Planet found in Earth's nearest neighbour star system

Doing this would cost over ten billion dollars. Or at least the same than building, launching and operating a better telescope for a while.
I would like the Voyager 2 probe to be brought back and stored in a museum but there's a slight problem with it. Let the Hubble scope burn.

When I was a very yound kid I read Isaac Asimov's books for children about the solar system, Mars, Jupiter and other planets and stuff. Neptune's photo struck me it's incredibly beautiful. It was the most outer photographed planet back then and still is.
 
If we really want to preserve Hubble for posterity, the cheapest option is probably to strap a booster on it and shove it into a higher orbit, which could be stable for milliennia. Future generations can then climb into their space cars and go gawp at it.

I have a sneaking suspicion that JWST is going to be a bit of an anti-climax as a follow-on mission for the eyes of the general public. Scientifically it'll do good work (though whether it's value for money is a non-trivial question), but it won't produce the volume of stunning pretty pics we've had out of HST.
 
nutball said:
I have a sneaking suspicion that JWST is going to be a bit of an anti-climax as a follow-on mission for the eyes of the general public. Scientifically it'll do good work (though whether it's value for money is a non-trivial question), but it won't produce the volume of stunning pretty pics we've had out of HST.
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It's going to take some photoshopping to get JWST's infrared images to look as vibrant as the optical spectrum images Hubble has provided.

But then again, heroic photoshopping were needed to make Hubble's images look so vibrant.

Cheers
 
Grall said:
I want us to build a lifting-body sarcophagus of some sort large enough to contain the Hubble for the day it is due for retirement, to take the telescope safely down through the earth's atmosphere. Shoot it up there on a Falcon Heavy, together with a Dragon capsule with 2-3 astronauts to perform the required work... That's a priceless artefact we got circling up there, it must be saved for posterity. To let it just incinerate upon re-entry would be a horrific crime. :(
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would rather they send it out into space and have it keep taking pictures as it goes(if its capable of it)
 
There was life before oxygen - some life started producing it, which ended up killing all other life. Then it took many, many million years oxydizing everything in the oceans till a lot of oxygen ended up in the atmosphere.

You could have a good chance of finding a life-bearing planet without oxygen in the atmosphere yet, I wonder if some planet can be permanently stuck at that stage too.
 
Yeah true, I was mostly meaning multi-cellular life though. It's going to be pretty hard to detect the really early life from measuring atmospheric composition.
 
jimbo75 said:
How long before we can detect that all-important indicator of life, Oxygen?
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I'm going to go out on a limb here and say it'll be a while. Measurements such as those reported in that paper are really tricky, on the very edge of what it's credible to extract from the data with current instruments. That's on relatively large planets with big atmospheres - for smaller terrestrial planets it's orders of magnitudes more difficult.

Personally when I sit through seminars on the subject I find myself shifting uncomfortably in my seat. I'll be honest - I think a lot of these detections of this, that and the other in exoplanet atmospheres are pretty dodgy, as in the detection of the features in the spectrum is marginal at best, and then they're way overinterpreted through use of models with a degree of complexity way out of whack with the quality of the observational data.

Anyway, I will be massively surprised if I see a convincing detection of a biomarker in an exoplanet atmosphere before 2050.
 
Yeah I agree they are taking quite a few leaps of faith and coming up with their best shot at it.

I think 2050 is overly pessimistic though, was thinking more like 2020-2025. This area is evolving really quickly now.
 
jimbo75 said:
I think 2050 is overly pessimistic though, was thinking more like 2020-2025. This area is evolving really quickly now.
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It is evolving quickly, but the timescales for the developing the kinds of facilities to do this stuff are long. For starters it's probably only possible from space. Secondly you're going to need a lot of photons to disentangle the tiny signal from everything else that's going on. Lots of photons means a large mirror... which means a large budget.

If you want to hypothesise that life can be found outside the habitable zone then there may be shortcuts, but if you want life on terrestrial planets in the HZ that's really hard.

Even if TESS does deliver terrestrial planets around brighter stars that's ~2020, and there may well not be enough of them given the compromises in its survey.
 
Not much attention here on this:

COMET DANCES WITH SUN, DEATH; GIVING MIXED SIGNALS

'We have never seen a comet like this'
Comet ISON is set to whip around the sun on Thursday after being in 'deep freeze' for billions of years -- but its odd behavior has astronomers completely puzzled.

2afemid.png


In this photo provided by NASA, a contrast-enhanced image produced from the Hubble images of comet ISON taken April 23, 2013 reveals the subtle structure in the inner coma of the comet. In this computer-processed view, the Hubble image has been divided by a computer model coma that decreases in brightness proportionally to the distance from the nucleus, as expected for a comet that is producing dust uniformly over its surface. ISON's coma shows enhanced dust particle release on the sunward-facing side of the comet's nucleus, the small, solid body at the core of the comet. This information is invaluable for determining the comet's shape, evolution, and spin of the solid nucleus. (AP Photo/NASA)
 
Something intriguing worth it to share. Hopefully, in the next few years we will enjoy far more impressive discoveries with Hubble's replacement telescope- The James Webb Space Telescope...

Hubble Space Telescope spots clouds on alien worlds

This most recent study, led by Laura Kreidberg of the University of Chicago in Illinois, has shown that there “have to be clouds” present. However, these would be utterly alien to the clouds found on Earth, and are likely to be made up of compounds such as zinc sulphide or potassium chloride, rather than our own, comparatively homely, mixture of water droplets and ice

Alien Clouds Blanket Nearby 'Super-Earth' Exoplanet, Hubble Data Show (VIDEO)
 
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Finally the Europeans do the right thing and select a mission that actually has the potential to discover a true Earth analog(*), ignoring the NASA spin surrounding Kepler and TESS.

http://www.esa.int/For_Media/Press_Releases/ESA_selects_planet-hunting_PLATO_mission

(*) 1 Earth mass, 1 Earth radius planet in a 1 year orbit about a G-type star. Not some 2 Earth radius, 8 Earth mass planet in a short orbit around an M star, or other media-hype-friendly crap.
 
perhaps because other variants are also interesting and life can thrive in very different conditions ;) you for sure don't need a copy of our own planet
 
UniversalTruth said:
perhaps because other variants are also interesting and life can thrive in very different conditions ;) you for sure don't need a copy of our own planet
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Not saying that the other variants aren't interesting. PLATO will do those too.

Kepler was premature, its planet hosting stars are too distant and too faint, and TESS is too small to do the long-period stuff. TESS might deliver a couple of planets amenable to a search for biomarkers, Kepler has delivered none.
 
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