exoplanets – Techdirt (original) (raw)

Stories filed under: "exoplanets"

DailyDirt: All Alone In The Universe With Nowhere To Go…

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People have been looking up into the sky for centuries, wondering what’s out there and if we’re alone on this world. Astronomers, more recently, have been looking into deep space with some relatively high-tech equipment — finding some strangely inexplicable phenomena (that could be alien megastructures?!) and still wondering if we’re alone in the universe. We may never know for sure if intelligent life exists anywhere else, but it doesn’t hurt to look, does it?

• The Breakthrough Prize Foundation is aiming to shoot lasers at a light-propelled nanocraft that could reach Alpha Centauri in a few decades (instead of millennia). This lightsail spacecraft would have a mass of just a few grams, so it could be accelerated to speeds of 100 million miles per hour — much faster than any existing spacecraft we’ve ever built (like Voyager I zipping away at about 38,500 mph). [url]
• The Kepler space telescope has gotten plenty of headlines for finding thousands of exoplanets, but the far lesser-known TRAPPIST (TRAnsiting Planets and PlanetesImals Small Telescope) in Belgium is also finding some exoplanets, too. The TRAPPIST telescope is stuck on the ground (unlike KST), but it’s looking at a few dozen ultracool dwarf stars and has found 3 planets orbiting a star that’s just 0.05 percent as bright as our Sun. [url]
• Kepler 36b and Kepler 36c are two exoplanets orbiting the same star which could possibly harbor some kind of microbial life (but probably not). Still, it’s an interesting question whether or not life — if it exists on either Kepler 36b or 36c — could be transferred to its neighboring planet. (Though maybe we should focus on looking at Venus and Mars first….) [url]

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Filed Under: alien megastructures, aliens, astrobiology, astronomy, breakthrough prize foundation, et, exoplanets, extraterrestrial life, kepler space telescope, life, lightsail, nanocraft, seti, spacecraft, telescopes, trappist

DailyDirt: Hello, World Universe! Hello? (Is This Thing On?)

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The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) hasn’t yielded much, and some of the results are even a bit embarrassing. We don’t really know what to look for when we’re listening for alien signals. There’s growing evidence that planets like ours are not rare in the universe, but that doesn’t necessarily mean intelligent life is abundant. Given the vast distances to neighboring star systems, we’re also not likely to visit them any time soon.

• Russian billionaire Yuri Milner is spending $100 million on a Breakthrough Listen initiative that will last 10 years and attempt to find alien intelligence. This effort will scan the universe using telescopes that cover more than ten times of the sky compared to previous projects, and the data will be made public for SETI@home distributed analysis. [url]
• NASA has its Nexus for Exoplanet System Science (NExSS) project to look for extraterrestrial life. Identifying exoplanets that might harbor life is a fascinating field that requires an interdisciplinary effort of biologists, physicists, astronomers, geologists and a whole lot of creative thinking. [url]
• No obvious signs of life have been seen after looking at 100,000 galaxies. This probably doesn’t mean anything other than we don’t know what to look for. [url]

After you’ve finished checking out those links, take a look at our Daily Deals for cool gadgets and other awesome stuff.

Filed Under: aliens, breakthrough listen, exoplanets, extraterrestrial life, nexss, seti, seti@home, space, yuri milner
Companies: nasa

DailyDirt: Out Of This World (And On To Others)

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Astronomers only somewhat recently confirmed the existence of planets orbiting other stars like our own — in 1995. Since then, we’ve found nearly 2,000 exoplanets, and we’re honing in on more Earth-like planets that look like our own little world. Amateur astronomers have helped to identify a few exoplanets, and it looks like we’ll be able to find more and more of them. “_You and I probably won’t be travelling to these planets – but our children’s children’s children could be._”

• The Kepler Space Telescope has found an ‘Earth 2.0’ exoplanet (now called Kepler-452b) that’s less than twice the size of Earth and orbits its star every 385 days in a ‘habitable’ zone. Only 12 exoplanets of this size/type have been found so far, and Kepler-452b is the only exoplanet we’ve seen circling a star very similar to our own Sun. [url]
• Super-Earth exoplanets might not be suitable for life as we know it because the surface of such huge rocky planets would not have the same kind of plate tectonics that drives our carbon cycle. However, there’s still a lot we don’t know about planetary geology. Venus is just a slightly smaller planet than our own, and no one is quite sure why it exhibits no plate tectonics. [url]
• Amateur astronomy can be quite amazing: a guy (David Schneider) used a common DSLR camera and some home-built equipment and managed to verify the observation of an exoplanet around a star (HD 189733) about 63 light years away in the constellation of Vulpecula. Schneider didn’t discover this exoplanet (he knew it was there already), but this kind of ingenuity could lead to some really cool amateur astronomy projects. [url]

After you’ve finished checking out those links, take a look at our Daily Deals for cool gadgets and other awesome stuff.

Filed Under: astronomy, david schneider, earth 2.0, exoplanets, kepler space telescope, kepler-452b, space, super-earth, vulpecula
Companies: nasa

DailyDirt: Space Telescopes Shutting Down…

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Artificial satellites are usually expensive instruments that have a limited useful life. Voyager 1 is still going, though, and it’s just about to cross into interstellar space. But normally, spacecraft don’t have missions that last over three decades. Here are a few space-based telescopes that have either retired recently or are about to wind down.

• NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer (aka GALEX) has shut down after over a decade of observing galaxies in orbit around the Earth, and it was originally planned to have just a 29-month mission. This space telescope discovered a missing link in the evolution of galaxy evolution, and data from the instrument will continue to be analyzed for years to come. [url]
• The European Space Agency (ESA) turned off the Herschel infrared space telescope as scheduled because it ran out of its supply of liquid helium. After collecting over 25,000 hours of data, this satellite has been placed in a “disposal” orbit. In 2011, Herschel found the first confirmed evidence of oxygen molecules in space. [url]
• French Space Agency CNES has terminated its CoRoT satellite for exoplanet hunting. CoRoT was the first instrument to find an exoplanet using the transit method, but it suffered a computer failure and can no longer transmit useful data. [url]
• The Kepler space telescope has unexpectedly stopped functioning and isn’t collecting data anymore. It’s not officially dead because there’s still a chance that it could recover. But if it doesn’t come back, it still completed its mission of observing hundreds of exoplanets and has collected enough data to keep scientists busy for a long time. [url]

If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: astronomy, exoplanets, galaxy, galex, kepler, orbit, satellites, space, telescopes
Companies: cnes, esa, nasa

DailyDirt: Life On Other Planets

We’ve discovered thousands of exoplanets beyond our solar system, and some of them are even in the “Goldilocks zone” where liquid water could possibly exist. Some astronomers think life could be abundant in the universe, but there’s not that much hard evidence (yet!). Here are just a few astronomical discoveries that might encourage researchers to look for signs of life a bit more carefully.

• Exoplanets have been discovered circling some extremely old, metal-poor stars, creating interesting curiosities that might expand the theories of how planets form. These exoplanets might not harbor any kind of life… or we may want to get a bit more creative about how we envision life on other worlds. [url]
• A free-floating planet named CFBDSIR2149 is not orbiting a star, and it’s only one of about two dozen or so known examples of a starless planet. This rogue planet is relatively young compared to the Earth, and some spectroscopic measurements suggest this planet’s temperature is about 430° Celsius — a bit too warm for our tastes (but maybe not for aliens?). [url]
• Within our own solar system, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has detected spurts of water from Saturn’s moon Enceladus. This evidence leads to some speculation of a habitable zone on some icy moons where microbes might be able to survive. [url]

If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: alien, astrobiology, astronomy, biology, cfbdsir2149, enceladus, et, exoplanets, extraterrestrial, life
Companies: nasa

DailyDirt: The Rest Of The Universe

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There’s a lot we don’t know about the universe. Until relatively recently, we weren’t even sure how big the universe is. Telescopes looking deep into space have gathered a lot of interesting information, and we’re finding all sorts of strange phenomena and types of extra-solar planets. Here are just a few cool tidbits about planets from far, far away.

• Nomad planets could be floating around our galaxy without orbiting a star in surprisingly large numbers. Based on some new estimates, there might be 100,000 times more nomad planets in the Milky Way than stars. [url]
• The Hubble telescope has found a totally new class of planet that is made of an enormous amount of water. Given the density of this waterworld, GJ1214b has more water than Earth and much less rockiness. [url]
• The Kepler Space Telescope has discovered over a thousand planets outside our solar system, and a few other star systems have interesting planetary orbit patterns. One “Kepler Object of Interest” (KOI) is a system in which there are planets that share the same orbit. In another KOI, all the planets circle their star in under a week. Strange, new worlds, indeed. [url]
• To discover more links on space exploration, check out what’s floating around in StumbleUpon universe. [url]

By the way, StumbleUpon can also recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

Filed Under: astronomy, exoplanets, hubble, kepler, koi, nomad planets, telescopes