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Exoplanets (Extra-Solar Planets)

Some radio astronomers are probably already pointing their antennas at Kepler and other exoplanets trying to discover intelligent signals.
 
It is always possible that the physics just doesn't allow much by way of what might be considered an extrastellar civilisation.
 
A better than 50/50 chance Kepler-186f has technological life

SETI Live's data on Kepler-186's solar system could be revealing evidence of extraterrestrial life. SETI may have seen ET's satellite signals already. Here is the data and my analysis. From my own expertise and experience in astronomy, specifically classifying signals for SETI Live... I say there is a better than 50/50 chance we have found that we are not alone.

SETI Live, a program whereby anyone can take part in searching for extraterrestrial intelligence has already pointed it's telescope array at Kepler-186, also known as KIC 8120608. I have done some digging and found their results. The following image shows the actual data from SETI Live on Kepler-186. This image is what SEIT Live calls a "waterfall".

So, now that you know what you would be seeing here is what the Allen Telescope Array saw from Kepler 186 on April 12th of 2014 at 19:20 UTC. The frequency is approximately 6430.5 MHz (or 6.4305 GHz).

Do any of you see a pattern in this noisy data? Do any of you see what could look like a broadband signal from ET?

One of the problem with searching for ET's radio signals is that we often use the same frequencies. The laws of physics dictate the way we use satellite communications. ET would have to obey those same laws. As it happens the above data was taken at the C band... often used on Earth for satellite communication.

So how can we know weather we are looking at RFI from our own satellites or an ET signal?

A signal from Kepler-186f would be very faint. It would look almost like static. The difference is there would be a pattern of white streaks. A few dozen pixels long and slightly on the diagonal. They would be next to each other indicating a communication band. IF there is a civilization with a satellite system at least as complicated as our own, there would be many such banded patterns next to each other.

I have been looking at SETI Live data on and off for many years now. I think I know RFI when I see it. I know random static when I see it. Looking at the data from Kepler-186f this is what I see.

Usually I am the one who gives a sober voice and a calm measured reading to scientific data while the rest of the media has a field day. That is my niche. There are many caveats to what I am about to claim. This could be confirmation bias. Who wouldn't want to find such a signal set in a known solar system? It could be really weak RFI from Seth Shostak talking to his wife about picking up milk on his Bluetooth. It could be reflected interference from satellites in Earth's orbit. I could have lost my ever loving mind.


Allow me to be bombastic, based on the above data and I will say there is a better than 50/50 chance Kepler-186f has technological life.
There is a strong possibility that KEPLER-186f may have intelligent life! Much more study would be needed along many fronts before we could know this one way or the other with real certainty. I would put the odds at 50/50 or 60/40 in favor of intelligent life using radio.


I wish to go on record publicly now as saying that there is a very good chance Kepler-186 has a technological civilization which 500 years ago (when the signals would have left there) was at least as advanced as our own. I could be very wrong....but that data is just what I would expect an ET signal to look like. It would be very noisy and degraded broadband communication as one would see from a network of satellites orbiting a planet.


Michio Kaku explains the problems with searching for ET quite well.

His mention of ET using a broadband signal is just what I had in mind for the last two or three years or so that I have been doing this. The signals I see in that background are what a broadband signal would look like.

None of this is withstanding what I said earlier about how Kepler-186f is most likely much colder than Earth. There is no reason that technological life could not develop on a very cold planet. To life which is evolved for such a planet our world is what would seem strange.

How to test this hypothesis.

This situation shows the reason we need to restart work on the terrestrial Planet finder (both versions coroagraph and interferometer). If we had the TPF right now we could find out just what the deal was with Kepler-186f.

Only a device like the TPF could practically test the hypothesis that Kepler-186f has technological life in a very rigorous way. Listening in on radio has many question marks. Seeing the spectrum of the planet and finding methane, water vapor, carbon dioxide, and soot, from technological life would close the case to a 70-80 percent chance.

One more thing to consider. If there are ET's living on Kepler-186f they look at Earth and see us at about 500 years ago. They see Earth at about the same time that Pocahontas was alive. So unless they have something like the terrestrial planet finder they have no idea we are here, and intelligent.

Updated 4/24/2014 3:05 AM CDST to add a illustration which hi lites my points about what it would take to say we've found ET technological life with anything like 90 or 100 percent certainty.

To look for a signal so strong that it would've been beamed at us intentionally is not a good way to proceed. Instead we should look for three kinds of evidence, which by themselves would not be proof enough, but when taken together are a powerful argument that a planet must have technological life. Like a stool needs all three legs for support and stability, this conclusion needs at least the three types of evidence in the triangle. A Earth mass planet in the habitable zone, possible communication as indicated by non-random appearing radio, IR, or optical signals, and spectroscopic data indicating a life friendly atmosphere with trace elements technology would introduce.

Any one of those three types of proof could be explained away by a naturalistic explanation. Spectral analysis of 186f, or any other planets atmosphere showing carbon, soot, water vapor, oxygen, nitrogen, and trace radioactive elements could mean two things. Either a civilization like ours has been belching out carbon oxides and testing nuclear weapons in the atmosphere...or there is very active volcanism. If we have that spectra data, and a HZ planet, and possible communications, the odds we would see all of those by chance are astronomical...less than 1%. Then and only then could we say we have likely found the home of another technologically intelligent species.


At best what we have on 186f now gives us a two legged stool. A two legged stool cannot stand, but we should try to find that third leg.

http://www.science20.com/quantum_gravit ... ife-134555
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'Godzilla of Earths' identified
By Jonathan Amos, Science correspondent, BBC News

There is a new class of planet out there that astronomers are calling the "mega-Earth".
It is an object with a hard surface like our own world but much, much bigger.
The necessity for the new designation follows the discovery of a planet which has a mass some 17 times that of Earth.

Known as Kepler-10c, it orbits a star about 560 light-years away. Scientists described its properties at an American Astronomical Society meeting in Boston.
They confess it is something of a head-scratcher.
Theorists had always thought that any planet that large would pull so much hydrogen on to itself that it would look more like a Neptune or a Jupiter.

"We were very surprised when we realised what we had found," said Xavier Dumusque of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), who led the research team.

"This is the Godzilla of Earths!" added the CfA's Dimitar Sasselov, the director of the Harvard Origins of Life Initiative. "But unlike the movie monster, Kepler-10c has positive implications for life."

Kepler-10c, as the name suggests, was detected by the US space agency's Kepler telescope.
This finds new worlds by looking for the tiny dip in light as they pass in front of their parent stars.
The technique gives a diameter - in this case, 29,000km, or just over two times the width of Earth - but not a mass.

For that, astronomers looked at 10c with the Harps-North instrument on the Telescopio Nazionale Galileo in the Canary Islands.
It extracts a mass measurement by examining the gravitational interaction between the planet and its host star.
Combined with the diameter, the mass number showed that Kepler-10c cannot be a gaseous world but must comprise very dense material.

Interestingly, the age of the host star is about 11 billion years old, which is early in the evolution of the Universe when generations of exploding stars have not had long to make the heavy elements needed to construct rocky planets.
"Finding Kepler-10c tells us that rocky planets could form much earlier than we thought. And if you can make rocks, you can make life," says Prof Sasselov.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-27669572
 
Planet Habitability Laboratory - University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo

Oldest Known Potentially Habitable Exoplanet Found

The planets around the nearby red-dwarf Kapteyn's star are over twice as old as Earth

An international team of astronomers, led by Guillem Anglada-Escude from Queen Mary University, reports two new planets orbiting a very old and nearby star to the Sun named Kapteyn's star. One of the newly-discovered planets, Kapteyn b, is potentially habitable as it has the right-size and orbit to support liquid water on its surface. What makes this discovery highly interesting is the peculiar story and age of the star. Kapteyn b is likely over twice the age of Earth and the oldest known potentially habitable planet listed in the Habitable Exoplanets Catalog.

The Super-Earth Kapteyn b orbits the star every 48 days and has a mass at least five times that of Earth's. The second planet, Kapteyn c, is a more massive Super-Earth with an orbit of 121 days and too cold to support liquid water. At the moment, only a few properties of the planets are known: minimum masses, orbital periods, and distances to the star. By measuring their atmospheres with future instruments, scientists will try to find out whether some of these planets are truly habitable worlds.

Kapteyn b is probably colder than Earth given a similar atmosphere. However a denser atmosphere could easily provide for equal or even higher temperatures. Based on its stellar flux (45% that of Earth's) and mass (? 4.8 Earth masses) the Earth Similarity Index (ESI) of Kapteyn b is comparable to Kepler-62f and Kepler-186f. Given its old age (~11.5 billion years), Kapteyn b has had plenty of time to develop life, as we know it.

The astronomers used new data from HARPS spectrometer at the ESO's La Silla observatory in Chile to measure tiny periodic changes in the motion of the star. Using the Doppler Effect, which shifts the star’s light spectrum depending on its velocity, the scientists worked out some properties of these planets, such as their masses and orbital periods.The study also combined data from two more high-precision spectrometers to secure the detection: HIRES at Keck Observatory and PFS at Magellan/Las Campanas Observatory.

About Kapteyn's Star

Discovered at the end of the 19th century and named after the Dutch astronomer who found it (Jacobus Kapteyn), Kapteyn's is the second fastest moving star in the sky and belongs to the galactic halo, an extended cloud of stars orbiting our Galaxy in very elliptic orbits. With a third of the mass of the Sun, this red-dwarf can be seen in the southern constellation of Pictor with an amateur telescope.

Typical planetary systems detected by NASA's Kepler mission are hundreds of light-years away. In contrast, Kapteyn's star is the 25th nearest star to the Sun and it is only 13 light years away from Earth. It was born in a dwarf Galaxy absorbed and disrupted by the Early Milky Way. Such a galactic disruption event put the star in its fast halo orbit. The likely remnant core of the original dwarf galaxy is Omega Centauri, an enigmatic globular cluster 16,000 light years from Earth which contains hundreds of thousands of similarly old suns. This sets the most likely age of its planets at 11.5 billion years; which is 2.5 times older than Earth and 'only' 2 billion years younger than the Universe itself (~13.7 billion years).
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PeteByrdie said:
Planet Habitability Laboratory - University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo

Oldest Known Potentially Habitable Exoplanet Found

Kapteyn's star is the 25th nearest star to the Sun and it is only 13 light years away from Earth. It was born in a dwarf Galaxy absorbed and disrupted by the Early Milky Way. Such a galactic disruption event put the star in its fast halo orbit. The likely remnant core of the original dwarf galaxy is Omega Centauri, an enigmatic globular cluster 16,000 light years from Earth which contains hundreds of thousands of similarly old suns. This sets the most likely age of its planets at 11.5 billion years; which is 2.5 times older than Earth and 'only' 2 billion years younger than the Universe itself (~13.7 billion years).
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Expect future alien contactees to meet beings from Kapteyn's star, especially Kapteyn b... ;)
 
One of the Most Earthlike Planets Ever Found May Not Exist

What was thought to be a planet in the "Goldilocks Zone" of its star may have just been starspots.
The Sun, imaged through calcium K (blue) and hydrogen alpha (red) filters. Prominences are shown inverted for visibility. The calcium line is commonly used as a proxy for stellar activity.

A filtered picture shows sunspots similar to the ones on Gliese 581 blamed for a false detection of a planet.

PHOTOGRAPH BY ALAN FRIEDMAN

Michael D. Lemonick

for National Geographic

Published July 3, 2014

All sorts of excitement accompanied astronomers' discovery of Gliese 581g in 2010—the alien world looked like Earth in both size and temperature, and thus seemed potentially hospitable to life.
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But according to a paper published Thursday in the journal Science, that excitement was misplaced. (Related: "First Truly Habitable Planet Discovered, Experts Say.")

"Gliese 581g doesn't exist," said lead author Paul Robertson of Penn State University in State College, Pennsylvania. Neither, he said, does another planet in the same solar system, known as Gliese 581d, announced in 2009—less clearly hospitable to life, but still once seen by some astronomers as a possible place to find aliens.

Initial Discovery

The original evidence for both worlds' existence came from measurements of its home star, Gliese 581—a dim red dwarf, about a third as massive as the sun, that resides about 22 light-years away from our solar system. (Related: "Land on 'Goldilocks' Planet for Sale on Ebay.")

Most exoplanets are too close to their stars to be seen directly with telescopes, so astronomers find them with indirect clues. In the case of Gliese 581g, they watched for subtle wobbles caused by the gravity of an orbiting planet tugging back and forth on the star in a regular pattern.

That's what Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution for Science, in Washington, D.C., and Steven Vogt of the University of California, Santa Cruz, thought they'd observed when they announced the discovery of Gliese 581g.

The time it took the "planet" to complete one orbit (37 days) told them how far it was from the star. In the case of this cool star, that was "just at the right distance to have liquid water on its surface," Butler said at the time. The strength of the tugging, meanwhile, told them the planet was about three times as massive as Earth.

Rising Doubt

But even at the time, other astronomers questioned whether Gliese 581g was really there. A star's wobbles are measured by looking at its spectrum—its light, smeared out to form a sort of rainbow. The wobbles are so tiny, however, that it takes some statistical analysis to find a back-and-forth pattern.

Critics such as exoplanet expert Eric Ford, then at the University of Florida and now at Penn State, said that Butler's and Vogt's analysis was unconvincing, arguing that the pattern wasn't even clearly there.

Robertson and his colleagues, however, did find a pattern: "There is a real, physical signal," he said. The bad news: "It's just that it's coming from the star itself, not from the gravity of planets d and g."

Starry Eyes

What's happening, they say, is that magnetic disturbances on Gliese 581's surface—starspots—are altering the star's spectrum in such a way that it mimics the motion induced by a planet.

The star itself rotates once every 130 days, carrying the starspots with it; the disputed planets appeared to have periods of almost exactly one half and one fourth of the 130-day period. When the scientists corrected for the starspot signal, both planets disappeared.

"This analysis demonstrates pretty convincingly that these signatures are more due to stellar activity than to the existence of planets," said Ford, who wasn't involved in this research. (Butler declined to comment on the new result, and Vogt did not respond to an emailed request for comment.)

Silver Lining

At the same time, subtracting the starspot signal actually made the evidence for three other worlds in the Gliese 581 system—planets b, c, and e, all of which are too hot to be habitable—even stronger.

"It's unfortunate that the other planets don't exist," said co-author Suvrath Mahadevan, also at Penn State. "But the important takeaway is that stellar activity is an important source of contamination, and that we can [now] take it into account."

It's very encouraging, agreed Robertson, that "we can now take out the stellar influence and reveal the planet's existence."

Follow Michael D. Lemonick on Twitter.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news ... y-science/
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Gliese 832c: Life-Roasting 'Super-Venus' Discovered

Jun 30, 2014 03:26 PM ET // by Ian O'Neill
View Related Gallery »
Artistic representation of the potentially habitable Super-Earth Gliese 832c with an actual photo of its parent star, center, taken on June 25, 2014 from Aguadilla, Puerto Rico.

Efrain Morales Rivera / Astronomical Society of the Caribbean / PHL / UPR Arecibo
Gallery
TopExoplanetsforAlienLife:photos
View Caption +#1: Cowboys & Aliens are Coming!
View Caption +#2: The Basics
View Caption +#3: Gliese 581d
View Caption +#4: Gliese 581g
View Caption +#5: GJ 1214b
View Caption +#6: HD 209458b
View Caption +#7: Kepler-10b
View Caption +#8: Project Icarus
View Caption +#9: Are We Alone?
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The Most Horrific Alien Planets In Our Galaxy: Photos
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One of the key incentives behind hunting down exoplanets is to find alien worlds with qualities similar to Earth. But in the case of a newly-discovered exoplanet orbiting a star only 16 light-years away, although astronomers may call it ‘habitable’ and a ‘super-Earth,’ it’s likely anything but.

Gliese 832c orbits a red dwarf star and it was discovered by the international Anglo-Australian Planet Search team led by Robert Wittenmyer of the University of New South Wales, Australia. The discovery has been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal.

PHOTOS: Exquisite Exoplanetary Art

Red dwarfs are small, dim stars that generate far less energy than our sun. Therefore, for a red dwarf-orbiting planet to maintain water in a liquid state on its surface, it must orbit much closer to the star. In the case of Gliese 832, its ‘habitable zone’ is very compact and Gliese 832c has an orbital period of just under 36 days. The possibly-rocky world, which is around 5 times the mass of Earth, is therefore considered ‘habitable.’ In fact, Gliese 832c is considered to be the third-most habitable world known so far on the Earth Similarity Index (ESI).

But don’t go having dreams of blue skies, opal oceans and lush, alien forests — this world would likely choke any life (well, life as we know it).

“Given the large mass of the planet, it seems likely that it would possess a massive atmosphere, which may well render the planet inhospitable,” said co-investigator Chris Tinney, also of UNSW. “A denser atmosphere would trap heat and could make it more like a super-Venus and too hot for life.”

ANALYSIS: New Exoplanet Hunter Directly Images Alien Worlds

Like Venus, Gliese 832c is probably enduring intense warming caused by a runaway greenhouse effect. In this case, although the planet’s orbital location should allow liquid water to persist, any water would likely be ripped apart on a molecular level by intense atmospheric heating and ultraviolet light from the star, a process known as dissociation.

Of course, the astronomers have no idea what chemicals are contained within Gliese 832c’s atmosphere. The world was discovered through its gravitational pull on its parent star, so no information about its atmosphere (if it indeed has one) and any water it contains is known. The wobbling effect (which can be detected through precise radial velocity measurements) was detected by combining observations by the Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT) at Siding Spring Observatory, Australia, the 6.5 meter Magellan Telescope and the European Southern Observatory’s 3.6 meter telescope (both located in Chile).

ANALYSIS: Awesome Exoplanet Imager Begins Hunt for Alien Worlds

In 2009, the same team detected another planet around Gliese 832. Thought to be a large gas giant like Jupiter, Gliese 832b has a 9 year orbit around the star. It is for this reason that astronomers believe the system to resemble the multi-planetary structure of our solar system, only more compact. And more planets could be discovered in the future.

“With an outer giant planet and an interior potentially rocky planet, this planetary system can be thought of as a miniature version of our Solar System,” added Tinney.

So beware the headlines that suggest Gliese 832c is ‘Earth-like’ — it is more likely ‘Venus-like’ and very alien to us terrestrial lifeforms.

Source: UNSW

http://news.discovery.com/space/alien-l ... 140630.htm
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This is exciting news - a great picture!

Planet formation captured in photo
By Jonathan Webb, Science reporter, BBC News

The clearest ever image of planets forming around an infant star has been taken by the Alma radio telescope.
In a vast disc of dust and gas, dark rings are clearly visible: gaps in the cloud, swept clear by brand new planets in orbit.
The sun-like star at the centre, HL Tau, is less than a million years old and is 450 light years from Earth in the constellation Taurus.

The image was made possible by Alma's new high-resolution capabilities.
Because the process of planet formation takes place in the midst of such a huge dust cloud, it can't be observed using visible light.
Alma, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, has snapped the impressive new image using much longer wavelengths, which it detects by comparing the signal from multiple antennas up to 15km apart.

To test out its latest high-resolution capability, only in operation since September, Alma scientists pointed the antennas at HL Tau. They found themselves looking at a "protoplanetary disc" in more detail than ever before. 8)

"I think it's phenomenal," said Dr Aprajita Verma, an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford.
"This shows how exciting Alma is going to be - it's going to be an incredible instrument."

Prof Tim de Zeeuw is director general of the European Southern Observatory, one of several organisations involved in Alma. He said: "Most of what we know about planet formation today is based on theory. Images with this level of detail have up to now been relegated to computer simulations or artist's impressions."

Dr Verma agreed that the image was a significant new piece of evidence - particularly because the star HL Tau is very young.
"I think the big result is that you might have expected just a smooth disc," she told the BBC.
"But you're really seeing multiple rings - and where it's darker, that's where you've cleared the material already in the disc."

The whole process is happening faster than we would have predicted from existing data, Dr Verma explained.
"It means that things are coagulating. It's really a planetary system, that you're seeing at a very early time.
"These rings will form planets, asteroids, comets... And eventually as the star evolves, this will cool and settle and there will be more clearing and more individual objects, just like we see in our solar system."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-29932609
 
The level of technology to produce an image like that planetary system forming really is quite awesome. The thing is 450 light years away...

I wonder if they just struck lucky in finding it or did they have an inkling there was something interesting at that location.
 
hunck said:
I wonder if they just struck lucky in finding it or did they have an inkling there was something interesting at that location.
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Serendipity or not, it's still a great find! :D
 
No argument there. I'm simply in awe of the people who do this sort of work. Technology at it's best.

If you look at the telescope's website, there are images of the location taken with Hubble, which produces stunning images itself, but it can't see through the dust or gas clouds present.
 
7 January 2015 Last updated at 00:42
'Alien Earth' is among eight new far-off planets
By Jonathan Webb Science reporter, BBC News, Seattle

One of eight new planets spied in distant solar systems has usurped the title of "most Earth-like alien world", astronomers have said.
All eight were picked out by Nasa's Kepler space telescope, taking its tally of such "exoplanets" past 1,000.
But only three sit safely within the "habitable zone" of their host star - and one in particular is rocky, like Earth, as well as only slightly warmer.
The find was revealed at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society.
The three potentially habitable planets join Kepler's "hall of fame", which now boasts eight fascinating planetary prospects.
And researchers say the most Earth-like of the new arrivals, known as Kepler 438b, is probably even more similar to our home than Kepler 186f - which previously looked to be our most likely twin.
At 12% larger than Earth, the new claimant is bigger than 186f but it is closer to our temperature, probably receiving just 40% more heat from its sun than we do from ours.
So if we could stand on the surface of 438b it may well be warmer than here, according to Dr Doug Caldwell from the Seti (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) Institute in California.
"And it's around a cooler [red dwarf] star... so your sky would look redder than ours does to us," Dr Caldwell said.

That first-person encounter, however, is unlikely - both because the planet is 475 light years away and because we still have essentially no idea what it's made of.
Images from the Kepler telescope, which trails behind the Earth and peers far into the distance as we orbit our own sun, are used to identify far-off planets by observing "transits".
This refers to the dimming of a star's light when a planet passes in front of it.
A large team of researchers then uses additional data from earth-bound telescopes to further explore these unfamiliar solar systems.
They try to calculate how big the planets are, and how closely they orbit their host stars.
Not everything that causes such a dimming eventually turns out to be a planet, however.

At the same time as the eight confirmed new exoplanets were announced by a 26-strong team spanning Nasa and multiple US institutions, the Kepler mission's own scientists released another tranche of more than 500 "candidate" planets.
"With further observation, some of these candidates may turn out not to be planets," said Kepler Science Officer Fergal Mullally.
"Or as we understand their properties better they may move around in, or even outside, the habitable zone."

Even once scientists have anointed a candidate as a confirmed exoplanet, the question of whether or not it is "Earth-like" is a fraught one, with fuzzy boundaries.
The size of the habitable or "Goldilocks" zone, where a planet is far enough from its sun to hold water but not so distant that it freezes, depends on how confident scientists want to be with their guess-work.
According to Dr Cardwell, just three of the eight new exoplanets can be confidently placed in that zone - and only two of those are probably rocky like the Earth.
More detailed description is very difficult.

"From the Kepler measurements and the other measurements we made, we don't know if these planets have oceans with fish and continents with trees," Dr Caldwell told BBC News.
"All we know is their size and the energy they're receiving from their star.
"So we can say: Well, they're of a size that they're likely to be rocky, and the energy they're getting is comparable to what the Earth is getting.
"As we fill in these gaps in our solar system that we don't have, we learn more about what it means to be Earth-like, in some sense."

Speaking at a related event at the conference, Prof Debra Fischer from Yale University said she remembered a time before the first exoplanet was discovered, more than two decades ago.
"I remember astronomers before that point being very worried," she said.
"We really had to step back and say: Maybe the Star Trek picture is wrong. That filled me with despair."

Prof Fischer said that sensitive telescopes like Kepler had ushered in an era of "amazing and impressive work".
"We're talking about a planet - and we can only see its star with a powerful telescope.
"And we can draw graphs and sketch its composition and have serious scientific discussions. This is incredible."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-30705517
 
Telescope Captures Stunning Images of Alien Planets and Young Star
by Mike Wall, Space.com Senior Writer | January 08, 2015 07:00am ET

gpi-exoplanet-image.jpg

Gemini Planet Imager (GPI) photo of the planetary system HR 8799, showing three of the system's four known planets. (The star is in the middle; planet b is outside the field of view shown here, off to the left.) These data were obtained on Nov. 17, 2013, during the first week of operation of GPI.
Credit: Christian Marois (NRC Canada), Patrick Ingraham (Stanford University) and the GPI Team.
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The world's most sensitive exoplanet imager has returned some amazing photos, as well as surprising results, just a year after opening its eyes.

The Gemini Planet Imager (GPI), which is installed on the Gemini South telescope in Chile, first started observing the heavens in November 2013 and didn't begin full science operations until this past November. But the instrument has already detected unexpected differences between two sister exoplanets and helped characterize the ring of dust and rocky bodies surrounding a young star, researchers announced Tuesday (Jan. 6).

Astronomers trained GPI on HR 8799, a star found about 130 light-years from Earth that's known to host four planets. One stunning GPI image captured three of those planets, as well as the star, in the same frame. And GPI's measurements revealed significant differences in the light coming from two of the worlds, HR 8799c and HR 8799d — a surprise, since both planets are about the same size (roughly 20 percent larger than Jupiter) and appear to be the same color. [7 Ways to Discover Alien Planets]



"This was not expected at all based on the prior photometry," Marshall Perrin, of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, said Tuesday during a news conference at the annual winter meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle.

Perrin and his colleagues aren't yet sure what the divergent spectra mean, but they have a theory.

"We believe that, most likely, what we're seeing is more uniform cloud cover on one of these planets versus more patchy cloud cover on the other, where you can see deeper into the atmospheric layers," Perrin said.

gemini-planet-imager-dust-disc.jpg

Gemini Planet Imager photo of the circumstellar disc around the star HR 4796A. These observations reveal a complex pattern of variations in brightness and polarization around the disc.
Credit: Marshall Perrin (Space Telescope Science Institute), Gaspard Duchene (UC Berkeley), Max Millar-Blanchaer (University of Toronto), and the GPI Team.
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The Gemini Planet Imager has also studied the circumstellar disc surrouding HR 4796A, a young star that lies about 240 light-years from Earth. This ring of dust and planetary building blocks — which Perrin likened to a scaled-up version of our own solar system's Kuiper Belt — has been observed by other instruments, but GPI's keen eyes have revealed new insights.

For example, GPI's measurements show that HR 4796A's disc is partially opaque, suggesting that its dust is packed much more tightly than the dust at the outer reaches of Earth's solar system, Perrin said.

"In some ways, it's analogous to one of Saturn's rings — very narrow, slightly optically thick to get the brightness ratio right on the two sides of the disc," he said. "We're still thinking about the dynamics of this."

gpi-hr4796a-disc.jpg

Diagram depicting the Gemini Planet Imager team's revised model for the orientation and composition of circumstellar disc around the star HR 4796A.
Credit: Marshall Perrin (Space Telescope Science Institute), Gaspard Duchene (UC Berkeley), Max Millar-Blanchaer (University of Toronto), and the GPI Team.
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While GPI has been characterizing alien worlds and systems, it has not discovered any exoplanets yet. But that could change over the next few years, as astronomers plan to use the instrument to search 600 nearby stars for Jupiter-like planets.

GPI is designed to find and characterize such large gas giants. The instrument isn't sensitive enough to study small, rocky worlds — but its operations may help researchers develop future gear that can do just that, Perrin said.

"We're going to be opening up a lot of new discoveries, hopefully, over the next few years in terms of exoplanet imaging and, in the long run, taking these technologies and scaling them to future 30-meter telescopes, and perhaps large telescopes in space, to continue direct imaging and push down towards the Earth-like planet regime," he said.

http://www.space.com/28202-exoplanet-photos-gemini-planet-imager.html
Click to expand...
 
40 times the mass of Jupiter and a large ring system? Sounds almost like a planet that failed to become a second sun.
 
The lower cut-off point for a brown dwarf is 80 x Jupiter masses, so this about half the size of the smallest star (if you count a brown dwarf as a star).

Saturn's largest ring, the very faint Phoebe ring, is 300 x Saturn's radius; about 18 million km. These rings around J1407b are 60 million km in radius, so maybe not that much wider, even if they are much denser. Saturn's Hill Sphere is about 65 million km, so it could just conceivably have rings as big as this, but I think that very dense large rings would collapse into moons quite quickly.
 
28 January 2015 Last updated at 04:06
Kepler telescope identifies ancient solar system
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Scientists at the University of Birmingham described the solar system as a "miniature version" of our own

An ancient solar system similar to our own has been discovered by scientists.
Studying data from the Kepler telescope, the team, led by the University of Birmingham, found a star orbited by five planets similar in size to Earth.
The system, 117 light years away, is the oldest known of its kind, formed 11.2 billion years ago.

Dr Tiago Campante said it could provide a clue to "the existence of ancient life in the galaxy".
"By the time the Earth formed, the planets in this system were already older than our planet is today," he said.
"This discovery may now help to pinpoint the beginning of what we might call the era of planet formation."
Researchers said the star, named Kepler-444, and its planets were two and a half times older than earth and dated back to the "dawn of the galaxy".

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The Kepler telescope searches for dips in light as planets pass in front of stars

Planets ranging in size from Mercury to Venus orbit the star within the equivalent of 10 of our days.
While the proximity of the planets to the star ruled out the possibility of life, Dr Campante said the discovery showed planets of an Earth-like size, capable of supporting life, could exist around a similarly ancient star.
"There may be civilisations out there with a head-start of a few billion years. Imagine the level of technology," he said.

Nasa's Kepler mission has so far found hundreds of new worlds since in launched in 2009.
Scientists have studied the occasional dips in light as planets pass in front of their host stars.
Scientists studied the natural resonance of Kepler-444, caused by the sound trapped within it, allowing them to measure its diameter, mass and age.
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Analysis
Dr David Gregory-Kumar, BBC Midlands Today

Planet hunting is one of the most exciting areas of astronomy. What was once thought of as science fiction is now a reality.
But what makes today's discovery by the University of Birmingham so interesting is that the astronomers have found ancient planets that are similar to those in our own solar system.
It means earth-like planets have been around for much of the 13.8 billion year history of the Universe.
This expands what we know about the early formation of planets and could even have implications for the potential for ancient alien life in our galaxy.

Meanwhile a new generation of planet hunting telescopes, including one led by the University of Warwick, are just coming online.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-birmingham-31002598
 
WASHINGTON (July 22, 2015)– NASA has some big news in the hunt for Earth-like planets.

NASA plans to share a discovery from its Kepler Space Telescope in a news conference scheduled for 9 a.m. Thursday, a press release announced.

Calling a news conference for the Kepler Telescope, a mission dedicated to finding Earth-like planets in so-called hospitable zones, is unusual. According to CTV, a tantamount goal of the Kepler mission is to find Earth-like planets suitable for supporting the existence of liquid water, a necessary ingredient for life.

The mission seeks planets a perfect distance away from a star that would likely maintain liquid water, known as the Goldilocks Zone. Too close to a star and water evaporates. Too far and water freezes to ice.

The announcement of a press conference has lit the Internet on fire with speculation. Many hope the Kepler Mission engineers will announce finding an Earth size planet with an abundance of oxygen.

“Abundance of oxygen suggests the existence of life,” one Redditor wrote. “Oxygen is too reactive to stay in an atmosphere without constantly being replenished.”
 
According to the Press release

"NASA will host a news teleconference at noon EDT Thursday, July 23 to announce new discoveries made by its planet-hunting mission, the Kepler Space Telescope"

That will be 1700 BST (5 p.m.) here in UK.

"The teleconference audio and visuals will be streamed live at:
http://www.nasa.gov/newsaudio "
 
Yeah. Earth 2.
 
Thankfully, I am not a telephone sanitiser.
 
Sorry guys I was out last few days - did Nasa announce anything?
 
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