706 Earthlike Planets Discovered By NASA Spacecraft

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/kepler-spacecraft-finds-hundreds-possible-planets-100618.html

by cwan • 16 years ago

36 18 16 years ago

space.com

mkramlich• 16 years ago

I say we attack immediately. Not wise to take chances they might be peaceful. ;)

dkuchar2• 16 years ago

hawkings:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/space/article7...

Life on this planet is predicated on material transformation/consumption. that's what we do - we eat and excrete our environment. no reason to believe it would be fundamentally different on other planets.

metamemetics3• 16 years ago

Surely there is enough uninhabited bodies of matter\resources in space to preclude the necessity of fighting with aliens over them for the next 100,000 years?

donaq• 16 years ago

I agree. Deploy our Keanu Reeves immediately!

itistoday• 16 years ago

My favorite comment there:

Aerospace_Cadet wrote: Wouldn't any planet found no matter it's size or location be considered alien?

petercooper• 16 years ago

Not in one particular instance: if we saw Earth. Current ideas about the shape of the universe don't make this an entirely impossible proposition (just an extremely unlikely one that we'd stumble across our own image from billions of years ago, and I, personally, don't buy it at all).

This idea is covered in an episode of Astronomy Cast. I forget which, but most likely http://www.astronomycast.com/astronomy/ep-78-what-is-the-sha...

robryan2• 16 years ago

706 promising candidates, not confirmed. As many people are pointing out there they are aiming for 3 transits to confirm something is a planet, it doesn't seem to be clear though whether those 706 are including things that have transited more than once in the 43 days which would indicate very short orbits.

Should note to that most exoplanets don't transit their star when viewed from earth. A quick Google search suggests that only 54 of the first 333 exoplanets discovered did.

BahUnfair• 16 years ago

There are other methods to finding planets. Most of the early Hot Jupiters were found by measuring the "wobble" of a star - a bulge at the surface - caused by the gravity of the massive gas giant careening around it.

Also, the title is wrong, just because the telescope is looking for earth like planets doesn't mean it can't find gas giants as well.

robryan2• 16 years ago

I'm aware, just pointing out that the transit method that kepler uses can only pick a percentage of planets even if they are of significant enough size to be found because from our viewing angle they don't transit.

Anm• 16 years ago

Not only are the 706 planets only potential candidates, but I believe they include all possible planets, not just the "earthlike" planets. The article is poorly written in that manner, and the headline here is magnifying the error.

That said, 306 of the 706 have already been confirm. No stats on the number or percentage of false positives in that first batch.

pvg• 16 years ago

The article is quite clear - "NASA's Kepler spacecraft hunting for Earth-like planets around other stars has found 706 candidates for potential alien worlds while gazing at more than 156,000 stars packed into a single patch of the sky."

Potential. No claim that any of them are 'earth-like'. The person who wrote the title either doesn't know how to read or is being deliberately sensationalist.

706 Earthlike Planets Discovered By NASA Spacecraft

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