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NASA's Kepler telescope discovers first Earth-size planet in 'habitable zone'

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G

GK86

Homeland Security Fail
Link.

Using NASA's Kepler Space Telescope, astronomers have discovered the first Earth-size planet orbiting a star in the "habitable zone" -- the range of distance from a star where liquid water might pool on the surface of an orbiting planet. The discovery of Kepler-186f confirms that planets the size of Earth exist in the habitable zone of stars other than our sun.

While planets have previously been found in the habitable zone, they are all at least 40 percent larger in size than Earth, and understanding their makeup is challenging. Kepler-186f is more reminiscent of Earth.

"The discovery of Kepler-186f is a significant step toward finding worlds like our planet Earth," said Paul Hertz, NASA's Astrophysics Division director at the agency's headquarters in Washington. "Future NASA missions, like the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite and the James Webb Space Telescope, will discover the nearest rocky exoplanets and determine their composition and atmospheric conditions, continuing humankind's quest to find truly Earth-like worlds."

Although the size of Kepler-186f is known, its mass and composition are not. Previous research, however, suggests that a planet the size of Kepler-186f is likely to be rocky.

"We know of just one planet where life exists -- Earth. When we search for life outside our solar system, we focus on finding planets with characteristics that mimic that of Earth," said Elisa Quintana, research scientist at the SETI Institute at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., and lead author of the paper published today in the journal Science. "Finding a habitable zone planet comparable to Earth in size is a major step forward."

Kepler-186f resides in the Kepler-186 system, about 500 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cygnus. The system is also home to four companion planets, which orbit a star half the size and mass of our sun. The star is classified as an M dwarf, or red dwarf, a class of stars that makes up 70 percent of the stars in the Milky Way galaxy.

"M dwarfs are the most numerous stars," said Quintana. "The first signs of other life in the galaxy may well come from planets orbiting an M dwarf."

Kepler-186f orbits its star once every 130 days and receives one-third the energy from its star that Earth gets from the sun, placing it nearer the outer edge of the habitable zone. On the surface of Kepler-186f, the brightness of its star at high noon is only as bright as our sun appears to us about an hour before sunset.

"Being in the habitable zone does not mean we know this planet is habitable. The temperature on the planet is strongly dependent on what kind of atmosphere the planet has," said Thomas Barclay, research scientist at the Bay Area Environmental Research Institute at Ames, and co-author of the paper. "Kepler-186f can be thought of as an Earth-cousin rather than an Earth-twin. It has many properties that resemble Earth."

The four companion planets, Kepler-186b, Kepler-186c, Kepler-186d and Kepler-186e, whiz around their sun every four, seven, 13 and 22 days, respectively, making them too hot for life as we know it. These four inner planets all measure less than 1.5 times the size of Earth.

The next steps in the search for distant life include looking for true Earth-twins -- Earth-size planets orbiting within the habitable zone of a sun-like star -- and measuring their chemical compositions. The Kepler Space Telescope, which simultaneously and continuously measured the brightness of more than 150,000 stars, is NASA's first mission capable of detecting Earth-size planets around stars like our sun.

Ames is responsible for Kepler's ground system development, mission operations, and science data analysis. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., managed Kepler mission development. Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. in Boulder, Colo., developed the Kepler flight system and supports mission operations with the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado in Boulder. The Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore archives, hosts and distributes Kepler science data. Kepler is NASA's 10th Discovery Mission and was funded by the agency's Science Mission Directorate.

The SETI Institute is a private, nonprofit organization dedicated to scientific research, education and public outreach. The mission of the SETI Institute is to explore, understand and explain the origin, nature and prevalence of life in the universe.
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N

nhlducks35

Member
Kepler-186f resides in the Kepler-186 system, about 500 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cygnus
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Not only will it take forever to get there, but we only know what it looks like from 500 years ago.
 
W

Woorloog

Banned
What did that Firaxis guy say at Civ Beyond Earth panel? Something about humankind finally finding a planet that is Earth-like? Strange timing...

nhlducks35 said:
Not only will it take forever to get there, but we only know what it looks like from 500 years ago.
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Which is utterly irrelevant time geologically.
 
D

Dai101

Banned
5SNPhX0.jpg
 
T

timetokill

Banned
It's amazing the dividends that NASA continues to provide, even while being criminally underfunded.

Just imagine what a visionary administration could accomplish for future generations of America and the world by giving NASA the funding it deserves.
 
A

akira28

Member
timetokill said:
It's amazing the dividends that NASA continues to provide, even while being criminally underfunded.

Just imagine what a visionary administration could accomplish for future generations of America and the world by giving NASA the funding it deserves.
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They'd have to kill most of congress and install puppets to do it. it's all push and tug, you should already know that.
 
L

Lovely Salsa

Banned
What can we do now? Are we able to check out its atmosphere? How will we know that life is there if there is no tech civilization there?
 
A

Angry Grimace

Two cannibals are eating a clown. One turns to the other and says "does something taste funny to you?"
Mysterious object near Cygnus? Firing up the Rocinante.
 
P

Parch

Member
Kepler's been a bit of a disappointment. I expected it to find a lot more than it has, but I suppose it's looking for those needles in a haystack. The technical problems haven't helped.
 
Gouty

Gouty

Bloodborne is shit
We should launch a shit load of garbage missiles at them, get their attention. It might piss them off something awful and lead to our extinction but who gives a fuck, our descendants can deal with that.
 
X

xbhaskarx

Member
Kepler-186f orbits its star once every 130 days and receives one-third the energy from its star that Earth gets from the sun, placing it nearer the outer edge of the habitable zone. On the surface of Kepler-186f, the brightness of its star at high noon is only as bright as our sun appears to us about an hour before sunset.
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So basically it would be like Alaska in October... no thanks I'll wait for a better planet.
 
C

commedieu

Banned
timetokill said:
It's amazing the dividends that NASA continues to provide, even while being criminally underfunded.

Just imagine what a visionary administration could accomplish for future generations of America and the world by giving NASA the funding it deserves.
Click to expand...

Black projects probably cover what NASA does and + some. the only thing that sucks, is you find out about the technology 50 years later. Same dividends though for a society.. new light weight materials, communication, whatever developments.
 
G

gutshot

Member
xbhaskarx said:
So basically it would be like Alaska in October... no thanks I'll wait for a better planet.
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Unless the atmosphere is more dense than ours, which would give it an elevated greenhouse effect, making the planet considerably warmer than our own Earth would be at a similar distance from the Sun.
 
A

A-V-B

Member
Woorloog said:
What did that Firaxis guy say at Civ Beyond Earth panel? Something about humankind finally finding a planet that is Earth-like? Strange timing...



Which is utterly irrelevant time geologically.
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The idea that 500 years is irrelevant is kinda scary. Look at what we've done in the last 100 or so, as a species. It's been like an atomic blast. When you think about how long it takes for intelligent life to appear, and then how short a time it takes for it to develop... is any intelligent life that's out there look anything like us at all? If we caught them on a cosmic scale on a timeline of development past ours, they must be eons ahead. And that's not even considering historical factors that allowed us to develop, like the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs and allowed primates to become us. And that took 65 million years. Imagine if dinosaurs never stopped evolving at the same scale. An extra 65 million years of development for all of them. It's crazy, you can't even comprehend it.
 
H

Hitokage

Setec Astronomer
Orbiting a red dwarf has its advantages. The rate of hydrogen fuel expenditure is much lower so that star is going to continue to burn consistently for hundreds of billions of years.
 
F

Futureman

Member
so looking up Cygnus, this is still in our galaxy, right? Is there anything beyond the Milky Way that we really know about?

my roommate JUST last night was going off on how unlikely there's life out there as Earth is the only planet like it that we know.

I dropped the stat on him that there are most likely 100 billion galaxies in the universe.
 
H

Hitokage

Setec Astronomer
Futureman said:
my roommate JUST last night was going off on how unlikely there's life out there as Earth is the only planet like it that we know.
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So far we've been finding larger planets because they're easier to detect. Pushing the range of detectability into Earth-sized planets is more recent.
 
eot

eot

Banned
nhlducks35 said:
Not only will it take forever to get there, but we only know what it looks like from 500 years ago.
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In principle you can go there as quickly as you want (just a matter of engineering), but if you sit on Earth waiting for someone to go there and back it'll always take at least 1000 years.
 
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