Kepler space telescope spots five Earth-sized planets in our galaxy
NASA scientists have announced Kepler has spotted five planets about the size of Earth, orbiting stars in our galaxy.
These planets are orbiting in what is known as the habitable zone, which puts them at a distance from their suns where liquid water could exist. Liquid water is a key ingredient for life to form.
it's a process, and slow at that, but with this progress, something tells me that in this decade we will find proof of actual physical evidence of (intelligent) life on other planets. hopefully to our benefit, of course.
__________________ "The darkside, Sidious, is an illness no true Sith wishes to be cured of, my young apprentice .."
"The Daemon lied with every breath. It could not help itself but to deceive and dismay, to riddle and ruin. The more we conversed, the closer I drew to one singularly ineluctable fact: I would gain no wisdom here."
Re: Kepler space telescope spots five Earth-sized planets in our galaxy
Cool. I hope to have my thesis vindicated. I wrote it about 10 years ago. I cannot find it...but I came up with a conclusion on how many planets would be in the "sweet spot" that were earth-sized/density. I think I came up with 3000 in our galaxy, alone. Maybe it was 5000. I certainly am not going to do the research, again, and write out the calcuation. It took me two weeks to do that.
i wager that there were tons of sources that contained the info you needed and then some in '01. the exoplanet concept's been around for years and years before then. i'm not saying your wrong. if those were the numbers you came up with due to your research then that's what you found.
i was just generalizing and therorizing while what you had was more concentrated..
__________________ "The darkside, Sidious, is an illness no true Sith wishes to be cured of, my young apprentice .."
sounds like you're either refering to yourself 10 years ago or you think i've been living in a cave the whole time. or both..
and if you think you're definetely right you couldn't be more wrong. i am fully aware of the leaps we've made over the last 10 years with how far we've come with multiple discoveries of exoplanets, how they're found, nasa's keplar program and it's mission, new finding in astrophysics, astronomy and astrobiology just to name a couple of subjects.
__________________ "The darkside, Sidious, is an illness no true Sith wishes to be cured of, my young apprentice .."
I did not refer to simply discovering more planets: that would not be a leap.
I refer to specific techniques that have developed over the last 10 years that have allowed us to discover more planets that we, otherwise, did not know existed. Measuring local gravity can only take you so far. That's "old school" and it lead to grossly understimated planet counts.
The numbers tossed around a decade ago were theoretical, no matter how practically likely they were. The hard science on the subject has primarily happened in the last 10 to 15 years.
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Feb 3rd, 2011 05:10 AM
