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Wolf 1069B: Earth-mass planet in the habitable zone of a nearby, low-mass star

arxiv.org

21–30 of 132 posts

Re: Wolf 1069B: Earth-mass planet in the habitable zone of a nearby, low-mass star

#21
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read up about the precision LIGO needs. Pretty mind boggling.

I don't understand anything about it, but I think I read that LIGO has been enhanced with a technique involving "squeezed light" which allows some bypassing of heretofore assumed fundamental physical limits through quantum wizardry. Something else I read about, that doesn't sound like it involves far out voodoo tech to me, that I wish I'd live long enough to see, is putting a probe out far enough and in the right pos…

The Solar Gravitational Lens is very neat but with current propulsion technology it would take a very long time to get the satellites into position.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQFqDKRAROI&t=411s

Re: Wolf 1069B: Earth-mass planet in the habitable zone of a nearby, low-mass star

#22

Always nice to have options on where to send the colony ships.

I’m pretty sure the safest bet is to send the colony ships out at relativistic speeds, back to earth 50 million years in the future.

Why have I never heard this? It’s actually brilliant and almost too simple.

Re: Wolf 1069B: Earth-mass planet in the habitable zone of a nearby, low-mass star

#23
So I thought this would be big news, so I did some reading. Turns out that in like the past 5-6 years we've gone from "who knows how many habitable zone planets there are" to "we're finding them all freaking over the place!"

Does anyone have a good blog/news site that covers topics like this? Because evidently I'm missing out.

Re: Wolf 1069B: Earth-mass planet in the habitable zone of a nearby, low-mass star

#24
post #23

So I thought this would be big news, so I did some reading. Turns out that in like the past 5-6 years we've gone from "who knows how many habitable zone planets there are" to "we're finding them all freaking over the place!" Does anyone have a good blog/news site that covers topics like this? Because evidently I'm missing out.

We're severly resource constrained in this field. The harder we look the more we find.

Re: Wolf 1069B: Earth-mass planet in the habitable zone of a nearby, low-mass star

#25
post #3

A little farther out than Wolf 359, where of course humanity will one day battle the Borg.

We were all thinking it.

I am NOT looking forward to the Bell Riots next year.

Being as I lived in SF in the late aughts, me and other friends would joke about the Bell Riots. Then 2016 happened, then 2020 happened, and all of a sudden it's not a very funny joke. :(

Re: Wolf 1069B: Earth-mass planet in the habitable zone of a nearby, low-mass star

#27

Detected by the radial velocity method, measuring the parent star being pulled toward and away from us by a variation of at little as 2-3 meters per second! It always blows my mind that we can measure that.

I know, right? It's mindblowing that we can pass that light through a spectrograph and get the radial velocity just by the infinitesimal doppler shifts. Read about HARPS and the followup projects for more.

Re: Wolf 1069B: Earth-mass planet in the habitable zone of a nearby, low-mass star

#28
post #24
post #23

So I thought this would be big news, so I did some reading. Turns out that in like the past 5-6 years we've gone from "who knows how many habitable zone planets there are" to "we're finding them all freaking over the place!" Does anyone have a good blog/news site that covers topics like this? Because evidently I'm missing out.

We're severly resource constrained in this field. The harder we look the more we find.

What's the resource? Satellite time, compute power, grad students?

Re: Wolf 1069B: Earth-mass planet in the habitable zone of a nearby, low-mass star

#29
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand anything about it, but I think I read that LIGO has been enhanced with a technique involving "squeezed light" which allows some bypassing of heretofore assumed fundamental physical limits through quantum wizardry. Something else I read about, that doesn't sound like it involves far out voodoo tech to me, that I wish I'd live long enough to see, is putting a probe out far enough and in the right pos…

The Solar Gravitational Lens is very neat but with current propulsion technology it would take a very long time to get the satellites into position. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQFqDKRAROI&t=411s

Then we'd better start as early as possible.

Re: Wolf 1069B: Earth-mass planet in the habitable zone of a nearby, low-mass star

#30
post #23

So I thought this would be big news, so I did some reading. Turns out that in like the past 5-6 years we've gone from "who knows how many habitable zone planets there are" to "we're finding them all freaking over the place!" Does anyone have a good blog/news site that covers topics like this? Because evidently I'm missing out.

Over the course of the past 2 decades we've gone from "perhaps some day we'll find extra solar planets" to "most if not all stars have planets".

JWST's already found water.

At this point it's no longer a matter of if but when extrasolar life will be confirmed, and with which instrument. Might be JWST, might be WFIRST, might be HabEx.

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