Planet Hunters Report Record-Breaking Discovery, Search for other habitable planets

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Michael Watson

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Message 1860219 - Posted: 8 Apr 2017, 1:54:09 UTC
Last modified: 8 Apr 2017, 2:36:38 UTC

Intersting, too, as this planet is tidally locked, with the same side always facing starward. This had been thought to allow the atmosphere to be eroded away by stellar radiation. The relatively rapid rotation of this planet, 1.6 days, may contribute to a strong enough magnetic field to preserve the atmosphere.
The fact that it was found only 39 light years away, in our backyard, really, suggests that such planets, with dense, intact atmospheres, could be quite common.
Quite encouraging for the prospects for life in the universe, as close-in, red dwarf planets are thought to be very plentiful.
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Message 1860417 - Posted: 8 Apr 2017, 20:37:05 UTC

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Message 1860461 - Posted: 9 Apr 2017, 1:41:34 UTC - in response to Message 1860228.  

What do our astro-biologists say. Can there be intelligent life as we know it without water ?

Time that we had a list of requirements to be Earth-like and to support land-based creatures of comparable intelligence to homo sapiens
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Message 1862451 - Posted: 20 Apr 2017, 4:54:19 UTC - in response to Message 1860461.  

Another 'super-Earth', has been found.


Newly discovered 'super-Earth' may be the 'most exciting exoplanet'



(CNN)Over the last year, researchers have found nearby exoplanets that could potentially support life, like Proxima b and the seven TRAPPIST-1 planets. Now, a "super-Earth" has been found 39 light-years away, according to new research in the journal Nature.
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Message 1864331 - Posted: 28 Apr 2017, 16:42:41 UTC - in response to Message 1862451.  

Frozen Earth Twin.



NASA finds Earth’s frozen twin planet


The hottest new exoplanet is anything but hot.

Planet OGLE-2016-BLG-1195Lb is almost identical to Earth, except that it’s a ball of ice.

The newly discovered world is the same mass as Earth and orbits its star at the same distance we orbit our sun. But, unlike Earth, this planet’s temperature hovers around negative 400 degrees Fahrenheit.

That makes OGLE-2016-BLG-1195Lb even more inhospitable than Hoth, the frozen planet where Princess Leia and Luke Skywalker hid from the Imperial forces in “Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back.”

The latest find was spotted 13,000 light-years away. Its star is 10,000 times fainter than our sun and is so small, scientists aren’t even positive that it can be considered a star.
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Message 1864553 - Posted: 29 Apr 2017, 15:17:01 UTC

Wasn't earth frozen for a period of time?
Bob DeWoody

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Message 1864738 - Posted: 30 Apr 2017, 10:38:02 UTC - in response to Message 1864734.  

In the last ice age the glaciers covered the state of Illinois down to Carbondale (almost 360 miles). You can see the terminal moraines when back packing in the Shawnee National Forest. The ice was said to be 2 miles thick or more.
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Message 1866358 - Posted: 9 May 2017, 5:42:21 UTC - in response to Message 1864980.  

This planetary system is located some 20,500 light years away from the Earth.


Two new Saturn-mass exoplanets discovered


(Phys.org)—An international team of astronomers has detected two new giant alien worlds circling distant stars. The newly found planets are estimated to be as massive as Saturn and are orbiting M dwarfs beyond the snow line. The findings were presented May 2 in a paper published online on the arXiv pre-print server.

The planets were discovered by researchers working as part of the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE) group and the Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics (MOA) collaboration. OGLE uses the 1.3-m Warsaw Telescope located at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile, while MOA utilizes the 1.8-m MOA-II telescope at the Mount John University Observatory, located in New Zealand. The main goal of these two microlensing surveys is to study the planet formation around late-type stars.
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Message 1869457 - Posted: 26 May 2017, 1:25:58 UTC - in response to Message 1867686.  

Puffy?



Giant ‘Styrofoam’ Planet Could Help Scientists Find New Habitable Worlds


We’re all pretty familiar with objects made from styrofoam. Our daily lives intersect with disposable items like coffee cups, insulation, hot and cold coolers and those seemingly millions of little cushioning styrofoam-y “things” that are put into mailing boxes to protect the more valuable contents.
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Message 1871168 - Posted: 4 Jun 2017, 23:02:14 UTC

I had the opportunity last fall to audit the Univ of Virginia’s graduate radio astronomy course, taught by two members of the NRAO staff. Besides giving me much insight into the observational hurdles for SETI using ground based RTs (the observation window challenges), we were required to do the habitable zone calculation for Sol as a black-body radiation transfer problem. Interestingly, that habitable zone does not include Earth, much less Mars, because the HZ calculation does not factor in the greenhouse effects of planetary atmospheres. Earth lies just beyond the theoretical HZ limit for SOL. We know that Mars once had flowing water on its surface, but it is significantly outside Sol’s thermodynamically defined HZ. Exoplanet discoveries trumpeting “in the habitable zone” of stars need to be greeted with some skepticism. It will likely be the outliers of the zone that we need to be interested in. Sol’s only planet squarely in the HZ is Venus and it has a runaway greenhouse effect.
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Message 1874028 - Posted: 19 Jun 2017, 16:56:50 UTC
Last modified: 19 Jun 2017, 16:57:11 UTC

Kepler has found 4034 planets. Ten of them are in the Goldilocks zone, one of them, KOI 7711 is a rocky one 30% wider than the Earth and has a orbital period of nearly one year. All this from a NASA conference at Ames Research Center today.
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Message 1874031 - Posted: 19 Jun 2017, 17:14:08 UTC - in response to Message 1874028.  
Last modified: 19 Jun 2017, 17:15:23 UTC

Kepler has found 4034 planets. Ten of them are in the Goldilocks zone...


The ten "Goldilocks zone" planets are new as of this batch of 219 announced today, not the only ones in the total 4,034.
(I think this is what you meant but it is worded such that it seems otherwise.)

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NASA’s Kepler space telescope team has released a mission catalog of planet candidates that introduces 219 new planet candidates, 10 of which are near-Earth size and orbiting in their star's habitable zone

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Message 1874032 - Posted: 19 Jun 2017, 17:18:57 UTC

I had heard of 50 Goldilocks in the total 4034. I think you are right.
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Message 1874040 - Posted: 19 Jun 2017, 18:47:27 UTC - in response to Message 1874032.  

we will need to refine further but it looks like the percentage of planets having the parameter "Temperature" in the range allowing life to develop is around 12.5 %. Now lets find the percentage of those that have water, magnetic field, ozone, Oxygen, etc so that a more realistic projection of how many truly "Earth Like" planets we might expect to be in our Galaxy.
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Message 1874140 - Posted: 20 Jun 2017, 7:17:45 UTC

After Kepler, the NASA conference mentioned space missions TESS, the James Webb Space Telescope and WFIRST, which is in doubt for financial reasons. Mars can wait.
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Message 1874148 - Posted: 20 Jun 2017, 8:53:23 UTC - in response to Message 1874040.  
Last modified: 20 Jun 2017, 8:58:59 UTC

Correction: the percentage of planets found in the correct temperate zone so far is 1.25% not 12.5 %. I expect it is this low since it is difficult to "see" smaller planets. If all of the parameters have this low a possibility and there are a dozen essential ones ; then there may be as few truly Earth-like planets as 1 in 6,870,000,000,000,000,000,000. If there only six such parameters then there might be 1 in a billion or so. These estimates, though wildly uncertain, would be a far cry from the 40 billion such planets in our galaxy as stated by someone just recently. You would think that temperate zone would be fairly common in comparison to ,say, stabilizing moon, magnetic field, nearly circular orbit, water, existence of oxygen, ozone layer and so on.
.
Time will tell as we can see better into the cosmos. I am more sanguine towards believing that there may be a half dozen in the Galaxy. It would help if we had a list of essential parameters and conditions for intelligent life to form so that we could refine all of our uncertain, wild estimates over time.
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Message 1874460 - Posted: 22 Jun 2017, 17:01:55 UTC - in response to Message 1874148.  


Updated Kepler catalog contains 219 new exoplanet candidates


Scientists have published a catalog of exoplanet discoveries made by NASA’s Kepler space telescope, identifying 219 previously-unknown planet candidates circling stars elsewhere in the galaxy, including 10 would-be worlds that appear to be about the same size of Earth with temperatures potentially hospitable for life.

Culling data collected during the first four years of Kepler’s mission, researchers used computers to pick out and analyze signals from stars that could be have caused by nearby planets. Automated software identified the detections most likely to be real worlds, according to Susan Thompson, a Kepler research scientist at the SETI Institute and NASA’s Ames Research Center who led the cataloging effort.

“This is the last search that we performed, and we used our most improved techniques, and with that we found 4,034 candidates, which include 10 new terrestrial-sized candidates in the habitable zone of their star,” Thompson said.
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Message 1878906 - Posted: 18 Jul 2017, 5:56:47 UTC - in response to Message 1874460.  


NASA-funded Citizen Science Project Discovers New Brown Dwarf


One night three months ago, Rosa Castro finished her dinner, opened her laptop, and uncovered a novel object that was neither planet nor star. Therapist by day and amateur astronomer by night, Castro joined the NASA-funded Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 citizen science project when it began in February — not knowing she would become one of four volunteers to help identify the project's first brown dwarf, formally known as WISEA J110125.95+540052.8.
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Message 1882867 - Posted: 9 Aug 2017, 20:33:32 UTC - in response to Message 1878906.  

light-years away!


Scientists find four Earth-like exoplanets orbiting closest sun-like star



Aug. 9 (UPI) -- Scientists have found four Earth-like exoplanets orbiting a star system just 12 light-years away.

The four planets are the closest Earth-like worlds yet discovered. And at just 1.7 Earth masses, they're also the smallest nearby Earth-like planets.

Astronomers detected the presence of the four exoplanets by analyzing slight wobbles in the movement of tau Ceti, the closest known sun-like star. Tau Ceti's wobbles are incredibly subtle, and required instruments capable of measuring deviations as small as 30 centimeters per second.
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Message 1882968 - Posted: 10 Aug 2017, 12:59:24 UTC

So many planets and no way to get there.
Bob DeWoody

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Message boards : SETI@home Science : Planet Hunters Report Record-Breaking Discovery, Search for other habitable planets


 
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