10 years and 130 planets later

Below is a great article from Space.com, about the past decades search for planets who revolve around a star similiar to our sun. In all, 130 planets have been found matching that description.

BALTIMORE – Astronomers met last week to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the first planet discovered around a normal star other than the Sun. Although more than 130 other such planets have been found since then, the field still feels like it is just getting started.

And the places they see are getting stranger every year.

Many recent breakthroughs have occurred in planet detection. The frontiers being crossed are towards planets with wider orbits and less mass. Along the way, though, strange objects may require retuning theories, and maybe even definitions.

"We are in fantastic times," said Michel Mayor of the Observatoire de Geneve. "In ten years, we have a lot of new data."

Mayor was one of the astronomers who detected the first extrasolar planet – that is, outside our solar system – in 1995 around the star 51 Pegasi. To commemorate this and other discoveries the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) organized its May 2005 Symposium, "A Decade of Extrasolar Planets Around Normal Stars."

www.space.com...

Well im sure you’ve heard of the discovery channels show, "Alien Planet" premiering the Saturday at 8pm EST. but besides that, they say they will find life in the next 5 years, and hopefully intelligent life in the next 10.i personally think it will take less than 10 years for intelligent life, and i wouldnt be surprised if we found micro bacterial life or something in the next year or two.

EDIT: Heres some nice links-

www.space.com...

news.yahoo.com.../nm/20050509/sc_nm/space_planets_dc

[edit on 5/9/2005 by Schmidt1989]

I have seen the previews for "Alien Planet", but did not hear that they were making claims that life and intellegent life for that matter will be found in the next 10 years. That's a pretty interesting claim for a Discovery Channel show. I'm looking forward to the series!

Well, it didnt air yet so i havent seen it, i just ment scientists around the world say they will have the life in 5 years and int. life in 10, but i think the show does say something about life in 10 years, and its going to be a great show, theyve got steven hawking on there and tons of other scientists.

Last night I saw a quick blurb on headline news that also mentioned it being 10 years since the first extrasolar planet was discovered. The story mentioned that those planets were rather large, Jupiter sized, but within the next few years the technology will be good enough to find Earth sized ones.

I think the issue with life on other planets is that we're really looking for life similar to what we have here. Being that most life on Earth would not survive for a minute on Jupiter, the search for Earth sized planets with distances to their star similar to that of Earth would be a good start.

It's pretty exciting news I think, and if the new tech pans out I think we'll have a lot more than 130 in the next 10 years.

I agree, Djarums, Im guessing around 500+? Because your still gunna find alot more juipter typoed ones and stuff, but also ones more like earth, mars, or others.

I highly doubt we'll find any kind of life anytime soon. If we do find life, it'll be fossilized.

I wouldn't get your hopes up.

fossilized life to a eager scientist would be as good as living(for the moment) they could study it and excavate the area and even carbon-14 date it to see how old it is.

How could life be found without actually getting close up to these planets? As far as I know, current planet detection is dependent on the movements of their home stars. I didn't think we even had distant images of extrasolar planets.

10 years is a long time as technonlogy goes, and im sure well find fossilized life on mars soon.

From what I've seen of the preview, it seems that we're supposed to develop interstellar travel within the next 10 years and send an AI-controlled spaceship to an extrasolar planet. Odd coming from so-called mainstream scientists who usually can't see past their own time period and rarely acknowledge that interstellar travel is real.

[edit on 5/9/2005 by Flinx]

Can you carbon date something on another planet that has a different atmosphere and different elemental makeup than earth does?

What if the planet has an absence of carbon entirely? What other ways are there to determine something's age?

130 planets later, it seems we have the first ever planet outside our system to be photographed...

APOD today has it! I find that... wow!

Yup, that's the one that CNN Headline News was showing in the background during their story. Amazing to look at. Overall perspective though I'd say that planet is HUGE!!! I mean compare the relative mass of Earth to the Sun and you'd get a boat and a sesame seed. This one is massive. It'll definitely take a heck of a lot sharper shot than that to view an earthsized planet won't it...

Either way, great stuff!

As I understand it all the planets we have found so far are very big and on very extraordinary orbits(its how we find them), IOW the planets we have discovered probably mean that those solar systems are unlikely for life. Imagine a planet 3 or 4x the size of Jupiter that swings from the outer solar system to the inner, even if it didn't directly smash into any terrestrial planets directly, the gravitational disturbances would likely make life unlikely. Its not just finding an 'Earth-like' planet around a 'Sun-like' star, but we need a realtively stable solar system, more or less configured like our own(relatively eliptical orbits for all planets), in a relatively 'quiet' part of the galaxy.

Originally posted by Djarums
Yup, that's the one that CNN Headline News was showing in the background during their story. Amazing to look at. Overall perspective though I'd say that planet is HUGE!!! I mean compare the relative mass of Earth to the Sun and you'd get a boat and a sesame seed. This one is massive. It'll definitely take a heck of a lot sharper shot than that to view an earthsized planet won't it...

Either way, great stuff!

Yes, if I'm not wrong, that planet is supposed to be about 5 times the mass of Jupiter...

Originally posted by Rren
As I understand it all the planets we have found so far are very big and on very extraordinary orbits(its how we find them), IOW the planets we have discovered probably mean that those solar systems are unlikely for life. Imagine a planet 3 or 4x the size of Jupiter that swings from the outer solar system to the inner, even if it didn't directly smash into any terrestrial planets directly, the gravitational disturbances would likely make life unlikely. Its not just finding an 'Earth-like' planet around a 'Sun-like' star, but we need a realtively stable solar system, more or less configured like our own(relatively eliptical orbits for all planets), in a relatively 'quiet' part of the galaxy.

No, not necessarily very big, nor necessarily on very extraordinary orbits... The thing is, to detect a planet, the only method so far was to measure the perturbations that that planet was involving in the light we receive from the system... Basically...

Now, this planet is not only HUGE, it is orbiting a very dim star, and thus we could photograph it... Normally, the other ones at least that we know of, I mean, couldn't be photographed because the light of their star makes them invisible...

For instance, Mercury is close to our sun, and it is thus difficult to photograph, because it gets lost in the halo of the sun... Even from here. Position yourself several light years away, and even Jupiter will be difficult to see. A planet doesn't shine: it reflects light. When the star light is more powerful than the reflection, and when the halo caused by it around the star extends past the visual orbit of the planet from where you are, the planet is not visible...

The California & Carnegie Search for Extrasolar Planets is one of the best scientific site on extrasolar planets, loads of info.

This page is a great one about stars in general, and their life cycle.

They both contain good info and good links, and for any amateur astronomer (I mean, person interested in space in general, at least...) they surely are references...