2nd Annual Kepler Science Conference - 10 NEW Earthlike Planets in Habitable Zones -LIVE STREAM- Oct

They are streaming everything live and there are some interesting new discoveries *10 Earth size planet candidates in the habitable zone of G and K (Sunlike) stars* complete with slides and a chat.

Tune in here: connect.arc.nasa.gov...

As promised... We can now add 10 new Earth sized planets (1-2 times the size of Earth) in Habitable Zones to our knowledge.

These 10 are all around G or K stars either identical or similar to our Sun.

Conclusion anywhere from 22% (plus or minus 8%) of stars like our Sun have a planet 1 to 2 times the size of the Earth in the stars habitable zone where liquid water would flow on its surface.








This is amazing.

To review: there are 200 billion stars in our Milky Way Galaxy.
11 percent of them are stars like our Sun. Or 22,000,000,000 Sunlike stars.
We now can estimate that around 22% of these have planets like the Earth.

That amounts to 440,000,000.

To put that figure into perspective: That is 120,000,000 more Earthlike planets that inhabit our Galaxy than people inhabit the United States (320,000,000 people in the US roughly).

In other words: We probably have a lot of company out there. Some of it likely nearby. (Galaxy is only 100,000 light years across).

If you just spread those planets out evenly then that means within 10 light years on average there are 12 Earthlike planets.

Thanks for the link, very interesting.

But it's November now, not October

Awesome stuff here. My puny brain just can't correlate how the hell they are able to determine such and such stars do or don't have the possibity of water just from looking at those darn charts. Obviously everything they do is purely based off of hypothetical logic but I'm glad they have the brain power to do so.

Any wonder we are not alone and being visited for a very long time. So if there are so many earth like planets and if we were to guess that 0.1% had life. How many Intelligent species would there be? More than 57 thats for sure!

Gets more interesting by the month.

And for those who feel we are alone, youve got to be kidding!

reply to post by JadeStar


The Federation of Planets will soon be calling.

Ten new earthlike planets in the very very very very tiny piece of space that this relates too shows that the universe (at least our local bubble) contains as many earthlike planets as all the grains of sand on all the.....you know what I mean.

signalfire
Thanks for the link, very interesting.

But it's November now, not October

Doh. Blame lack of sleep lol.

HawkeyeNation
Awesome stuff here. My puny brain just can't correlate how the hell they are able to determine such and such stars do or don't have the possibity of water just from looking at those darn charts.

Water, contrary to popular thought is one of the most common molecules in the universe. Just about wherever we look in space we find water in some form whether solid (ice), liquid, or gas.

We can detect water because of something called spectroscopy. Basically it works like this, light when it passes between a star and our telescopes, it passes through various gasses. The light is sort of like a .zip file on your computer. It contains a lot of information in one convenient package. Many elements leave their own fingerprint in that package. When we "unpack" the light from the star into a rainbow of separate colors, we see dark bands. The dark bands correspond with different elements on the periodic table and various molecules like H2O (water), CO2 (Carbon Dioxide) CO (Carbon Monoxide), NH3 (Ammonia) etc.





The dark lines on that rainbow are absorption lines and they tell us what was in the way. There are also emission lines but I won't go into that right now.

Also large molecular clouds of water give off radio waves when they are energized by cosmic rays, xrays, etc. You can see them the various frequencies here:

Obviously everything they do is purely based off of hypothetical logic but I'm glad they have the brain power to do so.

Spectroscopy isn't hypothetical. It's used every day, some car mechanics use it in a tool they use to check the RPM of an engine, it is used even in medicine.

If you want a layman's intro to Astronomy and astrobiology mixed in with a bit of UFO lore start reading my posts in this thread here: www.abovetopsecret.com...


It also why I laugh at sci-fi and stories that aliens would come to Earth because of water. There's likely 10 other uninhabited planets like the Earth full of water between them and us were they coming from just 40-50 light years away.

There is no need for alien invasion for resources. Any species advanced enough to get here can get to plenty of places where the cost and trouble of getting the same resources would be much lower.

RP2SticksOfDynamite
Any wonder we are not alone and being visited for a very long time. So if there are so many earth like planets and if we were to guess that 0.1% had life. How many Intelligent species would there be? More than 57 thats for sure!

Gets more interesting by the month.]

I did a rough calculation:

200 billion (number of stars in our Milky Way galaxy) *times* 11% (the percentage of stars like our Sun) = 22,000,000,000 Sunlike stars

22,000,000,000 Sunlike stars *times* 22% (the percentage of Sunlike stars that have habitable Earth sized planets based on today's announcement) = 440,000,000 Earthlike habitable planets in our Milky Way galaxy

440,000,000 Earthlike habitable worlds /divided by volume of the Milky Way Galaxy.....

Uh oh... time to do some more math...

The volume of the Milky Way can be approximated by a disk with a thickness of 1000 light years and a radius of 50,000 light years.

For simplicity I will use the formula for calculating the volume of a sphere: The formula is V = 4/3 π r cubed.

r = 50,000 light years

The cube of the radius - 1,350,000 light years

Multiply 1,350,000 light years by 4 over 3 (4/3 or 1.33333333333 in decimals) = 1,800,000 light years

Multiply 1,800,000 light years by π (pi) = 5,654,867

So the volume of the Milky Way - 5,654,867 light years


So to conclude 440,000,000 Earths divided by 5,654,867 (the volume of our Milky Way galaxy in light years) = 78.6 Earthlike planets cubed per a 100 light year volume on average = 647 Earths within a 100 light year sphere

So about 647 stars within 100 light years should have a planet like the Earth.

If we assume only 1% of those Earthlike planets produce technological intelligences then that = around 6.5 intelligent species within 100 light years of the Earth and a total of 44 million intelligent species in the Galaxy.

(I put money on us being the 0.5 in that figure by the way )

Kepler space telescope finds Earth-size, potentially habitable planets are common

Our Milky Way galaxy alone could harbor tens of billions of rocky worlds where water might be liquid at the surface, according to the report, which was published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and discussed at a news conference in California.

A fifth of all sunlike stars in our galaxy might have habitable planets

If the estimate is correct, the nearest ocean planet might be just 12 light-years away, which, though extremely distant for all practical purposes (such as sending a robotic space probe), is just around the corner in our galactic neighborhood.

reply to post by JadeStar

Good calculation. However, the one percent figure for Earthlike planets that evolve intelligent life may be far too high.

It took three and a half billion years — a quarter of the age of the universe — to get from life to intelligence on planet Earth. And even then, only one species ever evolved sufficient intelligence to produce a technological civilisation. To me that suggests that the evolution of high intelligence is a very rare occurrence. Odds of one in a hundred may be far too short. One in a million may be more realistic.

Astyanax
reply to post by JadeStar

 

Good calculation. However, the one percent figure for Earthlike planets that evolve intelligent life may be far too high.

It took three and a half billion years — a quarter of the age of the universe — to get from life to intelligence on planet Earth. And even then, only one species ever evolved sufficient intelligence to produce a technological civilisation. To me that suggests that the evolution of high intelligence is a very rare occurrence. Odds of one in a hundred may be far too short. One in a million may be more realistic.

So how many intelligent life form does that give us? Still millions if thinking Universe.

Astyanax
reply to post by JadeStar

 

Good calculation. However, the one percent figure for Earthlike planets that evolve intelligent life may be far too high.

It took three and a half billion years — a quarter of the age of the universe — to get from life to intelligence on planet Earth.

You realize our solar system is young compared to most of the Milky Way galaxy right?

Most stars are about 2-4 billion years older than our Sun and Earth. As such they would have had far longer to develop intelligence than we did. A 2-4 billion year head start.

There is no good reason to believe that evolution would take longer on other planets than it took on Earth.

I am with Copernicus on this stuff. The more we think we are special the less special we learn we are other than we might be the youngest intelligent species contemplating all of this in our section of the Galaxy.

And even then, only one species ever evolved sufficient intelligence to produce a technological civilisation. To me that suggests that the evolution of high intelligence is a very rare occurrence. Odds of one in a hundred may be far too short. One in a million may be more realistic.

At this point they're all guesses. But I would guess on the side of us being average because every other thing we thought was special about the Sun, our planet, the elements in our solar system and the likelihood of other planets like the Earth has shown that if anything, we've been too conservative in our estimates, not too optimistic.

The "Rare Earth" hypothesis took a huge blow today.

www.scientificamerican.com...

I wonder how long it will take them to figure out how to get there to explore.

Text Alcubierre’s design called for an American football-shaped spacecraft with a flat ring attached to the ship. Space time would warp around it, accelerating the ship to as fast as 10 times the speed of light without the ship itself ever breaking the speed of light. This would make trips to local stars a relatively quick jaunt: a trip to Alpha Centauri — some four light years away from Earth — would take just shy of five months.

www.extremetech.com...

I don't believe it will take long now that they have targeted some areas. I'm sure a budget will be set aside just for this - with the greatest minds working day and night to come up with a way.

Dianec
I wonder how long it will take them to figure out how to get there to explore.

Text Alcubierre’s design called for an American football-shaped spacecraft with a flat ring attached to the ship. Space time would warp around it, accelerating the ship to as fast as 10 times the speed of light without the ship itself ever breaking the speed of light. This would make trips to local stars a relatively quick jaunt: a trip to Alpha Centauri — some four light years away from Earth — would take just shy of five months.

www.extremetech.com...

I don't believe it will take long now that they have targeted some areas. I'm sure a budget will be set aside just for this - with the greatest minds working day and night to come up with a way.

edit on 4-11-2013 by Dianec because: Reformatted to put into quotes

There's a whole thread I started over in the Aliens & UFOs forum on that story about NASA testing his warp theory.

Even if it tests out it may be centuries before we know how to scale it up to a working warp drive engine.

That doesn't mean we can't send slower stuff to the stars. There are plenty of ideas for interstellar missions that would last about the length of our current human lifetime travelling at 1%-10% of the speed of light.

Project Longshot, Project Daedalus, The Lightsail, etc but there simply is no public and political will to build this stuff.

Simply knowing where another Earth is won't spur on an interstellar industry. Science education in the US in many schools has been poor for a long time and there is no culture of wanting to geek out on this stuff so it remains the domain of the few that do.

How do we change our society into becoming a spacefaring one again? That's the bigger question.

Ours is a culture of entertainment. "Here we are now. Entertain us."

Even our ideas about human spaceflight in the near term are all about entertainment (space tourism), not science.

Want interstellar space probes and colonies, well then it might make sense to allocate the money used to build new aircraft carriers, submarines, and B2s to building a starship. Because at minimum, that is what it will take budget wise.

We have the money. We lack the will.

reply to post by JadeStar


I'll try to find your thread and read through it. We have come so far technologically - it feels a lot like warp speed on that fact alone. I believe this can be done. I agree with you though - lazy minds and lack of will to do things that disrupt the equilibrium, which leaves us with few minds figuring this out. Education doesn't help either. I'm not even aware of science fairs for my own child to participate in (not that he is learning anything hands on yet - all about evolution right now). I am left to fill gaps I am not qualified to fill since he is interested in physics and the like.

When I read the article I felt hope - someone is going to do this. It sounds like they can (slower than ideal) so I will hope for that piece instead of the warp drive invention. I have a strong feeling we are on the edge of warp drive though - if only people could see the value and support the minds that have the motivation behind them. I'll find your thread and begin studying it. Thanks

reply to post by JadeStar



im disappointed looks like they've moved the goal posts in what they class as an earth size planet. I'm going to try and search for some answers maybe email them.

so yeah I read the actual paper and theyre jazzing up their numbers for the public

they class the HZ like this "a planet receives between four times and one-quarter the amount of light that Earth receives from the sun" 4x is completely insane. This is the same solar flux at 0.5 AU. Venus is 0.7 AU.

they count "earth size" as 1.5-2x the size (radius) of earth which is dubious at best. Planets this size are classed as super earths and are not likely to have the same conditions as a true earth size planet. ( 1.3r max) There were 2 papers presented that stated anything above 1.6r would be a mini Neptune.

so the 22% number is misleading as they are including planets that are too big and also too close to the star.

The paper itself gives more “realistic” values when using the habitable zone as defined by Kasting resp. Kopparapu: Then the number of Earth-like planets decreases to 8.6%. Restricting also the size range to 1-1.4 Earth radius reduces the value by about half (according to the paper), so we have maybe 4.3% as a more “conservative” estimate. And of course this is not based on actual data but on (mild) extrapolation, since Kepler hasn't actually found any such Earth-analog yet.

from 22% they present to the public to 4.3% when you read the paper. I can only class this as data manipulation. But at least i get a better answer from the paper

Astyanax
reply to post by JadeStar

 

Good calculation. However, the one percent figure for Earthlike planets that evolve intelligent life may be far too high.

It took three and a half billion years — a quarter of the age of the universe — to get from life to intelligence on planet Earth. And even then, only one species ever evolved sufficient intelligence to produce a technological civilisation. To me that suggests that the evolution of high intelligence is a very rare occurrence. Odds of one in a hundred may be far too short. One in a million may be more realistic.

Ok so if we say 0.0001%. How many intel life planets?