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Second Earth FOUND
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mithridates

Joined: 03 Mar 2003
Location: President's office, Korean Space Agency

Posted: Wed Apr 25, 2007 6:18 am Post subject:

kurva anjad wrote:

mithridates wrote:

ED209 wrote:

mithridates wrote:

ED209 wrote:

So with current technology how long would it take to send a probe there?

Much too long. One theoretical project to go to Barnard's Star would have taken 50 years:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Daedalus

We'd be half way there if we'd done that.
Right, screw war and poverty we need to pump billions of dollars in this and get out there.

We could get a project like that done simply with the money countries spend on their massive debts:

That's why I always laugh whenever someone makes the absurd claim that funds spent on the space program keep people in poverty, deny them universal education, etc. You can barely see the money there in the graph.

Is there a pie chart for Canada's Space Program spending?

I'm not sure, but it's even less per capita so it would be a smaller sliver than that. It's about $350 million per year, so $300 million US, and with a tenth of the population it's maybe about a quarter of that per person that the US spends.

vertical loser

Joined: 08 Jan 2006

Posted: Wed Apr 25, 2007 7:28 am Post subject: Re: Second Earth FOUND

mnhnhyouh wrote:

Junior wrote:

but I thought they were certain about how everything evolved? That is what everyone believes after all.

Of course they are not certain, nothing in science is certain. But evolution fits the facts better than any other theory.

</offtopic>

This is very good news, though not unexpected. Will be a bit before anybody gets there, especially as space exploration seems to have moved well to the backburner.

h

You are confusing natural selection with biogenesis. While the theory of natural selection has plenty going for it (to generalise) there is as yet no scientific "evidence" for biogenesis, or how life began. The guess (for that's what it is) is that lightning struck a nice warm puddle of amino acids, but this is about as scientific as Dr Frankenstein zapping the monster to bring it to life.

Hollywoodaction

Joined: 02 Jul 2004

Posted: Wed Apr 25, 2007 9:51 am Post subject:

And how are we supposed to travel at the speed of light for 20 years, OP? Aboard the Millennium Falcon? Yeah, that's right. I wouldn't pack my bags just yet if I were you.

NAVFC

Joined: 10 May 2006

Posted: Wed Apr 25, 2007 12:19 pm Post subject:

Hollywoodaction wrote:

And how are we supposed to travel at the speed of light for 20 years, OP? Aboard the Millennium Falcon? Yeah, that's right. I wouldn't pack my bags just yet if I were you.

I rpopose a easier way, by amplifiying the effects of gravity , using some kind ofm gravity amplifier and bending space time to drasticly decrease the ship - planet distance.

mithridates

Joined: 03 Mar 2003
Location: President's office, Korean Space Agency

Posted: Wed Apr 25, 2007 3:15 pm Post subject:

Hollywoodaction wrote:

And how are we supposed to travel at the speed of light for 20 years, OP? Aboard the Millennium Falcon? Yeah, that's right. I wouldn't pack my bags just yet if I were you.

Ha ha, zing. Too bad I never said that.

Junior

Joined: 18 Nov 2005
Location: the eye

Posted: Wed Apr 25, 2007 3:35 pm Post subject:

We could always do what they do in star trek. or maybe we'll just have to keep the earth we're on now, liveable.

mithridates

Joined: 03 Mar 2003
Location: President's office, Korean Space Agency

Posted: Wed Apr 25, 2007 3:39 pm Post subject:

Somebody on another board somewhere has made his own images. The size of the sun in the sky compared to ours on the right: http://img256.imageshack.us/img256/9061/gliese581io4.jpg Location of the star just outside the constellation Libra: http://img291.imageshack.us/img291/8307/gl581jq4.jpg You can't see it with your eyes though, it's too dark.

mindmetoo

Joined: 02 Feb 2004

Posted: Wed Apr 25, 2007 4:26 pm Post subject: Re: Second Earth FOUND

vertical loser wrote:

mnhnhyouh wrote:

Junior wrote:

but I thought they were certain about how everything evolved? That is what everyone believes after all.

Indeed. But it should be pointed out Junior is the one confusing evolution with any theory or hypothesis about the origins of life.

But what you do mean by "this is about as scientific as Dr Frankenstein zapping the monster to bring it to life"?

I don't see anything unscientific about simulating the conditions we think existed before we hypothesize life emerged and seeing if conditions and known actions could produce the basic building blocks.

mithridates

Joined: 03 Mar 2003
Location: President's office, Korean Space Agency

Posted: Fri Apr 27, 2007 7:57 am Post subject:

mithridates wrote:

Luckily we're all living longer than ever before. The space age started just 59 years ago with a probe that did pretty much nothing. Let's hope we get a move on settling petty conflicts over tiny tracts of land here and start doing things that really matter.
I checked the radial velocity of the star and it turns out it's -9.5, which means it's moving towards us at 9.5 km per second. That's another bonus.

Correction: the space age started only 49 years ago. What was I thinking? 49 years is an even better number than 59.

Anyway, here's some more insight from the guy that heads the team that discovered the planet:

Quote:

GENEVA (AP) -- Swiss scientist Michel Mayor, who heads the European team that announced the discovery of a new potentially habitable planet, has his sights set on an even bigger target, detecting signs of extraterrestrial life.

Mayor predicts that top researchers are less than two decades away from being able to detect real signs of such life -- if it exists.

"There's only one thing we can do. We can do science, we can do experiments. We have the methodology, the ability to do this simply on science, so let's do it,'' the University of Geneva scientist said Wednesday.

Mayor, who was credited in 1995 with co-finding the first planets outside our solar system, said the scientist in him was unsure of the presence of other life forms in our universe. "But, personally, I feel comfortable with the idea of life existing elsewhere,'' the 65-year-old said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press.

Leading astronomers are describing the discovery of the new planet as a big step in the search for life in the universe because it is just the right size, might have water in liquid form, and in galactic terms is relatively nearby at 120 trillion miles away.

But there is still a lot that is unknown about the new planet, named 581 c, discovered by the European Southern Observatory's telescope in La Silla, Chile. The telescope, which Mayor helped design, has a special instrument that splits light to find wobbles in different wave lengths, revealing the possible existence of other worlds.

"It is an absolutely fantastic instrument with great precision,'' Mayor said, but added that the planet's diameter, atmospheric makeup and contents have yet to be confirmed.

Stephane Udry, the discovery team's lead author also based in Geneva, speculated that the new planet is probably full of liquid water, but conceded that he bases the conjecture on how planets form, not on any evidence.

Mayor said many more planets meeting scientists' requirements for habitability would be found, but that that the most significant short-term discovery would be that of a low-mass planet even more similar to Earth. 581 c is about five times heavier than our planet, but is still the smallest found exoplanet, or one that is outside our solar system.

Switzerland, which takes pride in its achievements in engineering and biotechnology, feted the role of Mayor and Udry in the discovery.

"Swiss scientist discovers new Earth,'' the Zurich-based tabloid Blick declared next to a picture of Udry.

The daily Tribune de Geneve also praised the scientists, but couldn't help taking a shot at the world's traditional leaders in the study of the cosmos-- the United States.

"American scientists recently estimated that the discovery of an exoplanet resembling the Earth would probably take 20 years,'' it wrote. "The Europeans didn't wait for them.''

Mayor predicted that NASA's Terrestrial Planet Finder and the European Space Agency's Darwin satellite would make increasingly significant contributions in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

He said these institutions will be able to directly look for "signatures of life'' on other planets, similar to the high presence of oxygen in our atmosphere, within 15 to 20 years.

mithridates

Joined: 03 Mar 2003
Location: President's office, Korean Space Agency

Posted: Fri Apr 27, 2007 8:36 am Post subject:

It also turns out this is the 87th closest star system to our own, so if we are able to find similar planets in the remaining 86, so much the better.

Tiger Beer

Joined: 07 Feb 2003

Posted: Fri Apr 27, 2007 11:16 am Post subject:

Nice sunsets.

mithridates

Joined: 03 Mar 2003
Location: President's office, Korean Space Agency

Posted: Mon Jun 11, 2007 3:04 pm Post subject:

More good news:

http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=22805

Quote:

Boring Star May Mean Livelier Planet

The bad news for astronomers is: The light from the planetary system Gliese 581 is boring.

The good news for any Gliesians that might live there: The light from the star Gliese 581a is boring.

Canada's space telescope, MOST, placed Gleise 581 (pronounced "Gleez-eh" 581) under a scientific stakeout for about a month and a half, after a planet that might be capable of supporting life was discovered in that system. MOST, a Canadian Space Agency mission, sensitively measured the light output from the star with two goals. First, to look for "transits"- dips in the light from the star if the planet's orbit carried it directly between Earth and the star - to measure the size of the planet. Second, to monitor the variability of the dim red dwarf star itself and check its suitability as a home star for life around it.

The MOST results, presented at the annual meeting of the Canadian Astronomical Society at the Royal Military College in Kingston, Ontario today, rule out dips in the starlight down to a level of about 0.1% that would be caused by a transiting planet roughly the size of the Earth. That doesn't mean there's no planet, just that from Earth, we don't see its orbit nearly edge-on. But it does mean we can't directly measure the size of the planet Gliese 581c, to test models of its structure. That's the disappointing news.

The encouraging news is that the star itself seems remarkably stable over the six weeks it was monitored by MOST. The brightness of the star changed by only a few tenths of a percent over that time. This level of stability means that this red dwarf star provides a stable source of light, hence heat, to the surface of planet Gliese 581c. "The climate there should not be a wild rollercoaster ride that would make it difficult for life to get a foothold," notes MOST Mission Scientist Dr. Jaymie Matthews, a professor in the Department of Physics & Astronomy at the University of British Columbia. "It also suggests the star is quite old, and settled in its ways, so that the planets around it have been around for billions of years. We know it took about three and a half billion years for life on Earth to reach the level of complexity that we call human, so it's more encouraging for the prospects of complex life on any planet around Gliese 581 if it's been around for at least as long."

Another piece of good news is that the star doesn't show any variations that repeat every 13 days, the orbital period of the planet inferred from measurements of Doppler shifts in the star's spectrum. The signal for this planet is so subtle that it might have been produced by spots or other activity on the star's surface with a 13-day cycle. The MOST measurements show that's not the case, so it adds even more confidence to the indirect detection of the planet.

"The Gliese 581 system is only the first to be found - beyond our own Earth - that might have a liveable planet," says Dr. Matthews. With space missions like MOST, the French satellite COROT which joined MOST in orbit late last December, and the American Kepler mission due for launch in November 2008, Dr. Matthews predicts that: "Other 'Earthy' worlds will come to light in the coming months and years and some of them will have orbits that produce planetary alignments. Not the kind that excites somebody reading a horoscope but the kind that excites astronomers, because they will allow us to test our models of alien worlds. Worlds that might be homes to neighbours in our Galactic city, the Milky Way."

MOST (www.astro.ubc.ca/MOST) is a Canadian Space Agency mission, jointly operated by Dynacon Inc., the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies and the University of British Columbia, with the assistance of the University of Vienna.

seoulunitarian

Joined: 06 Jul 2004

Posted: Mon Jun 11, 2007 3:43 pm Post subject: Re: Second Earth FOUND

Junior wrote:

mnhnhyouh wrote:

But evolution fits the facts better than any other theory.

But not the balance of probabilities or logic.

Well, at least not as well as an uncreated (read, uncaused) God Rolling Eyes

Peace

Guri Guy

Joined: 07 Sep 2003
Location: Bamboo Island

Posted: Mon Jun 11, 2007 3:57 pm Post subject:

Excellent thread Mithridates. I love this kind of stuff.

ChuckECheese

Joined: 20 Jul 2006

Posted: Mon Jun 11, 2007 4:11 pm Post subject:

Nice! When can we move?

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