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Nasa announcement: New Earth planet could be announced

NASA are going to make an announcement at 5pm. You can view the livestream here:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/nasa-announcement-live-second-earth-new-planet-kepler-space-telescope-10410960.html

They're speculating that this is a 'new earth'. I hope they've discovered aliens, though.

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Poor Pluto, he was getting his time in the limelight with the horizon craft, and now he's about to be overshadowed by this amazing discovery (if it happens).

Lets hope this announcement is good! :biggrin:
Hopefully this doesn't turn into Mars Attacks
Live from press conference: Today's one step closer to answering the question we asked as a kid - are there planets orbiting the stars in space, and are there suns and planets like our own? Are we alone in the universe?

Update 2: They are using fluctuations in light to find planets, just like when the moon goes in front of the sun to create eclipses. If these happen roughly every year, then those planets are likely to be like Earth.

Update 3: Exoplanet has been discovered that is a close cousin to our earth and sun. (The Earth 2.0) could be more but this is the one found so far

Update 4: Keplar 4-52b, Orbits 385 days to it's sun, larger radius, 5% further, sun 10% bigger, If rocky: we would weigh twice as much as we do on Earth but we would adapt after a few weeks of walking around, likely to be active volcanos
(edited 8 years ago)
Reply 5
Original post by GuppyFox
Live from press conference: Today's one step closer to answering the question we asked as a kid - are there planets orbiting the stars in space, and are there suns and planets like our own? Are we alone in the universe?


Kepler has found over 3000 candidate planets. The nearest that may have water is 20 light years away.

I await the interesting news here though.
Its hard to understand with no speakers!
well i hope so, but we can't get a real image of it, they just detect to see if it is in the perfect habitable zone, by the way the sun wobbles, i really would love a real picture of an earth planet, it would be amazing.
Artists impression:

Aww the stream went down :/

Still, the conference so far is more or less what I expected. This new planet does seem very similar to Earth so far, though.

Seems to have come back now. I guess the stream got to full capacity or something. There's like 50,000 people listening to that's a lot of bandwidth.
(edited 8 years ago)
How far away?
Jon Jenkins:
It's spent billions of years in the habitable zone of its star - that means it could well host life on its surface, or could have at some point in its history.
Original post by Manitude
Aww the stream went down :/

Still, the conference so far is more or less what I expected. This new planet does seem very similar to Earth so far, though.

Seems to have come back now. I guess the stream got to full capacity or something. There's like 50,000 people listening to that's a lot of bandwidth.
That was annoying! I've gone to the text live blogs now
It's quite exciting that we've found another candidate for an Earth-like planet. Does anyone think there could reasonably be life there considering the gravitational field strength is twice that of Earth's?
Unfortunately it seems the planet is 1400 light years away.

For closer planets we shall have to wait for TESS to go up in 2017.
Original post by Rakas21
How far away?


1.400 lightyears.
Very interesting. However, I have no doubt that there are other sentient beings out there. The universe is too big for there to be only one life supporting planet.
All I can say is that I am extremely thrilled to hear such great news.

Spoiler

Original post by Plantagenet Crown
Very interesting. However, I have no doubt that there are other sentient beings out there. The universe is too big for there to be only one life supporting planet.


Its interesting that a few decades ago solar systems like ours were viewed as the exception and it was thought there might only be 10,000 plantets in the galaxy. In reality what we've found is astounding in that wherever the universe can fit a planet it seems to and most importantly that Red Dwarfs unexpectedly have planets (most interesting is that these are also likely to be rocky), this means that estimates of rocky planets in habitable zones apparently number around 40 billion!

TESS is the next telescope to go up in 2017 and should be able to scan the stars close to us (lots of red dwarfs) so its fairly likely that we'll find close habitable planets in the 2020's. Tau Ceti is also interesting, its 11 light years away, has several planets and also has a gap in its habitable zone where a more sensitive telescope might find a small planet.

We live in great times for space and also think that public interest seems to be coming back.
Original post by Plantagenet Crown
Very interesting. However, I have no doubt that there are other sentient beings out there. The universe is too big for there to be only one life supporting planet.


Planta's soulmate might be a new Earth's alien. :biggrin:

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