Looking for alien Earths? Here they come

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Looking for alien Earths? Here they come

Hopefully they are as cool looking as Krypton and the alien from them is like Kal-el (Hey I'm a Superman fan LOL!)

Well when they find evidence for life on other worlds, don't expect them to find any BEMs (Bug-Eyed Monsters).

I wonder what the mysterious phenomenon is he's hinting about? Something that would be noticed when only measuring dips in brightness.

Three periodic dips in brightness of the stars indicate a planet's passing. If they measure three periodic dips in starlight that fit the pattern for a planet's orbit, then they found a planet and they can calculate the planet's width.

Even if we found a lush green earthlike planet say fifty light years away, we could not get there with current propulsion technology and with our limited life span.

We would have to invent an entirely new physics to overcome the speed limitation and we would have to modify our species so we lived longer (and also keep our sanity). Both outcomes are possible but highly unlikely.

For the foreseeable future it is look but don't touch where stars are concerned.

ruveyn

Does that matter?
It's interesting to find out and to know, it isn't just worth knowing something only when we can touch it.

Some people would be willing to pay for it. (I am one). I don't favor funding cosmology with tax dollars, however, since not all people who pay taxes think it is worthwhile. I would rather fund efforts that would yield to us cleaner and cheaper energy, for instance.

ruveyn

If we could invent a propulsion technology that would allow spacecraft to travel near the speed of light, we could in principle travel to places much further than fifty lightyears within our lifetimes due to the effect of time dilation. It would just be impractical because of the twins paradox, everyone we knew would be long dead and buried by the time we got back.

We certainly can't reach extrasolar planets with current technology. But better engines is not beyond our reach with the current scientific knowledge. http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3c.html
Science-fiction writers have imagined some way to make space journey beyond human lifetime. We can always put the crew in hibernation, like in the movie 2001, or we can always make ships that can sustain ecosystems allowing a journey of many generations of thousand years long. It is beyond our current technology, but by discovering other earths the motivation to develop them will be there.

I agree with Scientist. Life is brightened by the joy of discovery.

Again, you sound like an old man...

"Men might as well project a voyage to the Moon as attempt to employ steam navigation against the stormy North Atlantic Ocean.
- Dr. Dionysus Lardner (1793-1859), Professor of Natural Philosophy and Astronomy at University College, London."

Some bright young spark like Scientist will prove you wrong. It wont come from an old man who no longer dreams.

Well, thank you, Fuzzy

I know that. He mentioned some unusual phenomenon. I was wondering what it might be, that could be deduced only from the dips, which is all they're measuring. All I could think of was either a quick succession of different dips at different periods indicating a large number of planets close in, or possibly dips with the same period but different brightness indicating two or more planets on a very similar orbit, which would be strange. But I'm curious to know.



But all we need is a working pusher plate and it's forty years to Centauri.

In the middle of the night a policeman came upon a drunk who was obsessed with walking around beneath a lamppost kicking the grass.

Finnally the cop asked him what he was doing. He replied "im looking for my car keys."
When the cop asked him where he was when he lost the keys the man replied by pointing down the road and saying "somewhere over there".

When the cop asked him why he was looking for the keys in one place when he lost them in another he replied that " well the light is better over here."

Astronomers are forced to be like the above drunk when seeking extrasolar planets.
They fiind the ones that are easy to find. The ones that are easy to find ( using either of the two ways used) are "hot jupiters"- big planets that are very close to the parent star (jupiters that are closer than mercurey).

whether hot jupiters are really typical planets are anyones guess. But small earh like planets (hot or otherwise) are much harder to detect. Which is why this is newsworthy.

One would think thatt our solar system would be kinda typical.
Heavy matter (that exists in a solid state at high temperatures) would loiter in the solar system near the star.

Lighter matter would be forced outward.

The heavy stuff would coalesce into rocky planets (like mercury earth mars venus).

The light stuff would coalesce into gassious balls to form large low densisty planets (jupiter, saturn, uranas, neptune) in the middle range of orbits.

Further out the light matter would freeze into ices and form small solid bodies agian (like pluto).

Small rocky planets close in, large gas balls in the middle, and small ice balls at the fringe- that would be reasonalbe way to set up a solar system.

But the ones weve discovered beyond our own have gas giants extreeemly close in.

So either our solar system is strange. Or our seach methods are skewed to finding strange solar sytems. I suspect the latter.

I suspect there are alot of rocky modest sized planets out there. How many are 'earth-like' in the sense that they have life is -anyone's guess.

nice summary wesmontfan.

Exactly. And where would we get the energy to produce the relativistic mass increase and time dilation? That is the catch. Whether we travel near light speed or send out generation ships, the original star travelers will have to say a forever goodbye to everyone they ever knew and loved. Star voyaging has a very sad aspect to it. For those who wish to die with the people with whom they lived it would be a difficult thing to become a star explorer.

That suggests yet another mutation to our species. We would have to become less sociable or more mission oriented. Very few normal humans have the will power to do that voluntarily.

ruveyn