NASA's Planet Hunter Spots Record 1,284 New Planets, 9 In A Habitable Zone (networkworld.com) 83
coondoggie quotes a report from Network World: NASA's planet hunting space telescope Kepler added a record 1,284 confirmed planets to its already impressive discoveries of extraterrestrial worlds. [This batch of planets is the largest single account of new planets since Kepler launched in 2009 and more than doubles the number of confirmed planets realized by the space telescope so far to more than 2,300.] The discoveries were a result of an automated technique implemented in a publicly available custom software package called Vespa, which lets scientists analyze thousands of signals Kepler has identified to determine which are most likely to be caused by planets and which are caused by non-planetary objects such as stars. "Vespa computed the reliability values for over 7,000 signals identified in the latest Kepler catalog which identified 4,302 potential planets and verified the 1,284 planets with 99% certainty," said the Princeton researchers that developed Vespa. NASA said, based on their size, nearly 550 of the validated planets could be rocky like Earth. Nine of which orbit in their sun's habitable zone.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: This is useless research (Score:1)
To piss you off.
Re:This is useless research (Score:5, Insightful)
Jesus Christ, what is wrong with you? Twenty years ago we didn't even know that exoplanets exist and now we find more and more of them. Since when has record breaking research in astronomy been a waste of taxpayer dollars? What kind of ignorant wouldn't want to know in what kind of universe we live?
Re:This is useless research (Score:5, Interesting)
Jesus Christ, what is wrong with you?
The answer might be in the first two words of your reply.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Calling out the superstitious on the subject of their delusions is not being a bigot.
Only doing that for one religion is. Calling out a man for being lazy is not bigotry. Only ever calling out black men for being lazy is.
Re: (Score:2)
Disagree. You can call out Scientologists as being nuts without painting other religions as so.
Yes, but that makes you bigoted against Scientologists. Not that I have a problem with that, mind you, but call it what it is.
Re: (Score:1)
Twenty years ago we didn't even know that exoplanets exist and now we find more and more of them.
We did know they exist, we just haven't observed any. Does a tree make sound if it falls in the middle of the forest and nobody is there to listen at it?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
No, the models SUGGESTED they existed. Actual proof of the existence of exoplanets was only confirmed relatively recently, and most have been discovered after 2004. . (1988 was the first confirmation, the "official" list is at the Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia [exoplanet.eu])
Re: (Score:3)
"We did know they exist, we just haven't observed any."
In science, you can't assume that anything exists until you can observe it. And the assumption that astronomers and astrophysicists made before Beta Pictoris was that planetary formation was a rare occurrence. And planetary formation in a binary or multiple-star system was thought to be impossible.
Re: (Score:2)
"We did know they exist, we just haven't observed any."
In science, you can't assume that anything exists until you can observe it. And the assumption that astronomers and astrophysicists made before Beta Pictoris was that planetary formation was a rare occurrence. And planetary formation in a binary or multiple-star system was thought to be impossible.
Meanwhile, everyone else said yeah they probably exist, if there's planets around this star why not others? At every point in history we've thought we were unique in existence. From basically the flat earth being the only thing that exists, to earth being centre of everything, to the galaxy being all there is. Just add rare planetary formation to the list because theres a metric shit ton out there. Sooner or later life (or the signs thereof) will be discovered somewhere else and then that'll go on too.
Re: (Score:3)
Yet another example of why AC posts are more trouble than they are worth.
Honestly I would like to see a change to the AC post. You have to log in and you have to take the karma hit but you can hide your name.
Yes it would not protect anyone from a government court order but how often does that happen on slashdot.
Of course others will disagree but they can if they wish.
Re: (Score:2)
So? This is slashdot. So what if my karma drops? It does not effect my job or my life in any real way. Frankly I have gotten all kinds of nastyballs on Slashdot as it is including someone that had some some strange desire to tie me up in his basement and rape me.
Frankly I think it would reduce the number of crack pots on Slashdot.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It is incredibly useful research, because you are much more likely to board the B Ark willingly if you know that the destination exists.
Re: (Score:2)
Why are taxpayer dollars funding research looking for planets that nobody will ever visit and will never make a difference to anyone?
Could say the same about the trillions spent on the military.
That said - it is at least making a difference to people... changing them from live people to dead people... (with apologies to Grant Naylor...)
Re: (Score:2)
Congreff shall have the power to regulate INTERSTATE COMMERCE.
Unfortunately, the SCOTUS has over the years defined the entire universe as being 'interstate commerce'. In 1942 in Wickard v. Filburn, it even defined a farmer's single field as being interstate commerce.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:2)
Why was James Cook sent to Tahiti to measure the transit of Venus so some stuffy elitist astronomers in Europe could know the distance to the Sun. He discovered New Zealand along the way...
Maybe looking at 1000's of other earths through telescopes will give us the clues we need to solve global warming if we have to do massive geoengineering.
Maybe the tech needed to see these planets will diagnos
Re: (Score:2)
Well, no, it didn't. But even if it did, it would be a lousy return on investment. That is, if private companies had spent a similar amount to funding for astronomy on development of wireless communications, they would have come up with much more than just WiFi.
It might. Pigs might fly too. But that isn't a ratio
Stop [doing this] (Score:3)
Why do the editors (I assume) keep putting stuff in [ ]s?
You don't need to identify every change you might have made to a submission (if that's what's happening). That kind of editing is supposed to be seamless. Highlighting it just leaves readers wondering if they're missing some significance.
Re: (Score:2)
The submitter put the brackets in, not the editors.
Re: (Score:2)
Then the editors should've taken 'em out.
Re: (Score:2)
Like they take out the a-with-a-coolie-hat-bracket-TM-closebracket?
Re: (Score:1)
Re:Lets build a few generational ships already... (Score:4, Insightful)
Our love of and emphasis on militarism and warfare is essentially what will prevent our species from progressing to the medium term future in a stable manner. So it's worth noting. It's also highly likely to be what ends civilization (roughly 1% or so risk of nuclear war per year).
Having said that, I'm not keen to start building 'generation ships' just yet. You've gotta walk before you can run. And we ain't even crawling.
But without wanting to be too doom and gloom - we aren't going to the stars. This isn't the species you're looking for. lol
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
I read it and I didn't enjoy it. Actually, I gave up part way through, something I very rarely do, because I found it that bad.
One of the problems is that it's supposedly hard sci-fi, but the problem is it's written by someone who doesn't know the science. As a result while some other aspects were plausible, other aspects were not and were downright annoying.
For example, there was lots of noodling about the halting problem , but he clearly has no idea what the halting problem actually is. He seems to have l
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
If I recall correctly, the "protein fragments" were prions, and the human immune system is famously susceptible to some prion diseases (reading about Creutzfeld-Jakob patients is a very sobering thing and you may not sleep well for days afterwards).
Yeah but it got it wrong for prion diseases too. The thing with prions is that they're a misfolded version of the protein which catalyses re misfolding. He talked about them needing salts and etc to replicate like life forms.
However, the whole point of the book -
Re: (Score:2)
Disclaimer: never read the book, just going from your descriptions.
In fairness, immune systems tend to only work against things very similar to what they're already accustomed to, with lots of help from symbiotic microbes that can adapt much more quickly. Unfamiliar pathogens tend to burn through populations like wildfire - for example estimates are that Europeans indirectly killed 70-90% of the population of the Americas before ever attempting any conquest, just by accidentally introducing new pathogens t
Re: (Score:2)
I found the novel well-written and quite interesting, but it did a poor job of defending its central premise, which was that there is some secret sauce that binds every living thing to the planet where it evolved. First of all the scenario starts in a tine as far ahead of ours of we are ahead of Columbus, with corresponding technological development: the whole solar system is settled, and a generation starship is sent out to Tau Ceti. If Earthly life were mystically bound to its home planet, the settled so
Re:Lets build a few generational ships already... (Score:5, Interesting)
While generation ships make for some compelling science fiction, the reality is that we have yet to be able to build a sustainable closed biosphere on Earth where we have a ton of advantages like gravity, sunlight, a magnetic field to protect from radiation, no concerns about explosive decompression and a distinct lack of large chunks of rock and ice floating around. Until we understand our own biology and ecosystem more fully, a generation ship wouldn't be a few dozen astronauts dying out of some larger number. Every single one would die.
Re: (Score:2)
In fairness we've only seriously attempted it once, and didn't fail all that badly.
Re: (Score:2)
You're assuming that we need to understand all the parts to make the whole work, a position easily dismissed by... pretty much all of medicine and other technology more than a few hundred years old. Trial and error is an incredible teacher - deeper understanding mostly just speeds things up.
Border disagreements (Score:2)
Yep. Our side enjoyed a brief technological and industrial advantage, won some wars, and carved up the disputed territories to our liking with no consideration for the residents or political realities of the situation. Why cant the rest of the world simply accept that the current borders are where they should be and get busy making do with what we've left them?
Yeah, it'd be great if we could all sit down and talk things out to reach an optimum solution, but that's not remotely realistic, even if we were w
I hate these "new planet spotted" stories (Score:1)
What they've spotted is NOT a planet, but the EFFECT ON THE STAR that's probably caused by a planet.
Re: (Score:2)
And?
All modern physics/astronomy/cosmology is about statistical analysis of likely causes of observations. From the Higgs Boson to an Exoplanet, it's all about the confidence interval.
And, really, when we find something that's the mass of a planet orbiting the star at the distance that planets do, not shining on its own, what else would you call it? Whatever it looks like, it's still a "planet".
Managed expectations (Score:5, Insightful)
One thing to keep in mind - according to many charts Mars and Venus are in our own star's habitable zone. Neither seem to have life. Even Earth seems like it would have a much hard time at it if not for some specific factors (ie, a large moon to stabilize the rotational axis - a rare feature for a rocky planet).
If we're batting only 1 out of 3 planets in the habitable zone of our own star actually having life, I wouldn't hold out too much hope of there being life on any of these planets just because its in the habitable zone. My guess (and really that's all we can do until we get a larger sample size of planets having life vs not) is that a very tiny percentage of these planets even in the habitable zones actually harbor life.
That said - even if there was only life in the universe at a rate of one inhabited planet per galaxy, the universe as a whole would still have billions of inhabited planets - it's just that there'd be virtually zero chance that life from one would ever be aware of or affected by life on another.
Re: (Score:2)
Heck, if one out of three is representative, then we probably just discovered three more life-bearing worlds! Not that I'd buy that, but it's hardly an argument against. And finding planets in the habitable zone is interesting primarily because it reveals places to look more closely at as we develop the technology to do so. Plus, as many others have pointed out, the "habitable zone" is only tuned to Earth-like life on the primary planet - Gas giant moons potentially expand that range quite a bit, while al
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
The problem of extrapolating a single data point (this star system) into many should be obvious to anyone that understand math and statistics at all.
Planets are abundant, we've finally confirmed this even in binary systems. Even Kepler (designed to hunt planets) has a hell of a time spotting earth size planets, though it can spot rocky worlds almost all of them are 2-3 times the size of earth and often on the close edge of the habital zone where they are easier to detect. We've never directly imaged one and
Vespa (Score:2)
The discoveries were a result of an automated technique implemented in a publicly available custom software package called Vespa
So which of these planets is Druidia?
What percentage are we not able to detect? (Score:1)