The Golden Age of Exoplanetary Research
When I was very young, I saw Neil Armstrong put his foot on the Moon on live TV, but I’m more amazed every year at new scientific discoveries in space.
The Centauri Dreams site has an interesting piece on the newest exoplanetary discovery of a planetary body, 45 times the size of the earth orbiting the star 55 Cancri, and apparently in the so-called “green zone” (where the temperature is right for liquid water to exist.)
While this doesn’t really shore up the extraterretrial hypothesis of UFOs, it is cool to note that our childhood dreams of looking into the sky and wondering if there was another kid on another planet wondering about us is another step closer to reality. The site also mentions that the European Space Agency’s COROT (COnvection, ROTation and planetary trasnits)astronomical satellite is “discovering exo-planets at a rate only set by the available resources to follow up the detections.” The Drake Equation is looking more realistic every year.
Thanks to Mac Tonnies for the heads-up.
This entry was posted
on Tuesday, November 6th, 2007 at 10:43 pm and is filed under Wake Up Down There, Breaking News, Astronomy/Space. You can follow responses via RSS 2.0 feed.
You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is not allowed.
del.icio.us Digg Reddit Ma.gnolia Technorati Help
- Related News Stories:
- Golden Age Italian UFOs »
- Flying Saucer Music #32 »
- UFOs: The News »
- Tim Good Interviewed »
- Saucer Smear! »
|
Nov 06 2007 
November 7th, 2007 at 11:40 am
Give me COROT anytime over CARET!
Interestingly, the cultural impact of this can be so profound that it has not yet caught the attention of most people.
But we have to remember that most probably that new planet won’t have life of its own (at least not life as we know it) as it is a gas giant, and although Carl Sagan made a pretty good thought experiment trying to imagine what kind of life could flourish on a planet like Jupiter, chances are that the most plausible places for organisms to flourish would be on this new planet’s orbiting moons, just like Europa or Enceladus in our own solar system.
Sadly, we don’t have the means to detect those smaller rocky moons or planetoids… yet.
These are the kind of things I think NASA should focus its resources to, instead of trying to re-create a new “Apollo on steroids” all on its own… If man is ever going to colonize other celestial bodies, it will only be accomplished through international cooperation.
November 7th, 2007 at 3:04 pm
RPJ,
Yeah, I know it was just a “gas giant,” but there were theories put forward about moons of these giants possibly harboring life, since they are in that “green zone.”
Also, the discovery was made with ground-based telescopes, and not the COROT platform, even though the space telescope is doing it faster. I suspect that astronomers are using the adaptive optics system that I described in Project Beta to tease more detail out of their images.
November 7th, 2007 at 5:52 pm
Greg,
Yeah, orbiting moons are the surest bet for life harborers. And yes, they used the time-tested “star-wobbling” approach to detect this massive planet. That’s why it took 18 years of observations and analysis to determine the existence of this new planet.
I wonder, would Seth and his Seti gang change their searching procedures after this new discovery?
We really do need Interferometer satellite telescopes to try and find a class M rocky planet.
If Nasa told me that the main purpose of tha base they intend to build at the Moon was to put a telescope that would search for Earth-like planets, they would have in me their most inconditional supporter.