NASA to announce 'intriguing planetary system' discovery on Thursday

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/news/releases/2010/10-72AR.html

by anigbrowl • 16 years ago

94 34 16 years ago

po• 16 years ago

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

TGJ• 16 years ago

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?

f1gm3nt• 16 years ago

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.

carbocation• 16 years ago

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.

RobIsIT• 16 years ago

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

borisk2• 16 years ago

Planet X on collision course with Earth? :D

myth_drannon• 16 years ago

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....

borisk2• 16 years ago

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?

robryan2• 16 years ago

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.

InclinedPlane• 16 years ago

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.

waterlesscloud• 16 years ago

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

sprout2• 16 years ago

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.

chc• 16 years ago

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

anigbrowl4• 16 years ago

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.

nopassrecover• 16 years ago

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?

anigbrowl4• 16 years ago

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

guelo• 16 years ago

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

leot• 16 years ago

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

anigbrowl4• 16 years ago

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....

ANH• 16 years ago

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.

markkat• 16 years ago

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.

DanielBMarkham• 16 years ago

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!

aplusbi• 16 years ago

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...

jff• 16 years ago

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

demallien• 16 years ago

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.

NASA to announce 'intriguing planetary system' discovery on Thursday

Related Stories