Does anybody know what the path is to performing some kind of spectroscopy on this planet? Detecting molecules that might indicate life - water, ozone?
NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth
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Re: NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth
#22Meh, given the hype for this press-release, I was hoping for something more extraordinary frankly. Not that finding other exoplanets isn't amazing, just that we're all waiting to find out whether we are alone or not in the universe. Finding out that other advanced civilizations exist out there would bring such an amazing new meaning to life. If I could ask for one wish, it would be to find out if we're alone or not.…
By some accounts we should probably be desperately hoping we are alone in the universe (at least with regards to technological civilizations), since it would mean the Great Filter is behind us rather than ahead. The alternative being we're very likely to go extinct before we get a chance to colonize the galaxy, and since that could probably be done using synthetic biology developed within the relatively near future, that would give our civilization an expected lifetime of less than a few hundred years at most. The more life that exists close to or surpassing our own level of development, the more bleak the future looks for our civilization.
Re: NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth
#23> 1,400 light-years away
Very cool that we can find it, but I don't think we'll be visiting this one any time soon...
Re: NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth
#24At 2 billion years older than Earth, I can't begin to imagine what kinds of things could possibly be living on this planet. Given, of course, that it's got the right ingredients for life to arise. What if it's suffered huge extinctions recently? What if there's a domineering species out to conquer the planet just like humans? What if there's a society there more sophisticated than us? It's a very exciting discovery.
I propose it's unlikely that any technological civilizations more advanced than our own have existed on this planet in the past few billion years, otherwise some subgroup of their species would likely have seeded the local universe with life (it's only ~1400 lightyears away) and they would be here instead of us. Unless of course the panspermia hypothesis is correct and that is indeed where life on Earth came from.
Re: NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth
#25Re: NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth
#26Does anybody know what the path is to performing some kind of spectroscopy on this planet? Detecting molecules that might indicate life - water, ozone?
When the planet passes in front of its host star, you can measure the change in the stars spectrum, the new chemicals that aren't normally present in a star are assumed to be the planet's.
Telescopes that can do this are still a tiny bit away reality I think.
Re: NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth
#27To help out anyone trying to search for stuff,
* This exoplanet is now "Kepler-452b" (kepler_name),
* In the "Kepler Object of Interest" catalog, it's KOI "K07016.01" (kepoi_name),
* Its star is both K07016 and Kepler ID 8311864 (kepid),
* In the broader 2MASS sky survey, the star has the id "J19440088+4416392"
Sources (catalog search engines),
http://exoplanetarchive.ipac.caltech.edu/cgi-bin/TblView/nph...
https://archive.stsci.edu/kepler/kic10/search.php
(edit): Here's a mirror of the Kepler catalog entries -- KIC for the star, KOI for the planet:
https://gist.githubusercontent.com/anonymous/deef2bd542224f3...
Re: NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth
#28if there is intelligent life there and they point a telescope at us right now, they would be seeing earth ~ 500 years ago. "check out this planet, looks like a promising place once we run out of materials here."
The planet is 1,400 light-years away. They'd be seeing earth at around 600AD.
Re: NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth
#29To rephrase another comment in the other submission - how do we know/can we infer so much about a planet so far away when we are just now getting reasonable pictures of Pluto? Looking at the images (aside from the artist interpretation), it looks like they're just guessing based on size and location?
One thing to keep in mind is that there is one thing that happens with exoplanets that can never happen with Pluto: the planet can pass between its star and us (i.e. eclipse the star). This gives a lot of information about the planet's composition, because light from the star will scatter/change color according to the planet's composition. See this image: http://seagerexoplanets.mit.edu/images/transitschematic.gif .…
> Now maybe you can do that with Pluto using some far-off star for reference, not sure.
It has been done for Pluto, first in 1988, with an occultation of a background star[0].
[0] http://www.space.com/29885-pluto-atmosphere-to-be-revealed-b...
Re: NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
One thing to keep in mind is that there is one thing that happens with exoplanets that can never happen with Pluto: the planet can pass between its star and us (i.e. eclipse the star). This gives a lot of information about the planet's composition, because light from the star will scatter/change color according to the planet's composition. See this image: http://seagerexoplanets.mit.edu/images/transitschematic.gif .…
> Now maybe you can do that with Pluto using some far-off star for reference, not sure. It has been done for Pluto, first in 1988, with an occultation of a background star[0]. [0] http://www.space.com/29885-pluto-atmosphere-to-be-revealed-b...
And most recently with SOFIA at the end of June:
https://sofia.usra.edu/News/news_2015/06_29_15/index.html
This will help tie in past and future occultation observations to the New Horizons data.