Possible first earth-like plan­et "super- Earth" found out­side our So­lar Sys­tem

Originally posted by yeti101

Terrestrial Planet Finder/Darwin (this will probably be a collaborative mission)

The info on the ESA website is out of date. ESA are going it alone with Darwin becuase Nasa budget cuts mean they have indefinitely postponed TPF. ESA want darwin to be launched by 2015, TPF looks like 2025 at the earliest

The scientists who made the coronagraph for the TPF mission say the technology is ready now to use in space and are looking for another mission top put their instrument on.

No one here will be alive to see that planet, sorry.

Wrong! we expect future telescope missions to get direct images of the planet so good you will be able to make out continents/water if they exist. Ok its a while off but they hope to do it within 50 years max.

Yeti, I would not rule out an Amero-European collaboration. As far as I know, both proposed satellites exist on the drawing board only. Budgets change all the time, no reason to expect that now would be any different.

You know, there probably isn't such a thing as "just right conditions" for life. Just because something is neccesary for our life it's not true for all life, including terrestrial life. Look at archaebacteria. They live in places we would never think could possibly support life. I think there's loads of planets with more advanced life then ours, we either havn't found it yet or it's being kept away from us. It could cause people to act strangely, especially deeply religious creationists who don't adapt to new ideas too well......i.e. my grandma. It could actually prove too much, for some reason. We all think very differently.

The universe is massive. We know little of our own puny planet, what's in/on it, and even ourselves. We're far from understanding the whole thing.

I only say this because I haven't seen anything about it except for one person saying that 7/7/07 is coming up. This seems to be the anniversary of the Roswell crash and quite an interesting discovery and thought.

This is just some food for thought as everyone seems to be drawn right in with awe at this finding. Seems to go along with prophecies.

I would not rule out an Amero-European collaboration

thats very true, especially on the engineering solutions both agencys need to overcome to make the missions successfull.

Im just annoyed at the US government cutting nasa budgets all the time they delayed kepler from 2007 to 2008 , and now theyve indefinitley delayed TPF - the missions that interest me the most.

the only downside is the mass...

sorry but red dwarf stars are still problematic www.centauri-dreams.org... - now this is pure theory but its a very pessemistic outlook-

on the planet itself Mr nordley from Journal of the British Interplanetary Society agrees saying its like earth is stretching it.

Udry et al., make a good case for a planet being there, but the rest looks speculative at best. The planet has a minimum mass of 5 Earths, the “1.5 Earth radius” is based on a density assumption with no data behind it, and the planet’s insolation is about 2.44 times the Earth’s (L/a2 = 0.013/.0732). The effective temperatures calculated didn’t reference any atmosphere model. A similar calculation for Earth gets you about 256K (-17C), depending on albedo. They used a Venus-like albedo to get down to 273K — actually not bad for the Venusian upper atmosphere. Of course, we all know what the surface of Venus is like. If an awful lot of things break the right way, well, maybe a terrestrial planet. But in my crystal ball G 581c is a rather hot mini-Uranus.

Nordley’s thoughts come at a time when Greg Laughlin (UC-Santa Cruz) has pegged the odds on Gliese 581 c harboring “a clement surface or a temperate ocean-atmospheric interface” at a thousand to one against. Which is not to downplay the significance of the Gliese 581 c discovery, but only to point out that there is a wide gap between the actual facts we have on this planet and the speculation they have provoked.

[edit on 29-4-2007 by yeti101]

so how long till really know if we could live there

probably 10-15 years. But by then we will have much much better target planets than this one to study.

Originally posted by IncognitoGhostman
I only say this because I haven't seen anything about it except for one person saying that 7/7/07 is coming up. This seems to be the anniversary of the Roswell crash and quite an interesting discovery and thought.

This is just some food for thought as everyone seems to be drawn right in with awe at this finding. Seems to go along with prophecies.

.......... its 20 light years away and orbits a completely different star than our sun.......

Anyways... this planet has not even been confirmed to have water or an atmosphere... and with our current technology we have no way to even to find out if it has either of those, forget about finding out if it has life on it.

Basically... this is pretty much as far as the story will go until our technology capabilities drastically change. Dont expect some breaking news that the planet has life on it in a few years or something.

[edit on 30-4-2007 by nybaseball44]

I say the news and I think it is awesome! I guess we have a spare planet now! Or. at least, some think we do. But if we won't learn how to conserve and respect this planet, I am sure we will manage to harm any new planet that we will find appealing for us leaving on it. I am curios about finding such big climate changes can occur on an unoccupied planet or not. If they are not found, this means that we influence the climate in such a big way.

This is why I love the universe, it's always full of surprises, and I don't think we will ever solve all of it's mysteries in humanities life time. It's such an amazing thing, and I find it funny with all of the evidence presented that people will still deny even the possibility of life on another planet.

It does sadden me however, to know that the nearest star to ours is something like 11 light years away, and we will probably never reach it.

Makes one wonder what else is hiding out there.

This planet's gravity is at least 2.1 times Earth's gravity, and possibly greater than that. At that gravity, it would be extremely difficult for most people to move around (think of yourself carrying someone as heavy as you on your back all day, every day). That doesn't sound very promising as an "extra Earth" for us to colonize, unless we figure some way to create "super-muscular" humans, or invent machines which will help us move around. Plus scientists only know one thing that is Earth-like about this planet -- its temperature. Scientistis don't even know if there is a rocky surface to this planet or if it is a gaseous planet.

I'm not saying that precludes the possibilty of ET life -- personally I think it's obvious that life exists out there somewhere. But it's way too early to say whether this is a planet habitable to us Earthlings.

Originally posted by Conquistadork
It does sadden me however, to know that the nearest star to ours is something like 11 light years away, and we will probably never reach it.

The nearest star to us is Proxima Centauri, a red dwarf 4.22 LY away.

A space shuttle would take 160 000 years to reach it, our fastest probe would get there in 17 800 years.

Groombridge 34, Ross 248 and Benards star are just about as close

Sirus is then the next star out there at about 10 light year
Procyon is then next...
check the local group within 12.5lights years google search atlas of the universe

[edit on 1-5-2007 by junglelord]

uhm your not quite right there, we wont need for a "drastic" change in technology..before they even found this they had planned to launch a space mission to seek out just such planets before they found a way to do it from Earth. So this new mission will already have a head start and be able to get even more details. I dont think it''ll be very long at all before we're finding them by the bucket loads.
Seems like your a bit scared of a paradigm change Its gonna happen in your lifetime..

Originally posted by nybaseball44

Originally posted by IncognitoGhostman
I only say this because I haven't seen anything about it except for one person saying that 7/7/07 is coming up. This seems to be the anniversary of the Roswell crash and quite an interesting discovery and thought.

This is just some food for thought as everyone seems to be drawn right in with awe at this finding. Seems to go along with prophecies.

.......... its 20 light years away and orbits a completely different star than our sun.......

Anyways... this planet has not even been confirmed to have water or an atmosphere... and with our current technology we have no way to even to find out if it has either of those, forget about finding out if it has life on it.

Basically... this is pretty much as far as the story will go until our technology capabilities drastically change. Dont expect some breaking news that the planet has life on it in a few years or something.

[edit on 30-4-2007 by nybaseball44]

Originally posted by wildone106
uhm your not quite right there, we wont need for a "drastic" change in technology..before they even found this they had planned to launch a space mission to seek out just such planets before they found a way to do it from Earth. So this new mission will already have a head start and be able to get even more details. I dont think it''ll be very long at all before we're finding them by the bucket loads.
Seems like your a bit scared of a paradigm change

Its gonna happen in your lifetime..

Easy to make claims without proof... show me proof please of any current or tech thats in a reasonable stage of developement (IE: not just on paper) which can tell if this planet has water, an atmosphere and life. Hell we can't even figure out if a planet right next door to us has current liquid water and life on it when we land damn rovers on the thing and you think we'll be able to tell that about one 20light years away anytime soon?

Plans to launch a space mission which seeks out life? Uh.... okay... can I get some links to that.. are you talking about a probe actually traveling to these other stars? You realize such a "mission" would take hundreds of years with our current tech right? This thing is 20 light years away, and we sure don't even have light speed capabilities yet.

You realize the limited things we "know" (planet size/gravity/temp) about this planet is still only even educated guesses at best, based solely on the slight "wobble" of a star 20 light years away. I'm not "afraid" of anything like you claim without even knowing me, I'm just going on the facts here not baseless speculation like others seem to claim as fact. Once again, we won't see much more to this story or find out if this planet has water/liveable atmosphere/life in our lifetime unless our technology drastically changes... which is possible it will but fact remains a big tech leap is needed.

[edit on 1-5-2007 by nybaseball44]

On APOD this morning, an artists conception of how such a planet would look to an observer.

Sunrise from the Surface of Gliese 581c
Illustration Credit & Copyright: Karen Wehrstein


Explanation: How might a sunrise appear on Gliese 581c? One artistic guess is shown above. Gliese 581c is the most Earth-like planet yet discovered and lies a mere 20 light-years distant. The central red dwarf is small and redder than our Sun but one of the orbiting planets has recently been discovered to be in the habitable zone where liquid water could exist on its surface. Although this planet is much different from Earth, orbiting much closer than Mercury and containing five times the mass of Earth, it is now a candidate to hold not only oceans but life enabled by the oceans. Were future observations to confirm liquid water, Gliese 581c might become a worthy destination or way station for future interstellar travelers from Earth. Drawn above in the hypothetical, the red dwarf star Gliese 581 rises through clouds above a calm ocean of its planet Gliese 581c.

For clickable links, please visit APOD

note: the page renews daily, so you will need to

nybaseball44

the technology currently exists in the form of coronagraphs & interferometers.

We just need to send them into space

www.sciencedaily.com...



[edit on 2-5-2007 by yeti101]

Maybe we could get more info on "The New World" by using a gravity shielding device. I have read on space.com that NASA are working on just this. Aside from the effects here on earth this device would be good in orbital slingshot manouvres.
www.space.com...

Perhaps fire a probe containing the above equipment towards the sun on an orbit close enough to be safe using conventional rocket propulsion, increase velocity to a very high speed and flick the switch on the ol' gravity shield just as you pass the sun, therefore not losing as much speed escaping the sun. Once far enough away from the sun fire up a bank of suped up ion drives?
We wont get all the way there anytime soon but maybe close enough to find out more info.

By the way i'm in junior high so keep the LOL's and comments respectable....

welcome to ATS orthisguyhere..


May I ask the origins of your ATS nick?

What most experts believe is that in the next few years we'll have better candidates for such a 'specific' mission profile as you describe.
Till then we can start building those probes

saw another posters name an thought it was piss funny (piss funny is australian for cool)

Originally posted by Soylent Green Is People
This planet's gravity is at least 2.1 times Earth's gravity, and possibly greater than that. At that gravity, it would be extremely difficult for most people to move around (think of yourself carrying someone as heavy as you on your back all day, every day). That doesn't sound very promising as an "extra Earth" for us to colonize, unless we figure some way to create "super-muscular" humans, or invent machines which will help us move around. Plus scientists only know one thing that is Earth-like about this planet -- its temperature. Scientistis don't even know if there is a rocky surface to this planet or if it is a gaseous planet.

I'm not saying that precludes the possibilty of ET life -- personally I think it's obvious that life exists out there somewhere. But it's way too early to say whether this is a planet habitable to us Earthlings.

Powered Exoskeletons have been in the research and development phase by DARPA for a few years now. That may be one solution.