NASA to announce 'intriguing planetary system' discovery on Thursday | Hacker News Reader

NASA to announce 'intriguing planetary system' discovery on Thursday

nasa.gov

94 pointsanigbrowl34 comments

I'm quoting a person who works on that project: "They discovered a huge number of Earth-like planets. The new count is vastly outnumbers previous estimations even over the gas giants due to imperfect technology." The remaining conclusions are up to you, even if they are not going to be voiced at the conference....

The reason I found it interesting was that the news about 'hundreds' of Earth-like planets (using a very ballpark description of 'Earth-like,' of course) filtered out back in June in the usual fairly low-key fashion.

This announcement refers to a 'new discovery about an intriguing planetary system' - in other ones, just one solar system out of the hundreds of possible candidates. Maybe it's nothing more than extreme cleverness being used to confirm one of them has 3 or more planets (which would be significant in itself), but I sense a mystery - either something we'd never seriously considered before (like planets with overlapping orbits?) or else something that looks unexpectedly familiar.

Most exciting of all would be confirmation by some other observation platform of something interesting at a particular location - the plan is to work with other observatories to take a more detailed look at interesting candidates (see http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/kepler/news/keplerm-201005...). Small hope of that right now, though.

If you want to study the date yourself, it's available via http://archive.stsci.edu/ and http://nsted.ipac.caltech.edu/; http://nexsci.caltech.edu/workshop/2010/speaker_talks/Plavch... gives a quick rundown on what you need to know in order to work with it.

Overlapping orbits would be interesting. They would have to be equal size planets and directly opposite (my mind isnt alert enough to consider 3D right now) the star so as not to collide nor alter the other planet's orbit right?

I have no idea if/how that would work - it was just the first wacky thing that came to mind blush

Depends on the definition of "Earth-like", really. Mars is Earth-like in some astronomical contexts.

Venus is also Earth-like in the sense we're talking about here, despite being almoet a thousand degrees Fahrenheit hotter.

Earth before life wasn't much to be looked upon, either.

Well, if you have the resources to get from here to a Mars-like planet, turning it into a habitable world should be trivial, so Mars is Earth-like enough for colonization purposes at least.

That doesn't seem to hold up empirically. We have the resources to get from here to a Mars-like planet (namely, Mars), yet we don't have the ability to trivially turn uninhabitable areas of our own planet into earth-like enough places for human colonization.

>trivially turn uninhabitable areas of our own planet into earth-like enough places for human colonization.

What?

They're called "houses". See also, desert irrigation, slash/burn farming, terrace farming, and Lapplanders & Inuit peoples.

Edit: But yes, parent's comment that Mars is trivially terraformed is as bonkers as your post.

I thought it was clear from my post when I said "Mars-like" that excluded Mars. (Since the subject of debate is extrasolar planets.)

And I was speaking in reference to traveling to that planet, which is virtually impossible with current technology.

And to expand a little more, I would say a generation ship of some sort would be required to get even to Alpha Centauri, so creating a self-sustaining ecosystem from whole cloth is a prerequisite for traveling to extrasolar planets.

Now, you could make an argument that some magic FTL technology will appear, but I still think that terraforming is a trivial problem by comparison.

Houses aren't terraformed colonies, and they're definitely not closed cycle. Anything we would set up on Mars (or a Mars-like planet) would necessarily have to be, because the planet lacks a human friendly biosphere and volatiles with which we could support them. We can't terraform the Sahara into something 200 people could live in for any extended period of time.

Teraforming an entire planet would, in many respects, be simpler than safely teraforming just the Sahara and nothing else at the same time.

We don't even need to make Mars better than the Sahara. The primary objective would be to raise the pressure to that at which a pressure suit wouldn't be needed, and the temperature such that that too would meet what we currently can handle on earth. Once we've got that, the rest would be fairly straightforward (I'd argue that atmospheric manipulation is harder than getting life to colonise the regolith).

Looks quite likely. They started collecting data in June 2009 and expected that a year of observations will be necessary to confirm a big number of planets.

What are your conclusions? We are not alone? There are places for humankind to expand to?

As far as I have been able to tell when looking a couple of weeks back the data they are mainly using for ground based confirmations is the stuff from the first few months. There seems to be quiet a big lag time between recording the data and actually getting it out for confirmations which themselves would be taking quiet some time.

These are Earth-mass planets, not Earth-orbit (1 year period) planets. They need 3 transits for confirmation, which requires at least 2 years and more likely 3 years of observations.

These are "hot Earths" to the previous "hot Jupiters" we had been discovering.

Please keep in mind that NASA's idea of an 'intriguing planetary system' is probably very different than the general public's.

It does make me wonder to consider what NASA finds intriguing. Exciting would be a green planet of the right size orbiting the right distance from it's sun. What could fall into intriguing but not exciting to people that for most intents and purposes have seen it all?

I would be excited by a blue planet; a green planet (assuming that's shorthand for large masses of chlorophyll == extraterrestrial life) would probably be the most important announcement ever made.

From what I understand of the technology it isn't possible for us to detect this right now.

Yeah, I want to know as well. I've read a little on the tech they use. Sounds pretty cool, but could some of these planets be false positives? They said they found a planetary system so I can only assume.

Would be neat if they found a planet similar to ours.

They have a list of false positives thus far, most of which are binary stars which eclipse each other as viewed from earth.

For any HN readers who are suitably qualified and looking for a new career challenge...

Kepler is NASA's Discovery mission to find the first Earth-sized, habitable exoplanets. The SETI Institute is seeking an astronomer/scientist to archive Kepler data and results. The successful candidate will be a member of the Kepler Science Office, located at the NASA-Ames Research Center, and will be an integral part of the Kepler Team that shares proprietary ownership of the data and its scientific exploitation. This Support Scientist will assist in the verifying, validating, managing, coordinating, and archiving of the data produced by the Kepler photometer and ground-based follow-up observations. The production of the mission-critical Kepler Results Catalog will be their primary goal.

The successful candidate should have experience managing large volumes of data. Familiarity with optical CCD pixel-level data, high-precision photometry and time-series analysis, light curve modeling and stellar astrophysics are highly desirable. An appreciation for the importance of interface control documents, configuration management, and system engineering is critical. [....more at link...]

http://www.seti.org/jobs/kepler-archive

I have a feeling the "succeful candidate" already knows and works with many of the interested people.

Here's a recent Planetary Society podcast interview with the Kepler principal investigator, Bill Borucki: http://planetary.org/radio/show/00000400/

He talks about the discovery of those hundreds of candidate planets.

Perhaps it will be related to this?

http://www.nature.com/nmeth/journal/v6/n7/full/nmeth0709-487...

EDIT: original PNAS article http://www.pnas.org/content/106/19/7816

I'd be surprised, but happily we have options for making such tests via Hubble and others, so if not now, then maybe later.

BTW if you haven't seen it, you'll probably enjoy this (small pdf): http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.43....

Maybe they discovered a planet that orbits a binary star but whose orbit doesn't match what physics would predict for planets in a binary system. Almost as if the planet itself were adjusting and compensating...

The suspense is going to kill me. I'm thinking it has to be either a sister-like system, or have a green/blue planet. My money is on the former.

A very big occluded:not-occluded ratio, on the order of 1:10 - welcome to Ringworld!

Well, we can always dream, but it would be intriguing.

A Klemperer rosette of planets, each with its own small artificial sun?

In related news, some types of bacteria proven to survive in space for more than a year. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11039206

I don't think we're anywhere near an "ET" moment, but I'm excited that we're getting some hard numbers on the types of planetary distributions there are. These numbers can feed models that can be extrapolated. If we end up with a billion earth-mass planets in the galaxy? Well you don't have to be a rocket scientist to see the writing on the wall.

If they'd announce the general news that would be one thing. But if it's going to trickle out system-by-system, that is going to be a huge pain in the ass. Isn't it possible for them just to let their hair down a bit, go out and have a beer, and tell us what it currently looks like? Sure beats having to wait!

Planet X on collision course with Earth? :D

I've been trying to introduce an intriguing planetary system to my wife for years now.

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