Kepler Finds Earth-Sized Worlds In Habitable Zones
NASA Media Teleconference to Announce Latest Kepler Discoveries
“NASA will host a news teleconference at 9 a.m. PDT (12 p.m. EDT) Thursday, July 23 to announce new discoveries made by its planet-hunting mission, the Kepler Space Telescope. The teleconference audio and visuals will be streamed live at: http://www.nasa.gov/newsaudio“
Press briefing graphics
Kepler Finds 12 Earth-sized Worlds In Stellar Habitable Zones, SETI Institute
“The new catalog includes 12 candidates that are less than twice Earth’s diameter, orbiting in the so-called habitable zone of their star. This zone is the range of distances at which the energy flux from the star would permit liquid water to exist on the planet’s surface. Of these candidates, Kepler 452b is the first to be confirmed as a planet. At a distance of 1,400 light-years, Kepler 452b accompanies a star whose characteristics are very similar to the Sun: it is 4 percent more massive and 10 percent brighter. Kepler 452b orbits its star at the same distance as Earth orbits the Sun.”
Kepler Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth, NASA
“The newly discovered Kepler-452b is the smallest planet to date discovered orbiting in the habitable zone — the area around a star where liquid water could pool on the surface of an orbiting planet — of a G2-type star, like our sun.”
My jaw just hit the floor. NPR’s hourly news at 11 AM – MDT began with the ” NASA’s Kepler finds an Earth-like planet” as its lead story , ahead of Iran and politics and everything else.
The day will come when we find a for-real Earthy planet, one with obvious O2 in the atmosphere from life. And I think the public response will surprise us all.
O2 and methane.
Already on news sites comments are coming along that say things like “they have known this and more for decades, they have mountains of proof of extraterrestrial life, but are dribbling it out to prevent panic” etc.
These comments are getting voted up.
I think we are doomed.
(Not by aliens)
I always ask “who would panic?”
There’s never a good answer for that question. Polls show that most people already think there’s extraterrestrial life out there somewhere. Usually I get some mumbling about religious people, which isn’t true because none of the religions with a significant following say there can be no such thing as aliens. Even the Vatican has said that extraterrestrial life would not interfere with Christianity, and that aliens could be considered brothers and sisters in Christ.
Aliens would have their own religion based on a god in their own image and you know we don’t have a good history of getting along with different religions and races.
Entirely possible.
What if they had a religion in common with us?
Let’s say we meet up with some aliens, and it turns out that a good portion of them think that at some point in the past a god-man (alien-man?) appeared on their planet advising them to, say, turn the other tentacle and other admonitions that some of us here on earth find mighty darn familiar.
What a riot!
Ramen!
That assumes that aliens would find a need for a god.
We would have to fight them!
I can see some religions being knocked off kilter a bit because of the belief that a god created Earth as a singularly unique place in the universe. I’ve seen far too many comments saying that a god created life in only one place in the universe.
Of course we know that life in the universe is not solely located on Earth. After all, JFK and Elvis both met regularly with the grays from Zeta Reticuli.
Well, extremists or fundamentalists from any given religion are always panicking about something or other anyway, so I think if life is found in the stars, that not much will change.
Such comments are everyday occurrences on virtually any page that mentions NASA. In general, the mast majority of comments on any science page, be it websites or Facebook pages, make me fear that the lowest common denominator is exponentially plunging to a new, all time lowest common denominator.
If the the U.S. government ever does acknowledge the existence of extraterrestrial life, I fully expect all the tinfoil hat conspiracy nuts to do a smokin’ 180 and immediately start claiming that government claims of E.T.’s are all a sham to hide some dastardly new government plot to corrupt our precious bodily fluids or whatever. You heard it here first!
Yeah, what Hawking doesn’t want (and what, if you think about it for a bit, does seem like it might actually be a bad idea) is for us to broadcast our location when we don’t know what’s out there yet. Nothing at all wrong with passively looking for extraterrestrial life.
I still think he’s been seeing too many movies.
How much more advanced would a species have to be to build segmented 200 meter space based, optical telescopes? I can not imagine that there are not species out there with that capability and can see algae blooms in earth’s oceans. Also know exactly were we are in industrial processes by analysis of our atmosphere.
We’re advanced enough to do that. We likely won’t do it, at least not until the memories of JWST’s issues are forgotten.
There are people who are pushing the large space based telescope idea: http://www.hdstvision.org
That’s a surprisingly well-developed, and well-supported proposal. I hope it goes somewhere!
Thanks for that link. As I went through the presentation I kept thinking how lucky these guys are to have all that Hubble imagery in the slides!
More to the point I also saw that the focus is on spectra, which makes sense, but the public wants to see images. Then I noticed this coronograph, showing what our own system would look like through the eyes of this new bird.
It’s stunning. And as the presentation winds up the tech to do it is either existing or nearly so.
Thanks for the link, fastinating reading.
Well, they have to be within about 300 ly to see any industrial processes, but yes spectral analysis of our atmosphere should be perfectly possible. And that’s pretty much what we’re going to do, spectrally analyze the atmospheres of exoplanets to find out if they have life.
But that’s a lot of stars, Doug; according to one source there are 260,000 starts within 250LH: http://www.atlasoftheuniver…
We just couldn’t trust them?
When we can’t get along with our own kind. To think we could get along with Aliens from another world is just insane.
I can remember Kepler from the beginning. Back when they had the crappy beige HMTL website. I remember when they were not selected and then when they finally were with the silly bouncing up and down sprite on the website.
Dr. Borucki is an inspiration to all of us. He, and his team, never gave up. There were some very long, hard, and frankly challenging times with Kepler.
Borucki just got the Shaw Prize. Well deserved in my opinion. Here is the link along with one of the Kepler challenges in 2007. Link is external and Kieth, if you have to kill, its ok – just adding this to NASAWatch for historical purposes.
http://spacenews.com/kepler…
Earth-sized is a stretch – it’s 60 percent larger than Earth, putting it on the wrong side of the 1.5-Earth-radius threshold. I bet it’s a sub-Neptune, with a hydrogen-helium atmosphere over a rocky planet and a super-hot (probably molten) surface.
more likely a super-Venus (rocky). See a good discussion as usual over at http://www.centauri-dreams…..