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Related: About this forumKepler finds smallest exoplanet to date
Now we just need to find an Earth-sized one in the habitable zone.
The two new worlds orbit a sunlike star 950 light-years away called Kepler 20. One has dimensions almost identical to our own planet; the other is just 87 percent Earth's diameter. The planets, which by convention have been assigned the names Kepler 20 f and Kepler 20 e, respectively, are the smallest exoplanets for which diameters are known. Francois Fressin and Guillermo Torres of the HarvardSmithsonian Center for Astrophysics and their colleagues announced the discoveries in a paper published online December 20 in Nature. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.)"
For the first time, we've crossed the threshold of finding Earth-size worlds," Torres says. "The next step is having an Earth-size planet in the habitable zone."
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=kepler-20-smallest
For the first time, we've crossed the threshold of finding Earth-size worlds," Torres says. "The next step is having an Earth-size planet in the habitable zone."
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=kepler-20-smallest
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Kepler finds smallest exoplanet to date (Original Post)
pokerfan
Dec 2011
OP
The man is so resourceful he even continues to make discoveries after he's dead.
gtar100
Dec 2011
#1
gtar100
(4,192 posts)1. The man is so resourceful he even continues to make discoveries after he's dead.
Kidding aside, this is very cool. I wonder what the limits really are in the detail we can obtain from the light off of distant planets. How much detail does light really carry?
Ian David
(69,059 posts)2. Detecting the lights of extrasolar cities
Alien bright lights, big city could reveal ET
...
In the unlikely event that ET has built a Tokyo-sized city beyond Neptune on an icy object in the Kuiper belt, the Hubble Space Telescope could detect its glittering lights, Loeb calculates.
More:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21125-alien-bright-lights-big-city-could-reveal-et.html
Confusious
(8,317 posts)3. My exoplanet app shows
That neither are in the habitable zone of that star.
'E' is probably a mercury, 'F' a Venus. But it all depends on the chemistry man!
pokerfan
(27,677 posts)4. Separating fact from speculation about Kepler-20's Earth-sized planets
From the Planetary Society, a very detailed analysis of today's news:
As usual, I'm far from the first to comment on this story, but I'll try to compensate by being thorough and actually reading the paper rather than just the press release. In all scientific papers you have data (observations) and lots of detailed interpretations and often a concluding paragraph of speculation. With these exoplanet detections, there is very good data on their diameters and their orbital parameters. But when it comes to actually describing what these planets are like, there is an awful long chain of interpretations from interpretations from interpretations. I thought it'd be useful for you readers if I separated the observational facts from the quite-likely-to-be-true inferences from the downstream speculations.
<snip>
I love the speculation part of these papers, because they serve as nutritious food for the imagination. Exoplanet science is especially delicious; there are so very many kinds of alien worlds out there, and it's fun to imagine traveling to them or to imagine what sort of life might exist on any of these crazy planets or their moons. But the speculative parts of any scientific paper are hazardous because they're usually the most fun to write about, yet are the most likely sections of a paper to turn out to be wrong. Keep that in mind when you read stories about these Earth-sized planets!
Read the whole article
<snip>
I love the speculation part of these papers, because they serve as nutritious food for the imagination. Exoplanet science is especially delicious; there are so very many kinds of alien worlds out there, and it's fun to imagine traveling to them or to imagine what sort of life might exist on any of these crazy planets or their moons. But the speculative parts of any scientific paper are hazardous because they're usually the most fun to write about, yet are the most likely sections of a paper to turn out to be wrong. Keep that in mind when you read stories about these Earth-sized planets!
Read the whole article