The 500th Alien Planet Discovered

[n2doc]

"It could happen almost any time now. We now have the technological capability to identify Earth-like planets around the smallest stars."

David Latham -Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

Last week a 21st-century miles was reached: Planet hunters discovered the 500th planet beyond our solar system. To be sure, the vast majority are hot, Jupiter-sized planets that would dwarf the Earth and are almost certainly lifeless. Over the past 15 years, the count of these extrasolar worlds, has soared from single digits to the dozens and then into the hundreds. The pace of discovery is now so rapid that the number of identified planets leaped from 400 to 500 entries in just over a year.

The "book" of exo planet discoveries is being compiled and maintained by Jean Schneider, an astronomer at the Paris Observatory, who since 1995 has maintained The Extrasolar Planets Encyclopaedia of known exoplanets as well as those that are unconfirmed or controversial. Schneider advises caution about celebrating the 500th milestone as there is no consensus on what is a planet and what is a brown dwarf. In an interview with Scientific American, he says: "We don't know exactly where the planets stop and the brown dwarfs start on the mass scale. In addition, the mass scale is not a good criterion. So there is some fuzziness there."

"I think that radial velocity measurements will provide several hundred to a few thousand planets and no more," Schneider added, discussing his view of future discoveries. "Astrometric measurements, and in particular the GAIA mission, are expected to provide a few thousand planets by astrometry, because they are surveying one billion stars. As for microlensing, if a mission like WFIRST is finally launched in 2020, they could have, say, a few hundred planets. Direct imaging will provide certainly more than one hundred but not more than a few hundred, because with direct imaging you cannot go very far away in the galaxy. And the Kepler mission will provide many, at least several tens, of Earth-size planets in the habitable zone of their parent star.

more

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2010/11/the-500th-alien-planet-discovered-finding-a-second-earth-could-happen-anytime-now-nasaharvard-teams-.html

[laconicsax]

1. So how come the Exoplanet iPhone app already has 504?

http://exoplanet.hanno-rein.de/iphone/

[trotsky]

3. It's Apple.

It counts Steve Jobs' balls, his head, and his ego.

[laconicsax]

6. Makes sense.

[usregimechange]

2. Neato

[txlibdem]

4. Kepler, searching for Earth-size planets that are in the habitable zone of their parent star

That is where my interest lies. I love pretty pictures of Jupiter and the rings of Saturn. Oooh, pretty. But the thing that is going to be important to the survival of the human race is finding other Earth-size planets that could become our colonies in the centuries ahead. It isn't going to happen this century (unless FTL is discovered by some miracle), but we will eventually have to consider that our race is putting itself in peril by sticking to a single star system. A rogue black hole or wayward neutron star could whip through the solar system and wipe us all out. Or a supernova could send a jet of lethal radiation in our direction with the same deadly result.

Yup. I've outed myself as a nerd. Gerard K. O'Neill, I love you man!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard_K._O'Neill#Space_colonization
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_High_Frontier:_Human_Colonies_in_Space

A couple of quotes:

"Clearly our first task is to use the material wealth of space to solve the urgent problems we now face on Earth: to bring the poverty-stricken segments of the world up to a decent living standard, without recourse to war or punitive action against those already in material comfort; to provide for a maturing civilization the basic energy vital to its survival."
-- The High Frontier (1976)

"Is the surface of a planet really the right place for expanding technological civilization?"**

**"Is the surface of a planet really the right place for expanding technological civilization?"-Stewart Brand interview July 1975

[eppur_se_muova]

5. Those aliens have 500 planets, and we only have one!

We MUST close the Planet Gap !!

[txlibdem]

7. Are you ready to do your part, Citizen?

----Do you want to know more?