"Earth 2.0" Officially Discovered

[Patticus]

Kepler 22-b: Earth-like planet confirmed

Astronomers have confirmed the existence of an Earth-like planet in the "habitable zone" around a star not unlike our own.

The planet, Kepler 22-b, lies about 600 light-years away and is about 2.4 times the size of Earth, and has a temperature of about 22C. It is the closest confirmed planet yet to one like ours - an "Earth 2.0". However, the team does not yet know if Kepler 22-b is made mostly of rock, gas or liquid. During the conference at which the result was announced, the Kepler team said that it had spotted some 1,094 new candidate planets.

The Kepler space telescope was designed to look at a fixed swathe of the night sky, staring intently at about 150,000 stars. The telescope is sensitive enough to see when a planet passes in front of its host star, dimming the star's light by a minuscule amount. Kepler identifies these slight changes in starlight as candidate planets, which are then confirmed by further observations by Kepler and other telescopes in orbit and on Earth.

Kepler 22-b was one of 54 candidates reported by the Kepler team in February, and is just the first to be formally confirmed using other telescopes. More of these "Earth 2.0" candidates are likely to be confirmed in the near future, though a redefinition of the habitable zone's boundaries has brought that number down to 48. Kepler 22-b lies at a distance from its sun about 15% less than the distance from the Earth to the Sun, and its year takes about 290 days. However, its sun puts out about 25% less light, keeping the planet at its balmy temperature that would support the existence of liquid water. The Kepler team had to wait for three passes of the planet before upping its status from "candidate" to "confirmed". "Fortune smiled upon us with the detection of this planet," said William Borucki, Kepler principal investigator at Nasa's Ames Research Center. "The first transit was captured just three days after we declared the spacecraft operationally ready. We witnessed the defining third transit over the 2010 holiday season."

The results were announced at the Kepler telescope's first science conference, alongside the staggering number of new candidate planets. The total number of candidates spotted by the telescope is now 2,326 - of which 207 are approximately Earth-sized. In total, the results suggest that planets ranging from Earth-sized to about four times Earth's size - so-called "super-Earths" - may be more common than previously thought.

http://www.bbc.co.uk...onment-16040655

It's 600 light years away, so the odds of any human in the next thousand years visiting it are slim at best, but it's the closest we've so far come to uncovering an alien world with a realistic possibility of harbouring life which might be somewhat like ours. On that small, rocky planet orbiting within that foreign star's habitable belt, there may just be someone or something looking back...

Of course, the world being rocky and it being within its parent star's habitable zone doesn't guarantee life at all. After all, we only exist today because a long series of improbable events took place which may not for most worlds:

• Thousands of stellar collisions gave us our moon, atmosphere and water.
  
• Our world is in an orbit stable enough and close enough to the sun to grant it life.
  
• Our moon has always acted as a shield for us, protecting us from myriad stellar debris, while providing the gravitational tug necessary to maintain the earth's rotational balance so its weight doesn't cause it to wobble and leave one side permanently exposed to the sun while the other permanently freezes, and therefore maintain a healthy biosphere.
  
• The collision which gave birth to our moon also provided the Earth with sufficient internal mass to sustain its own molten core, and therefore maintain a large protective magnetic field around itself, without which our homeworld's atmosphere, oceans and life itself would have long since been scoured away by the solar winds.
  
• At least five known major mass extinction events, and dozens of minor extinction events, have had to take place in order to clear the way and allow for new organism actors to take to the stage. Without them, many very old families of animal would probably still dominate today, and at best we would still be hunting and gathering in Africa.
  
• Life forms which produced oxygen as a by-product, such as photo-synthesising bacteria (and later plants), had to evolve to give earth its breathable atmosphere over millions of years and allow for the evolutionary chain which lead to us to even exist. There was no guarantee that they'd evolve.
  

And so on.

The possibility that this world may possibly harbour a biosphere of some variety is still enticing though. I hope man one day makes it out there.

[Delta Starfire]

This is an awesome discovery. Although, at six hundred light-years distant, we're going to need those FTL drives developed. I sincerely doubt anyone's dedicated enough to space exploration to commit themselves to a generational ship, after all...

[Raxz]

This is an awesome discovery. Although, at six hundred light-years distant, we're going to need those FTL drives developed. I sincerely doubt anyone's dedicated enough to space exploration to commit themselves to a generational ship, after all...

Eh, you never know. Right now it's basically considered officially not worth it if it'd take more than 50 years to get somewhere, but I'm sure there's only so much stuff in a 50-year's travel time radius that's actually worth exploring. After that, generational missions would probably just become the new thing since there'd be nothing else to do in terms of space exploration.

[Patticus]

This is an awesome discovery. Although, at six hundred light-years distant, we're going to need those FTL drives developed. I sincerely doubt anyone's dedicated enough to space exploration to commit themselves to a generational ship, after all...

If we eventually discover Faster Than Light travel to be an impossibility, and there is every indication that it may be exactly that, and assuming that things like Stasis and Wormholes and Folding Space are technical impossibilities too, then the only way of seeding the stars with our progeny may well have to be multi-generational city ships flung out into the void, with no firm guarantee of locating habitable worlds to populate*.

It would prove a very risky venture, requiring a high level of dedication in the face of potentially insurmountable odds, but if it is our only hope of escaping our home system then we will have to make do when the time comes, and in that case I am sure we will have no problems finding people willing to embark on the endeavour.

*Although, by the time we reach the stage where such ships can be built, even if FTL travel is out of bounds, we may have the kind of telescopic array technology in place which can give us guarantees on potentially habitable worlds, provided the trajectories of the ships leaving our home system are exact enough...

[Axl.EXE]

Best NASA Christmas present ever.

Now, back to work on those antimatter drives so we can colonize Pluto, slaves physicists!

[Preston]

I sincerely doubt anyone's dedicated enough to space exploration to commit themselves to a generational ship, after all...

We might as well spend that time making artificial wormholes, allowing instant transportation through spacetime to any part of the universe.

Edited December 6, 2011 by Preston

[Milo]

Sounds awesome. Too bad it's lightyears away. :/

[Koopalmier]

Meh. So we just know it has water and is in a zone that can be inhabited. Doesn't mean it's habited (at least not yet).

[Badnik Zero]

... then the only way of seeding the stars with our progeny may well have to be multi-generational city ships flung out into the void, with no firm guarantee of locating habitable worlds to populate*.

Edited December 6, 2011 by Dabnikz

[KrazyBean]

Hurry up and make those Mass Relays!

Edited December 6, 2011 by KrazySanta14

[Patticus]

Have you guys seen the movie Pandorum? I think of it now whenever these habitable world articles come up now.

Nope, can't say that I have.

FTL talk makes me wonder. Wouldn't it suck if we sent these mega-ships into space for like 1,500 years, but discovered FTL while they were en route? The people could land to discover hundreds year old colonies already.

I'd like to hope that, in that scenario, we would be kind enough to dig up the last received flight trajectory data and fly along their last known routes until we find the ships en route (that if we find them) so we could retrieve them and tow them to their destination or something.

[PSI Wind]

Don't they find a "Earth 2.0" everytime though?

[Mick]

Yep one of my friends had this on his Facebook page.

They should call this new planet Earth 2.

Did they read this in that older thread? And just added the . and the 0?! Wow! Hehe!

[Indigo Rush]

Don't we get these discoveries and topics about them a few times each year?

Can we condense them all into an "Earth-like Planet Found" mega-thread or something? This is becoming more and more common, it seems.

[SuperStingray]

If we eventually discover Faster Than Light travel to be an impossibility, and there is every indication that it may be exactly that

Not necessarily. Until CERN claims their discovery of 15000 neutrinos reaching their destination faster than light was based on erroneous measurements, I wouldn't exactly say there's "every indication" that may be the case.

[Kevin]

This is an interesting discovery despite it being so far away and the question of whether we'll be able to come up with some kind of ability to travel that far of distance in a short amount of time.

What's most interesting out of this is the spotting of 1,094 new candidate planets. That's a huge discovery with a lot of potential for other earth-like planets out there. I'm hoping one day, we'll develop the ability to travel out there, because I'd love to know what's it like on those planets.

[Koopalmier]

I don't like the idea of "Earth 2.0". The major points of Earth aren't just that it has water and is in a habitable zone, but also that it can house life. All the planets we call Earth 2.0's should be considered CANDIDATES to possess that name, as they can't house life as far as we know.

[Patticus]

Not necessarily. Until CERN claims their discovery of 15000 neutrinos reaching their destination faster than light was based on erroneous measurements, I wouldn't exactly say there's "every indication" that may be the case.

[LATER BUDDY]

Oh yeah, I saw this on the news the other day, =D.

This stuff is always extremely exciting for me, but at the same time I want to rage face that I probably won't get to somewhere like this in my life time XD. While finding a "new house" is awesome and all, what really has me curious is finding life aside from ours, since the chances of us being alone is still far to slim for me to handle, XP. I WANT MOAR KNOWLEDGE!

[Blacklightning]

You know, I really don't understand the practicality of FTL travel, but I suppose it could be because my understanding of space physics is a little fucked. I mean, considering the amount of power needed just to escape Earth's atmosphere can already render a grown man unconcious, going faster than that speed of light sounds like it'd be literally skin-tearing to experience. How exactly would human transportation work at those speeds without killing the pilots and passengers? And hell, assuming a human crew can still somehow survive that, even the smallest pebble impacting a spaceship could do a ridiculous amount of damage when it literally hits faster than it can humanly be percieved. You'd have to somehow rule out the possibility of debris attacking your billion-dollar investment at all - to say that's easier said than done is a massive fucking overstatement, and even calculating an accurate path of minimum resistance through open space will only get you so far.

The more people bring this kind of thing up, the more likely it seems that distant space explorations will be handled completely unmanned, even if only at first. And even that seems like a hell of a lot of trouble, given how difficult extreme-range communications are at this stage.

[Patticus]

I'm not sure how life would survive light-speed travel, frankly, but the whole reason why launching from the earth into space is so taxing on the human body is because you're fighting gravity, you're climbing away from the earth's gravity well. In space, away from gravitic bodies, I imagine you wouldn't feel the kind of forces you do on a rocket leaving earth. They might need to develop some kind of space couch to sit in while the ship heads toward the speed of light though, and some sort of extremely precise manoeuvring thrusters to spin the ship to face the opposite direction once you reach the halfway point in the journey; if slowing down at 50mph takes a lot more time than at 20mph, imagine how long you'd be slowing down from an FTL flight!

And then you've gotta think about relativity; How many years/decades/centuries for normal society have passed on your outward voyage? How many would pass if you went home? What kind of world are you going to return to? You'd need to be prepared to return to find a wasteland ala Fallout 3, a dead world, a conquered world, a world hostile to you on every level.

[SuperStingray]

I'd like to see CERN's results replicated in facilities across the planet by lots of independent testing before I accept that FTL particles really and properly exist. And even if they do go faster, what are we gonna do, build a ship out of FTL neutrinos? Fire them out the back to propel us forward? Knowing that they can under certain circumstances break the light speed barrier in no way enables us to build ships that can break it too.

So I'll rest on what has been the default position of the scientific community for decades - that FTL travel is impossible - until the scientific community at large verifies and confirms the breakthrough and develops a new standard model to cope with this information.

I didn't say to accept it, I just said the idea's not off the table. Besides, what the hell are you even talking about? Just because we've observed a phenomenon in one particle doesn't mean it's the only particle that could potentially exhibit it.

[Delta Starfire]

Have you guys seen the movie Pandorum? I think of it now whenever these habitable world articles come up now.

FTL talk makes me wonder. Wouldn't it suck if we sent these mega-ships into space for like 1,500 years, but discovered FTL while they were en route? The people could land to discover hundreds year old colonies already.

Heh. That happened in an episode of Babylon 5. Although, in that case, it was a sleeper ship, not a generational ship. The sad irony was that after the ship was launched, Earth made first contact with the Centauri about ten years later and they shared jump technology with them. If they'd only just waited... But then, they couldn't possibly have known.