Interactive map of potentially habitable Exoplanets

I found this earlier and it was pretty interesting so I thought I'd share. It's a neat little site putting into perspective the amount of possible life supporting planets there might be out there.

exoplanets.newscientistapps.com...

Enjoy!

Wow makes you wonder how FULL space could be with life

reply to post by hknudzkknexnt


I know! I was a little taken aback. You hear every once in a while about a planet being discovered in the "Goldielocks zone" but this blew my mind. Like you said "Make you wonder"...Hmm I think it's a little naive for people to think that we are the only ones who have somehow hit the life supporting jackpot.

What a great visualization - I love it! To go to their last point a little further - this is just based on what we know life looks like on one planet. Imagine when we can expand our frame of reference to be able to look at all the excluded planets! How could life NOT be everywhere?

What I find fascinating about discovering exoplanets is how boring it seems to be to the general masses. With the sheer number of them discovered so far, to me it is extremely exciting and starting to open the door that actually our Universe is teeming with life.

It is relatively still a new discovery, the first exoplanet was confirmed in 1992.

So for many, many years we had no way to even prove that Earth like planets or any planets at all existed outside our solar system. Now we have found a tremendous amount over a very short time. According to exoplanets. org: 4,201 planets have been found. exoplanets.org...

It seems to not be such a favorite pop culture topic for discussion. The Cosmos in general seems to be something we (modern humans) take for granted. Finding all these exoplanets increases the probability of life existing elsewhere quite loftily and in my opinion is proof enough of life within the Universe as prominent and dispersed as all other related existences within this realm of reality.

Imagine another fifty or hundred years down the line, I would imagine the number of discovered exoplanets will be in the hundreds of thousands if not exponentially more.

Thank you for sharing the link Op. S&F.

Does anyone know what the temperature is outside of the heliosphere? I haven't seen any information about that from NASA....since their satellite is out there now it should be able to transmit that information back. I suppose they forgot to put a thermometer on the thing back in the sixties.

mcx1942
What I find fascinating about discovering exoplanets is how boring it seems to be to the general masses.

I think it's just the sheer fact that you have only the scientist's word to go on. "By watching the host star blink and studying the spectroscopy we can tell that there is a rocky planet 4 times the mass of Earth orbiting what might be the habital zone of this star and it could have water on it's surface".

That's great and all, but it's just hard to get excited about a tiny dot of light and speculation. We want to /see/ real, quality images of this planet! Not artist renditions! Now that would really get everyone super-excited. Getting to actually see the first real planet outside of our solar system..that's what would get everyone going crazy and speculating. Sadly, I know I'll probably never see this in my life time, but I dream of a day when we have high-res images of an alien planet, like the famous, beautiful images we have of worlds in our own system from the Voyager and Cassini missions.

Yah & how do we get out there Putin/Russia cause Obama killed the space program???

And to think people laughed at me when I was in school when I said that there were many planets outside our own solar system and that life exists in the Universe. Well they are not laughing now are they! And they certaintly wont be laughing when ET is announced on the news someday. I feel vindicated!

rickymouse
Does anyone know what the temperature is outside of the heliosphere? I haven't seen any information about that from NASA....since their satellite is out there now it should be able to transmit that information back. I suppose they forgot to put a thermometer on the thing back in the sixties.

Vacuum itself doesn't have a temperature. There is some interstellar gas and dust that has temperature, but it's so tenuous that it wouldn't affect the thermometer. Heat is gained or lost through radiation. Outside of the Solar System, a spacecraft would get very cold.

The temperature of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation is 2.7 kelvin. (−270 °C; −454 °F) en.wikipedia.org...

reply to post by wildespace


But this is the first time that we have actually had any sensors outside of the solar system. Until this time everything was a hypothesis. I am looking for information that is real but haven't seen any yet. Many things that were thought to be true have recently been proven wrong once we actually got instruments out there. Recently they have found that the earth and probably every planet has lines or arms of connection with the sun. That hypothesis would have been laughed at two years ago by most scientists. I like real evidence before I make a conclusion about something, not just a widely accepted consensus of the time..

It will probably take a few more months of analysis before NASA releases the information. Hopefully it is not so different that thought that they do not tell us. I don't want to have to go back to third grade in five years to find the truth. Sometimes adults do not get access to this knowledge but young kids do.