Astronomy and space exploration

Requires a substance with negative mass, good luck creating that.
As for using the casimir effect, you'd be better off asking the astronaut to fart out of the window the casimir effect is incredibly weak.

Reminds me of the EM Drive

 

Give it a listen

Edit: It's a long discussion about many things, the most relevant info to this topic starts at around 1 hour 47 minutes

 

No the Casimir effect is very weak, so weak that a fart would produce millions of times more thrust. You ruin the joke when you make me explain it.

It's only slightly relevant

Try this (its in bitesize peices)
http://www.worldscienceu.com/scienc...be-environments-with-extremely-strong-gravity

 

I'd say that's right on the money, especially the part about a multiverse and our understanding of the universe, and it definitely falls under the "interesting comment" category. He also holds a Ph.D. in physics from MIT so his comments regarding this subject should hold some value

 

The thread is about space travel and propulsion systems
but since it seems to be morphing into other areas Eloyc you may find this thread interesting
https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/can-you-explain-one-of-the-greatest-mysteries-ever.56700/

 

Ugh, please take any Kepler press release with a huge pinch of salt.

 

Nasa arnt above adding a lot of speculation to their press conferences.
see my video about the EM drive from the 15min mark

 

A couple of reasons.

Firstly, Kepler is a NASA mission, and the NASA PR machine is very aggressive. You wouldn't know that the rest of the world did astronomy going by NASA press releases. The Kepler team are worse than most for this as they have a bit of a chip on their shoulder - they know now that the mission they designed those decades ago has turned out the wrong one, and that TESS and ultimately PLATO are what we really need to advance the field.

Secondly the way that Kepler detects planets doesn't directly yield a measurement of the mass (in most cases). Follow-up observations (radial velocity) are required to obtain a precise mass measurement, and these observations are very difficult for typical Kepler planets as they tend to be quite faint. So the Kepler team have started using certain statistical and model-dependent techniques to assign masses to their planets. Some of these are quite robust, eg. transit timing variations in multiple planet systems, others are distinctly dodgy in the sense that you get out what you put in.

These statistical estimates may or may not be correct, but they are not substitutes for a proper measurement, particularly when speaking about individual objects. Without an proper mass measurement it's not possible to be definitive about the planetary nature of the transiting object. There have been a slew of high-profile public news stories about the discoveries of "Earth-like" planets in habitable zone orbits, most of which only have radius measurements not mass measurements. The argument is basically "it's 1 Earth radius, so what else can it be??". Well either measure the mass to prove it's a super-Earth, or STFU. High-profile PR stunts publicising results that later turn out to be wrong doesn't do exoplanet science any favours.

 

knowing the size and mass gives you a better chance of predicting what the planet is made of. Is it rocky, is it gaseous ?

 

One of the key techniques for characterising the atmospheres of transiting exoplanets is transmission spectroscopy, ie. studying the absorption by the planet atmosphere of the starlight that shines through it during transit. This is spectacularly difficult to do, it gets more difficult as the planet and hence the scale-height of its atmosphere gets smaller. We need capture sufficient photons that passed through the atmosphere to make a statistically significant detection of chemicals in the planet atmosphere. For the smallest planets, eg. Earth-like rocky planets which in our current world view are the best place to search for biomarkers, this can only be achieved for the brightest stars.

So what we are really after are small planets around bright stars. Bright stars are rare in the sky, so to find enough small planets around bright stars we need to survey a lot of the sky. Kepler has a tiny field-of-view (100 sq. deg) compared to the whole sky. TESS and PLATO are optimised to have much larger field-of-view, and moreover their survey strategy will involve multiple pointings which Kepler did not. TESS will cover about 85% of the sky, typically with baselines of a few months, up to one year. PLATO is optimised to detect true Earth analogues, ie. Earth-sized planets in a 1 year orbit about a G-type star. PLATO will stare for up to three years at each of its fields, to catch multiple transits of this type of planet.

 

At the earliest.

Look at it this way though, will you still be alive in 2045? If PLATO really delivers as promised you will be privileged to see the fruits of its discoveries. For me it's touch and go - I am working on the mission, I will be close to retirement age at the end of its life (2035). Proper confirmation of biomarkers in the Earth 2.0 that it discovers will take maybe a decade. But there is quite high probability that you will see it if you can hang on that long

TESS is probably launching next year, if Elon can manage to stop blowing up his customers payloads. If TESS can deliver on its promise there will still be some exciting science to keep you interested in the meantime.

 

Ah, Elon not immune to believing his own hype