DailyDirt: Out Of This World (And On To Others)

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Mon, Jul 27th 2015 5:00pm — Michael Ho

Astronomers only somewhat recently confirmed the existence of planets orbiting other stars like our own -- in 1995. Since then, we've found nearly 2,000 exoplanets, and we're honing in on more Earth-like planets that look like our own little world. Amateur astronomers have helped to identify a few exoplanets, and it looks like we'll be able to find more and more of them. "You and I probably won't be travelling to these planets - but our children's children's children could be."

The Kepler Space Telescope has found an 'Earth 2.0' exoplanet (now called Kepler-452b) that's less than twice the size of Earth and orbits its star every 385 days in a 'habitable' zone. Only 12 exoplanets of this size/type have been found so far, and Kepler-452b is the only exoplanet we've seen circling a star very similar to our own Sun. [url]
Super-Earth exoplanets might not be suitable for life as we know it because the surface of such huge rocky planets would not have the same kind of plate tectonics that drives our carbon cycle. However, there's still a lot we don't know about planetary geology. Venus is just a slightly smaller planet than our own, and no one is quite sure why it exhibits no plate tectonics. [url]
Amateur astronomy can be quite amazing: a guy (David Schneider) used a common DSLR camera and some home-built equipment and managed to verify the observation of an exoplanet around a star (HD 189733) about 63 light years away in the constellation of Vulpecula. Schneider didn't discover this exoplanet (he knew it was there already), but this kind of ingenuity could lead to some really cool amateur astronomy projects. [url]

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Filed Under: astronomy, david schneider, earth 2.0, exoplanets, kepler space telescope, kepler-452b, space, super-earth, vulpecula
Companies: nasa

6 Comments

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Pixelation, 27 Jul 2015 @ 5:45pm

Kepler 425b
Pretty cool that it's likely been in the "habitable zone" longer than the earth. Perhaps we should rename it "Earth 2.0".
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- Anonymous Coward, 28 Jul 2015 @ 12:34am
  
  Re: Kepler 425b
  More like "Earth beta" or "Earth 0.9", considering it was around before us.
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- Ninja (profile), 28 Jul 2015 @ 4:07am
  
  Re: Kepler 425b
  I wonder how the added size/mass affects gravity and if we'd be able to inhabit such planet. But honestly, we already fcked up this planet, leave that one alone ;)
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  - Anonymous Coward, 28 Jul 2015 @ 9:41am
    
    Re: Re: Kepler 425b
    Why leave it alone? Maybe we are but parasites and after we suck this world dry we will move on to the next one? Maybe instead of like all the movies portray, the aliens are the good guys and we will be the ones invading other worlds for their resources?
    
    Or maybe we are stuck here; which in my mind isn't such a bad place.
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    - JoeCool (profile), 28 Jul 2015 @ 10:54am
      
      Re: Re: Re: Kepler 425b
      Leave it alone because planets are inherently dangerous places to live. The eventual home of all intelligent species is an artificial habitat in empty space. There are still a few hazards, even then, but far fewer than on a planet's surface.
      
      My own thought is that when a species reaches a certain level of technology, they migrate to space habitats while restoring the surface of the planet they are leaving - kind of turning the planet into a natural preserve. Perhaps they think that doing so also allows the planet a chance to produce another intelligent species.
      
      Think about it - humans haven't been around that long, and maybe a previous species already developed and then left Earth long ago, removing all signs they were here when they did so. Maybe in another hundred or so years, we'll be in O'Neil stations while robots remove all signs of human habitation from the surface, leaving the Earth free for the next species.
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pdh, 28 Jul 2015 @ 5:05am

Pretty minimal qualifications
It may well be Venus 2.0, no?

I may be Einstein 2.0! After all, I'm human & live in the habitable zone near New Jersey.
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