I for one welcome our new earth....

[No Boss]

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science...ed-dwarf_N.htm

European astronomers announced Tuesday that they've discovered the first potentially habitable Earth-like planet outside our solar system where conditions are such that oceans, and thus life, may be possible.

The planet circles the red dwarf star Gliese 581 in a Goldilocks orbit that sets its temperature between 32 and 104 degrees Fahrenheit, neither too hot nor too cold — but just right — for liquid water to exist, according to the team led by astronomer Michel Mayor of Switzerland's Geneva Observatory.

Of the more than 200 planets detected orbiting nearby stars since 1995, most are gas giants. The new discovery, dubbed Gliese 581c, is rocky like Earth and the first small planet detected at the right distance from its star to harbor oceans. NASA has long believed it needs to "follow the water" in its search for life elsewhere.

"Life on the planet we have discovered is indeed possible," says team member Xavier Bonfils of Portugal's Lisbon Observatory in an e-mail. "We're very excited by this discovery because we feel we are entering a new (class) of planets like Earth."

Gliese 581 is about 20.5 light-years away in the constellation Libra (one light-year is about 5.9 trillion miles), much less bright than our sun. Because the star isn't as hot, the planet, one of three circling the star, orbits within a habitable zone about 14 times closer to its star than the Earth's habitable orbit around the sun. Gliese 581c completes a "year" in only 13 days, Bonfils says.

"This is the closest planet to another Earth that has been found to date," says astronomer Alan Boss of the Carnegie Institute of Washington (D.C.), by e-mail. "The fact that it could have liquid water makes it even more fascinating and arguably the first habitable planet."

The discovery team detected the planet indirectly, by measuring back-and-forth gravitational wobbles that the orbiting planets induce in Gliese 581, a star about one-third as heavy as the sun. That method provides only a minimum mass estimate of a planet. In this case, Gliese 581c is likely about five times heavier than Earth and half again as wide, one of the three smallest planets yet detected orbiting a nearby star.

"We may be witnessing the start of a cosmic real estate boom," says astronomer Jill Tarter of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif. SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, has surveyed Gliese 581 for radio signals, without result, in its privately funded Project Phoenix effort, according to Tarter.

Gliese 581 "appears to be a nice, quiet older star that orbits placidly within the disk of the galaxy," says astronomer Margaret Turnbull of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. "Because the star itself is so small, it makes sense that the planets orbiting it would also be small — so we should not be shocked about that. "

"Water will be the key" as to whether life could exist on Gliese 581c, and determining, with a telescope, whether oceans exist there will be tricky, Tarter says.

Gliese 581c, "is probably tidally locked to the star, like the moon to the Earth," says astronomer Wesley Traub of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. But newer, lower estimates of the star's temperature mean that if winds and oceans exist on the planet, heat from the star-facing hot side will likely be distributed evenly around the planet at life-sustaining temperatures, he says.

Regardless, the planet has likely rocketed to the top of the list for would-be Earth-hunters, Bonfils says. Red dwarf stars are 80 of the 100 closest stars to Earth, he adds, making the detection of more small planets orbiting red dwarfs likely.

SCHWEEEEETT!

[BlaRo]

Awesome.
Where do I buy tickets?

[Blind_Io]

Oh, can I be in on choosing who goes on the "B Ark?"

[Redliner]

I already read about this when I took a course in Exobiology. Makes you wonder.

[BlaRo]

Originally Posted by Blind_Io

Oh, can I be in on choosing who goes on the "B Ark?"

Nah, the B Ark stays here. Our new world doesn't need any telephone sanitizers.

[toma_alimosh]

Oh brother, another idiot blogger putting his spin on things he knows close to nothing about. Glen Boyd, STFU.

I'm sorry to break it to you fellows, but a lot of what he says is as close to fact as that planet is to us. Sure, the discovery of a new planet outside the solar system did occur, and it is a step forward just for the fact that its size is only 1.5 that of Earth as opposed to the last marker we were at (4 times the size of Earth). But that's pretty much it. All the rest is just unfounded hope that the things that make life possible might exist elsewhere in the universe, just as there was hope that there is or was life on Mars or that the liquid oceans under Jupiter's moon Europa might have life. But this idiot jurnalist does what all jurnalists do: sensationalize it beyond belief and hope it sells well.
I'm going to take this article apart just because I'm not in the mood of having another money-hungry enterprise stain the truth of astronomy, like the discovery channel did for years now. Just look for bolded text and count how many times this guy inflated the issue with only his own subjective ideas.

The question of whether or not we are alone in the universe — certainly one of the most profound which has ever perplexed mankind — may have been answered.

Ok, this first line says it all about the article. And even though I need not go further, I will. So, one of the greatest questions of all times might have been answered and front page headlines, instead of flashing this at us, are preoccupied with the Virginia Tech shooting. Why? Because most jurnalists are a bit more caucious about spreading false rumors, and are more preocupied with real news. Tabloids don't count here, they're not really newspapers, they're rumorpapers.

A number of news sources are reporting that a team of European astronomers have discovered a planet located about twenty light years away from Earth, with potentially life sustaining qualities remarkably similar to our own planet. The planet, currently being called Gliese 581c is named for its close proximity to its "sun" — the red dwarf star Gliese 581. It is roughly one and a half times the size of earth, measuring about 12,000 miles across compared to our own 8,000.

This is the part where he gives the numbers to create a false sense of accuracy and show that he has at least a few facts to back up his claims. But notice that in no way does he name actual references or link back to them, he just cites them as "a number of news sources". A large number? Maybe a small number. Maybe only two. And maybe not very credible either since he's not up to par on telling us where exactly he got this information. He also doesn't name the astronomers that made this discovery, or what they were affilliated to. He doesn't even get close to it. "A team of European Astronomers" ... Which one? There are so many. I know this is only a blog, but you'd expect something better from a journalist, right?

Also, the planet's not named that way because it's close to its star, it's named that way because it orbits the star and is the third planet that was discovered in that planetary system ( A for first, B for second, C for third).

Gliese 581c's surface is also believed to be solid. Like Earth, it is most likely covered with both rock and water, rather than an ice-based or gaseous surface.

And they know this because .. oh, that's right, they don't know. But they think they know. All that they have done so far is get a little spec on their lenses with enough light to know that it's there and that it orbits its star. By finding out its orbiting trajectory and because of earlier studies done on the star, they found its mass and its distance from the star. From this, they found its mass and that its proximity to the star is within the limits that might allow life to remotely exist. Everything else is just derived from scientific models of what we THINK usually happens in normal planet formation circumstances. And trust me, you don't want to count the number of assumptions that one has to make for them to work.

For example, they can't know its solid. What if it hadn't cooled down yet? We wouldn't know, because the light from it is too faint to determine its actual surface temperature. Also, they can't know that it has water on it. Mars is close enough to the sun. It has an atmosphere, it could have a steady temperature, but it doesn't. Does its surface have liquid water? NO. Do we know whether this new planet has ANY water at all? no, light's not powerfull enough to tell. BUT, some studies made in whole other circumstances show us that it might (then again, it might NOT). As for a gaseous surface .. of course it doesn't have a gaseous surface. At that mass, it could never come close to having a gaseous surface. What idiot astronomer even mentioned that in this case?

[quote]It has a mass five times the size of earth, giving it enough gravity to maintain a stable atmosphere. The planet is also most importantly believed to maintain temperatures between 32 and 104 degrees.[quote] See ... again with the speculations. "Our scientific models show it should be like this.." or as most put it: "It is believed that.. ". It is also believed that Xenu is the root of all our problems on Earth ... but that doesn't make it true unless you have at least something to back up the claim. We can't even measure its overall temperature yet ... and that's not even enough .. what we'd have to measure is its surface temperature. Also, notice how it says that the temperature in numbers but not the scale that it's measured on. Being that this study was made in Europe, it's most likely in degrees Celsius, not Fahrenheit (however, an american audience will still think it's in fahrenheit). Which makes the difference between the lower end of the scale (animals corching in the heat) and the top end of the scale (boiling the skin off the animals' corpses) pretty great. Only the most extreme of bacteria would survive at the upper end. Notice, this would only be the mean temperature. Yet, on most planets, the temperature from day to night and from season to season differs quite a lot, so take that a few tens of degrees more in either direction. And then realize that this range might not even be a close estimate.

These properties — among the most basic elements necessary to sustain life as we know it — have led to some reports labeling Gliese 581c as the "New Earth".

Some reports ... some, I'm not saying by who and what for, but SOME. Might as well have been written by Michael Jackson for all we know ... or anybody else without an astro-physics degree ... but most likely with a journalism degree . The new earth, huh? That just takes it really far doesn't it? New hope for humanity, we're all saved. When everything fails, our planet's on the brink of destruction and we're almost extinct, we can just move there right?

If life does indeed exist on Gliese 581c however, its inhabitants would have to deal with a few drawbacks.

IF, indeed. But inhabitants? We haven't even determined if it might have all the things necessary for life and we're already talking about inhabitants. Wow.

Parent sun Gliese 581 is only about one third the size of our own, and is 50 times cooler. However, it is also considerably closer, orbiting at about six million miles away (compared to our larger sun at 93 million miles away). This would make for a spectacular Glieseian sunset dominated by the huge red star appearing some twenty times the size of our sun. However it would also mean greater solar radiation and higher geologic instability due to the gravitational tides from the nearby sun.

So, what's going to stop this whole load of radiation from getting tot eh surface and frying everything on it? An ozone layer. No wait, that's right, we don't know if it has one. We don't even know what substances exist on this planet. We don't know its chemical composition, we don't know the distribution of the substances present there, so what do we know? Oh yes, the curst would be regularly rumbled by gravitational tides, giving birth to thousands of volcanoes, just like on most of Jupiter's closer moons. Gee, that sound really prosperous to life.

Still, you can't help but marvel at the possibilities.

What possibilities, and how remote are they really?

While there have been many exciting discoveries made within our own solar system over the past few decades — such as bacteria on Mars and possible water on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn — this is the first time a planet so similar to Earth has been discovered outside our own immediate neighborhood.

Just to set the record straight, what they found was a meteorite that COULD have come from Mars (or any other planet outside our solar system with a crust composition similar to Mars) in which they found some cristal formations that MIGHT (yet they might not) be excrements from bacteria. As for water on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn ... yes, in solid form: ice caps. The only one with a slight hint o liquid water would be Europa, where they think that at least a bit of liquid water might be hiding underneath the ice caps which cover the whole planet. This would be kept alive because of a great deal of geologic activity (plate tectonics and underwater volcanoes) and the tidal forces coming from Jupiter. But they don't know if that's true because they can't see underneath the ice. And as far as they know the depth of the water could be as small as 100 meters or as much as 10 kilometers. And they don't even know if it's permanent or just happens because of Jupiter's constant tidal pull on the planet. Whenever a rupture occurs the stress of it heats up the ice, makes it into liquid water and once it settles, it just freezes up again.

It's relatively close proximity of 120 trillion miles — or about 20 light years away — also gives projects like SETI (The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) a prime target at which to point its equipment searching for alien radio signals.

Aliens ... whoa, boys, this guy's really enthusiastic abaout this, isn't he? He went from a new planet was discovered, to it's a marvelous new find, to it might possibly have the things that cause life, to what if it has animals on it and what the sunset would look like there to what if there is an intelligent civilization there? Somebody give this man a prize, any prize.

"On the treasure map of the Universe, one would be tempted to mark this planet with an X," said Xavier Delfosse, one of the scientists who discovered the planet.

Quite true, it shows just how far we've gotten in our understanding and exploration of our immediate part of the universe. Notice how the quote stops here?

The discovery of the first planet outside our solar system so much like Earth, with so many of the same life sustaining properties, at the very least both provokes a sense of wonder and the awe of possibility.

So much like Earth? So many life sustaining properties? How do you know? Have you been there? That being said, give this man a round of applause for this great speech, folks.

EDIT:
<captain Kirk>Scotty .... beam him up .... and set a course .. for Gliese 581c. So that he may ... learn ... the awfull truth. Engage.</captain Kirk>

[No Boss]

Oh brother, another idiot blogger putting his spin on things he knows close to nothing about. Glen Boyd, STFU.

I'm sorry to break it to you fellows, but a lot of what he says is as close to fact as that planet is to us. Sure, the discovery of a new planet outside the solar system did occur, and it is a step forward just for the fact that its size is only 1.5 that of Earth as opposed to the last marker we were at (4 times the size of Earth). But that's pretty much it. All the rest is just unfounded hope that the things that make life possible might exist elsewhere in the universe, just as there was hope that there is or was life on Mars or that the liquid oceans under Jupiter's moon Europa might have life. But this idiot jurnalist does what all jurnalists do: sensationalize it beyond belief and hope it sells well.
I'm going to take this article apart just because I'm not in the mood of having another money-hungry enterprise stain the truth of astronomy, like the discovery channel did for years now. Just look for bolded text and count how many times this guy inflated the issue with only his own subjective ideas.

Ok, this first line says it all about the article. And even though I need not go further, I will. So, one of the greatest questions of all times might have been answered and front page headlines, instead of flashing this at us, are preoccupied with the Virginia Tech shooting. Why? Because most jurnalists are a bit more caucious about spreading false rumors, and are more preocupied with real news. Tabloids don't count here, they're not really newspapers, they're rumorpapers.



This is the part where he gives the numbers to create a false sense of accuracy and show that he has at least a few facts to back up his claims. But notice that in no way does he name actual references or link back to them, he just cites them as "a number of news sources". A large number? Maybe a small number. Maybe only two. And maybe not very credible either since he's not up to par on telling us where exactly he got this information. He also doesn't name the astronomers that made this discovery, or what they were affilliated to. He doesn't even get close to it. "A team of European Astronomers" ... Which one? There are so many. I know this is only a blog, but you'd expect something better from a journalist, right?

Also, the planet's not named that way because it's close to its star, it's named that way because it orbits the star and is the third planet that was discovered in that planetary system ( A for first, B for second, C for third).



And they know this because .. oh, that's right, they don't know. But they think they know. All that they have done so far is get a little spec on their lenses with enough light to know that it's there and that it orbits its star. By finding out its orbiting trajectory and because of earlier studies done on the star, they found its mass and its distance from the star. From this, they found its mass and that its proximity to the star is within the limits that might allow life to remotely exist. Everything else is just derived from scientific models of what we THINK usually happens in normal planet formation circumstances. And trust me, you don't want to count the number of assumptions that one has to make for them to work.

For example, they can't know its solid. What if it hadn't cooled down yet? We wouldn't know, because the light from it is too faint to determine its actual surface temperature. Also, they can't know that it has water on it. Mars is close enough to the sun. It has an atmosphere, it could have a steady temperature, but it doesn't. Does its surface have liquid water? NO. Do we know whether this new planet has ANY water at all? no, light's not powerfull enough to tell. BUT, some studies made in whole other circumstances show us that it might (then again, it might NOT). As for a gaseous surface .. of course it doesn't have a gaseous surface. At that mass, it could never come close to having a gaseous surface. What idiot astronomer even mentioned that in this case?

It has a mass five times the size of earth, giving it enough gravity to maintain a stable atmosphere. The planet is also most importantly believed to maintain temperatures between 32 and 104 degrees. See ... again with the speculations. "Our scientific models show it should be like this.." or as most put it: "It is believed that.. ". It is also believed that Xenu is the root of all our problems on Earth ... but that doesn't make it true unless you have at least something to back up the claim. We can't even measure its overall temperature yet ... and that's not even enough .. what we'd have to measure is its surface temperature. Also, notice how it says that the temperature in numbers but not the scale that it's measured on. Being that this study was made in Europe, it's most likely in degrees Celsius, not Fahrenheit (however, an american audience will still think it's in fahrenheit). Which makes the difference between the lower end of the scale (animals corching in the heat) and the top end of the scale (boiling the skin off the animals' corpses) pretty great. Only the most extreme of bacteria would survive at the upper end. Notice, this would only be the mean temperature. Yet, on most planets, the temperature from day to night and from season to season differs quite a lot, so take that a few tens of degrees more in either direction. And then realize that this range might not even be a close estimate.


Some reports ... some, I'm not saying by who and what for, but SOME. Might as well have been written by Michael Jackson for all we know ... or anybody else without an astro-physics degree ... but most likely with a journalism degree . The new earth, huh? That just takes it really far doesn't it? New hope for humanity, we're all saved. When everything fails, our planet's on the brink of destruction and we're almost extinct, we can just move there right?


IF, indeed. But inhabitants? We haven't even determined if it might have all the things necessary for life and we're already talking about inhabitants. Wow.

So, what's going to stop this whole load of radiation from getting tot eh surface and frying everything on it? An ozone layer. No wait, that's right, we don't know if it has one. We don't even know what substances exist on this planet. We don't know its chemical composition, we don't know the distribution of the substances present there, so what do we know? Oh yes, the curst would be regularly rumbled by gravitational tides, giving birth to thousands of volcanoes, just like on most of Jupiter's closer moons. Gee, that sound really prosperous to life.

What possibilities, and how remote are they really?



Just to set the record straight, what they found was a meteorite that COULD have come from Mars (or any other planet outside our solar system with a crust composition similar to Mars) in which they found some cristal formations that MIGHT (yet they might not) be excrements from bacteria. As for water on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn ... yes, in solid form: ice caps. The only one with a slight hint o liquid water would be Europa, where they think that at least a bit of liquid water might be hiding underneath the ice caps which cover the whole planet. This would be kept alive because of a great deal of geologic activity (plate tectonics and underwater volcanoes) and the tidal forces coming from Jupiter. But they don't know if that's true because they can't see underneath the ice. And as far as they know the depth of the water could be as small as 100 meters or as much as 10 kilometers. And they don't even know if it's permanent or just happens because of Jupiter's constant tidal pull on the planet. Whenever a rupture occurs the stress of it heats up the ice, makes it into liquid water and once it settles, it just freezes up again.


Aliens ... whoa, boys, this guy's really enthusiastic abaout this, isn't he? He went from a new planet was discovered, to it's a marvelous new find, to it might possibly have the things that cause life, to what if it has animals on it and what the sunset would look like there to what if there is an intelligent civilization there? Somebody give this man a prize, any prize.


Quite true, it shows just how far we've gotten in our understanding and exploration of our immediate part of the universe. Notice how the quote stops here?


So much like Earth? So many life sustaining properties? How do you know? Have you been there? That being said, give this man a round of applause for this great speech, folks.

EDIT:
<captain Kirk>Scotty .... beam him up .... and set a course .. for Gliese 581c. So that he may ... learn ... the awfull truth. Engage.</captain Kirk> :rotflmao:

Terribly sorry, mate, but I read about this in todays USA Today. I just did a random GNS for "Gliese" and linked this one, not realising it was a blog (I hate blogs). I guess I should have linked the actual USA today article because it was quite good.

[toma_alimosh]

yes, but notice how much more conservative the USA Today report is: "water may be possible" not "most likely covered with rock and water", as the blogger says. There's a big difference between "most likely" and "possibly". There possibly is life on Europa, Jupiter's moon. But it's definitely NOT "most likely".

It also names the team that did the discovery and where they made that discovery. As opposed to a simple man read maybe 1 short article on the internet and decided to put his own spin on it.

Please read the whole report. I'm not dennying the discovery has been made, I'm dennying that the blogger has all his facts straight and is thus speaking out of his anus. I'm sure USA Today got their facts from NASA.

[KaJuN]

Sweet news! Nice to see NASA is still doing something productive.

[BlaRo]

Newsflash to toma: any schmuck with a blog can be a "journalist", try to take it with a grain of salt. Even USA Today, the slightly retarded half-cousin twice removed of the newspaper world, is a more respectable source.

[No Boss]

Originally Posted by BlaRo

Newsflash to toma: any schmuck with a blog can be a "journalist", try to take it with a grain of salt. Even USA Today, the slightly retarded half-cousin twice removed of the newspaper world, is a more respectable source.

Exactly... I'm gonna swap articles. This is ridiculous.

[AnGuRuSO]

Fantastico

[Derek]

Is there already an interweb connection available?

[jeffy777]

What do the native chicks look like?