outside our solar system"... nearest star to our own is over 4 light-years away (and no planets). Even that one is very, very far outside our system.
But again- neat stuff!
 
Oh -- the Kepler telescope. I was kind of wondering how ol' Johnny K did that nearly 400 years after his death.
 
Someday....maybe.

Actually, it probably will be. It is awfully egotistical for us to believe that we are the only intelligent species that exists, especially considering the billions upon billions of stars and galaxies that are out there.

-John

Eh, I ran the drake equation once and came up with a number less than 1.
 
Neat stuff, but I wouldn't call any of them "just outside our solar system"... nearest star to our own is over 4 light-years away (and no planets). Even that one is very, very far outside our system.
But again- neat stuff!

Well, that's true, but Kepler is truly only looking at nearby stars. It can't get the precision it needs more than a few hundred light years out. To quite a number of us, that's VERY nearby. The galactic and extragalactic folks try to avoid nearby stars.

Kepler is a local project and there is a lot of excitement around the Center about it. Slightly annoying since it came the day after we demonstrated full ops capability (and their result is obviously a bigger deal than ours).

Kepler may have been effectively dead for a year, but as is common, it collected as much data as it could, as fast as it could, and it's going to take some time to reduce it all. The result they are reporting is that it's going to (and so far has) take a lot less time than they thought, due to a new reduction technique. It's not at all unusual for discoveries to come out of archival data, long after the spacecraft is done. Heck, my practice project correlating active galaxies with hard X-rays used data from HEAO-1, which had been dead some 10 years at the time.
 
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Oh -- the Kepler telescope. I was kind of wondering how ol' Johnny K did that nearly 400 years after his death.

Get with it Ron. ;) We don't say; "Hubble telescope" any more, it's "The Hubble". The "The Kepler" is the hip language for us astronomer nerd types .
 
Henning is the only POA member I know that is a certified guild to conduct tours of the ozone. :yes:

:eek:


:rofl::rofl::rofl:


;)
 
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Oh -- the Kepler telescope. I was kind of wondering how ol' Johnny K did that nearly 400 years after his death.

Hey, at least they named it after someone worth naming a satellite after. And the satellite really does measure Keplerian elements.

JWST drives me nuts. On a whole bunch of levels.

It's not unusual for astronomers to personify their telescopes. One uses Keck or Lick or Spitzer. Sometimes, one even swears at it when it doesn't do what you want.
 
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it is awfully egotistical for us to believe that we are the only intelligent species that exists, especially considering the billions upon billions of stars and galaxies that are out there.

-John

"If we are alone in the Universe, it sure seems like an awful waste of space."

Carl Sagan - from the movie Contact, possibly earlier origin.
 
Fry: Did you build the Smelloscope?
Professor Hubert Farnsworth: No, I remembered that I'd built one last year. Go ahead, try it. You'll find that every heavenly body has its own particular scent. Here, I'll point it at Jupiter.
Fry: Smells like strawberries.
Professor Hubert Farnsworth: Exactly. And now, Saturn.
Fry: Pine needles. Oh, man, this is great... hey, as long as you don't make me smell Uranus.
Leela: I don't get it.
Professor Hubert Farnsworth: I'm sorry, Fry, but astronomers renamed Uranus in 2620 to end that stupid joke once and for all.
Fry: Oh. What's it called now?
Professor Hubert Farnsworth: Urrectum. Here, let me locate it for you.
Fry: No, no, I, I think I'll just smell around a bit over here.​

I love Futurama! :D
 
The reality is that even if there is life in other planets ouside of our solar system will never know. Space distances are measured in light years and the closest solar system is about 5 light years away. Life is just plainly rare. Even on the moon that is at the same distance from the sun as earth there is no life on it. And finding advanced intelligent life, which is the only one we can detect by the SETI project is like trying to hear voice conversations in London from New York with a funnel on your ear. And even if you have a starship where would you be heading to and for what purpose.

The hostile environment (gravity, radiation and others) of other planets makes it impossible to even step temporarily on them. There is no more benefits to mankind sending a man to Mars than what the robotic missions has done and will do in the future.

Space is veeery big and hostile. I envision that the future of space exploration is going to be by more powerful telescopes/sensors and robotic missions to bodies in our solar system.

Sorry to disappoint you but there are no Klingons or Vulcans out there. The only alliens you will find are those south of the border.

José
 
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The reality is that even if there is life in other planets ouside of our solar system will never know. Space distances are measured in light years and the closest solar system is about 5 light years away. Life is just plainly rare. Even on the moon that is at the same distance from the sun as earth there is no life on it. And finding advanced intelligent life, which is the only one we can detect by the SETI project is like trying to hear voice conversations in London from New York with a funnel on your ear. And even if you have a starship where would you be heading to and for what purpose.

The hostile environment (gravity, radiation and others) of other planets makes it impossible to even step temporarily on them. There is no more benefits to mankind sending a man to Mars than what the robotic missions has done and will do in the future.

Space is veeery big and hostile. I envision that the future of space exploration is going to be by more powerful telescopes/sensors and robotic missions to bodies in our solar system.

Sorry to disappoint you but there are no Klingons or Vulcans out there. The only alliens you will find are those south of the border.

José

Sounds like you already have all the answers. Call NASA and tell them so they can stop waisting money.

I didn't know we has such an advanced intellectual on our forum from Kapax.
 
Our so called "intelligent" life here on earth is what...a few thousand years in existence, ten or so thousand I'm guessing. I think, in the great scheme, we probably know nothing. I would guess, compared to the time life of other galaxies, humans on earth are still crawling out of the muck and ooze of a newer planet.

For us to say "impossible, it can not be done" has got to be one of the most inane comments we could possibly make. We are so primitive, we have no clue what can or can not be done. We have not been around long enough to know squat about anything, hell, we're still perfecting the wheel.

Our most advanced technology being used to look for other "intelligent" life in our own galaxy is little more than a few notches above smoke signals.

-John
 
Neat stuff, but I wouldn't call any of them "just outside our solar system"... nearest star to our own is over 4 light-years away (and no planets). Even that one is very, very far outside our system.
But again- neat stuff!

The Oort cloud, which is part of the solar system, goes about a quarter of the way there.
 
Intelligent life on earth?
We play sports that induce brain trauma to get an education.
Have you watched any You Tube videos?
Read any factual causes from the NTSB?
Seen any TV commercials?
Driven on roads with other drivers?
Name any government not driven by greed and corruption?
Walked around in a Walmart lately?
Have you seen photos from any war?
Visited any internet forums?
Oh, we're an intelligent life form alright.
 
The reality is that even if there is life in other planets ouside of our solar system will never know...Life is just plainly rare...Sorry to disappoint you but there are no Klingons or Vulcans out there.

All quite unwarranted assumptions.

Yes, it's a daunting task. Yes, calculating the odds involves speculation (but less all the time).

Throw into it the fact that intelligent life may develop in ways not conducive to communication outside their worlds (think dolphins on this planet). Or be other than carbon based and living out lives on vastly different time scales than ours.

Finally, yes, space is huge. That means we may receive signals millions of years after they were propagated. And that if we chose to "answer" it would be millions of years before our signals arrived, and the civilization could be long gone. As might ours in the millions of years to get a return answer. Huge hurdle to any real two-way communication - ever, unless new ways around the currently understood laws of physics are discovered.

Anyway, the sort of defeatism and negativism shown by José, as also seen in others areas, kind of surprises me.
 
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I grew up wondering about life on other planets. "To boldly go where no man has gone before." Star Trek stuff.

I remember Kennedy saying; "We choose to do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard."

The prospects of finding new life or other planets to inhabit is simple amazing to me, brings back all those starry eyed feelings I had as a kid.

Then I watch an episode of Honey BooBoo and I want to throw up. :lol:
 
Not millions of years. Thousands. Kepler has shown that planets are around most stars and habitable planets aren't THAT rare. Don't confuse it with SETI, though. It's mission is only to find and characterize nearby exoplanets in a small patch of sky. That answers important questions about solar system formation, quite separate from extraterrestrial life.
 
Unless we want to chat it up with some hot Andromedean babes.
 
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