European Observatory to Make 'Major' Alien Planet Announcement Monday

Has anyone signed up to be a part of the group who can get this info as it happens?

I was hoping to watch it live, but it seems you have to be signed up for it.

S &F...

Looking forward to hearing what the discovery is. The time must be getting close by now. Watching this thread for further posts of the findings.

Originally posted by ArMaP

Originally posted by Nikola014
It depends on how do you see it.

Obviously.

If you're an astronomer,this could be a really huge and exiting news.

I don't think this is "huge", because if it was I don't think they would have only a "virtual" press conference, they would have a real, physical, press conference.

But if you want to hear that they discovered Nibiru then you will probably be disappointed after this conference.

No, I do not want to hear that they discovered Nibiru.

I know,it was just an example

I suspect someone will let us all know.
I am curious, but I can't image it being anything really awesome.

Looks like they discovered another potential earth-like planet:

www.skyandtelescope.com...

reply to post by awful021


Nope or at least that's just "telescope & sky" speculating as well as space.com.

Here is the link to the official ESO press release.

www.eso.org...

Closed to the public. Media credentials must be confirmed, scientist will apparently be able to Q&A too.

Originally posted by awful021
Looks like they discovered another potential earth-like planet:

www.skyandtelescope.com...

Nice article

However, I think the more exciting point here is the method they used to analyze this planet, NOT the planet itself. It sounds as if this method of using a planet's albedo as a way for generally determining its potential atmosphere can be another useful tool in the toolbox that planet-hunters use.

If today's press conference is about the info in this article, I'm going to assume that the scientists will ascribe more importance to that analytical method than they will to planet HD 85512b itself.

reply to post by thesungod




not fair

reply to post by Soylent Green Is People


Good point, the method does appear to be the bigger news.

Surprised there have been no updates yet on this.

Should be coming through by now.

reply to post by Soylent Green Is People


Sky and Telescope states:

Their method involves determining the planet's albedo (its reflectivity) and calculating how much energy per unit area it receives from its star. The more starlight a planet reflects, the more likely that it has a cloudy atmosphere.

Source

Well, I hate to rain on their parade, but the most reflective object in our solar system is Enceladus and unfortunately it does not have a cloudy atmosphere. It has a high reflectivity because it's covered with water-ice doh. It does have water geysers though.

Link

There's got to more to it than this...

reply to post by Nicolas Flamel


I don't know the details of this method, but perhaps it's not as simple as them asserting that a "greater albedo = cloudy atmosphere". Maybe their method is a little more complex than that.

Like I said, I don't know if the press conference is about this, but I'd still be interested to find out more about this albedo analytical method.

reply to post by Nicolas Flamel


This is not the big announcement for today. The announcement is closed to the public and only accredited reporters can attend the online conference call. I suspect that what they have to say is so groundbreaking that journalists are having trouble writing their articles describing it.

reply to post by BIGPoJo


"Groundbreaking" is a relative term.

What a scientist involved in the study of exoplanets considers groundbreaking may be considered boring by the general public.

reply to post by Soylent Green Is People



Not if they find trace gases in an exoplanet that could only be the result of industrialization. That will peek a few interests guaranteed. We have the ability to make such measurements and considering that a planet like that may only be 30 or so light years away, well that's exciting. If we find such a planet then we can assume that planet can see our television and radio transmissions from 30 or so years ago. Yikes! Conversely, we would be able to detect their radio emissions as well to verify if there is a civilization there or not.

Looking forward to the updates on this

reply to post by BIGPoJo


True -- but now you are simply engaging in baseless speculation.

You may as well speculate that these scientists are going to introduce us to aliens who knocked on the door of their offices to say "hello".

So yeah, turns out it was pretty much exactly what I posted before:

www.space.com...
www.eurekalert.org...

Those go into slightly more detail than the previous article.

Astronomers have previously discovered 564 confirmed alien planets, with roughly 1,200 additional candidate worlds under investigation based on data from the Kepler space observatory, according to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

SOURCE

To say that people are not on other worlds is like saying people are not on other continents. It makes more sense that in this vast universe there would be life everywhere instead on one out of countless worlds.

"In the coming ten to twenty years we should have the first list of potentially habitable planets in the Sun's neighbourhood. Making such a list is essential before future experiments can search for possible spectroscopic signatures of life in the exoplanet atmospheres," concludes Michel Mayor, who discovered the first-ever exoplanet around a normal star in 1995.

SOURCE

The plan is to gather as much data on possible Earth like planets so we can check for gases produced by life or industrialization. I predict that we will make a case for extraterrestrial life in our current generation. Some of you may brush this off as boring but i find it interesting that we are making real efforts at discovering extraterrestrial life.

Originally posted by BIGPoJo
Not if they find trace gases in an exoplanet that could only be the result of industrialization.

While I agree that such discoveries could allow us to target our search for transmissions more carefully the idea that there are gases that can only be the result of industrialisation is absurd. Care to name one of these gases that cannot be explained by planetary processes?

My guess is that ESO have simply found a LOT more exoplanets rather than anything of substance (no pun intended).