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Don't Worry, Scientists Suggest, New Earth Just 'Few Years Away'
Super-Earths Found Around Sun-Like Stars
Four newfound planets orbiting two nearby stars add weight to the promise of detecting habitable worlds within the next few years, researchers said today.
New date is helping scientists "indicate that low-mass planets are quite common around nearby stars," said study team member Steven Vogt, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. "The discovery of potentially habitable nearby worlds may be just a few years away." (Image: Space.com) Two of the extrasolar planets are considered super-Earths, more massive than Earth but less massive than Uranus and Neptune. Spotting true Earth-sized planets is challenging with current technology, but the presence of super-Earths suggests finding a world like ours is just a matter of time, researchers say.
"These detections indicate that low-mass planets are quite common around nearby stars," said study team member Steven Vogt, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. "The discovery of potentially habitable nearby worlds may be just a few years away."
The astronomers are not sure if the super-Earths are rocky like our own world or if they have some other composition.
The team found the new planet systems by combining data gathered at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii and the Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT) in New South Wales, Australia. They inferred the existence of the planets by noting the worlds' gravitational effects on the parent star's orbit. This method is called the radial velocity, or wobble, technique.
The objects have not been photographed.
Three of the exoplanets orbit the star 61 Virginis, which is virtually a twin of the sun and lies 28 light-years away in the constellation of Virgo. (At this time of year, Virgo can be seen rising a few hours before the sun.)
The researchers estimated the minimum mass of each planet as: 5.1 Earth masses for 61 Vir b, 18 Earth masses for 61 Vir c, and 23 Earth masses for 61 Vir d, according study team member Chris Tinney of the University of New South Wales.
"So the smallest one is in the super-Earth mass range, and is the first planet like this to be found around a sun-like star," Tinney told SPACE.com.
Other super-Earths have been found around stars that are cooler and redder than the sun, he said.
Tinney added, "This is exciting, because it demonstrates the ability of our team to find planets at these interesting, small masses around solar-mass stars. If we want to one day find habitable planets that are really like the Earth in systems that are really like ours, then those are the sorts of stars we need to be able to find low-mass planets around."
The second new system found by the team features a 7.5-Earth-mass planet orbiting HD 1461, another near-perfect twin of the sun located 76 light-years away in the constellation Cetus. The scientists say at least one and possibly two additional planets also orbit the star.
HD 1461 can be seen with the naked eye in the early evening under good dark-sky conditions.
The researchers say they aren't sure whether the planet, now called HD 1461b, is a scaled-up version of Earth, composed largely of rock and iron, or whether, like Uranus and Neptune, it is composed mostly of water.
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83 Comments so far
Show AllOh, just great. I can see the colonizers now, rubbing their grubby hands together, getting ready to finish the job off on the earth, to completely extract every last bit of mineral to build their "new earth". Idiots.
Yes, that is obviously the ultimate dream of the capitalist corporate elites - to find other worlds they can rape and strip bare of resources, after the Earth is finished. Just like so many sci-fi movies portray.
Fortunately, the ability to travel at or beyond the speed of light - which would be required to reach any of these earth-like planets - is not even believed by many to be possible, let alone in even the most infantale stages of research. If it IS possible, that technology is centuries away. And even then, there's a goodly chance the human race might not exist by then, or at least not in such a civilized state that it could even pursue such research.
Those earth-like worlds out there in the universe have nothing to worry about from us greedy humans. Our very nature will destroy ourselves and keep them safe from our clutching claws.
"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag, carrying a cross."
Sinclair Lewis, "It Cant Happen Here", 1935
Actually you could launch a ship that could be designed to do the voyage over a century or so... Of course that would require one heck of an investment, and building it would take a few decades at least. You'd also have to be beyond certain that the planet you're trying to reach could indeed harbour human life. Of course that wouldn't be a guarantee, there could be microbes that would kill any human the second you landed, or life forms that would just regard you as lunch.
Oh, yah, and don't forget that the target system that we see (in this case the one that's only 28 light years away) is giving us information that's a quarter century out of date. For all the potential colonizers know they're off to a planet that's just been hit by a massive asteroid...
Dodgy doesn't begin to describe the potential cost of getting to, let alone colonizing another world. You'd have to take enough humans to start a new pool of humanity, as the voyage would be one way. The investment of doing that would never pay off for the corporations on earth, it could not be made to be profitable for them (unless they built a ship that they knew wouldn't support life for the journey to the other star).
in that case --if corporations find it troublesome for profiteering....GOOD!
who needs 'em anyway.
science can go ahead without them with the right mindset. of course we're eons away from THAT mindset. that's the trouble.
It is funny that that the first thing that comes to mind among people nowadays is how long-distance generation-starships would never be launched because there would not be any way to make money off them.
In the 1960's and 70's poeple never talked that way. In fact, talking of the profit motive as the prime motivator of humans at all was mostly limited to a then-small cult following of an obscure writer named Ayn Rand and the most thoroughly trounced US presidential candidate in history, Barry Goldwater. Everyone else simply assumed that such an adventure would be done because the is something deeply human and good about setting out on such adventures, and it would all be financed by a group of nations or a new United Nations Space agency of such.
The chances of a one in billions of years event rendering the planet uninhabitable over the hundred years or so it would take to get there seems pretty slim to me.
But, a definitive determination of the planets environment would require a separate unmanned probe first - itself taking a hundred years or more before we saw any data from it. We are getting there. NASA's New Horizons mission to Pluto, then the outer Kuiper Belt objects, launched in 2007, will extend over decades.
I have books by Jerry Pournelle, Larry Niven and their like written in the early 70's. Many are set a couple hundred years in the future, but often have timelines of, for example 1985-first expedition to Mars, 1994-first base on Titan, 2008 FTL travel first discovered, etc etc...What happened to that optimism?
To be fair, I was also thinking that the government wouldn't raise taxes to pay for such a thing either. Moreover, every one of the us space shots were profitable for the companies who built the probes, spaceship parts that were eventually assembled by NASA.
In the 60s and 70s people did question the idea of sending out probes and spaceships, it's one reason Nixon canceled future moon shots and cut NASA's budget.
I agree that the asteroid hitting the habitable world is a longshot, the more likely event facing any colonists would be that the planet looked like a garden of eden, but the lifeforms already there would be deadly to any human who landed there.
Government wouldn't have to raise taxes, just reorder spending priorities, notably, "defense" spending. Also, pool their resources with other nations. Of course such a thing is profitable to the contractors, not a big deal.
Finally, are a lot of misunderstandings about deficit spending, it is not nearly the bogeyman that the business-propagandists make it out to be. Read about this here:
http://www.counterpunch.org/auerback12072009.html
No kidding. How much space exploration would a couple of hundred billion dollars fund?
"Our" government would, upon planning a trip to a distant planet, create the U.S. Space Force under control of the Pentegon. We gotta be able to protect ourselves from those extraterrestrial terrrists ya know!
The author says the government can increase the money supply all it wants without consequences as long as there is no inflation. But that is the result of excess liquidity.
Just do a google search for printing money inflation:
http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=printing+money+inflation&btnG=Google+Search&meta=&aq=0&oq=printing+money+
Here's one of the first results:
Why Not Just Print More Money?
http://economics.about.com/cs/money/a/print_money.htm
For all these reasons and more, it could never happen.
Why is this story about something purely academic, and light-years distant, deserving of a headline?
I thought it was going to be about the new, hot, dead acid sea covered future earth, a few light-microseconds out my window.
I wondered the same thing, and expected the same thing.
I sure hope this wasn't posted on the CD site in the same spirit as the recent "NASA is bombing the Moon!" nonsense that made the rounds on the left. (Adding the words "Don't Worry" to the original article's title makes me worry that this is the case.)
Any notion that finding another Earth-type planet will result in its imminent conquest, strip-mining, or enslavement by humanity is absurd in the extreme. We're still dithering about returning to the Moon with astronauts; traveling to another solar system is hundreds--if not thousands--of years away, and may never happen for humanity at all.
Long, long before then, we will have either figured out how to live in a truly sustainable fashion on this planet, or this planet will have spanked the hell out of us (deservedly so).
On the other hand, it would be nice to know that other life-bearing planets exist in the Galaxy, and that the endless possibilities of evolution have more fertile ground in which to be realized than just this one world on which we find ourselves.
Because it is interesting? Because well rounded human beings, regardless of political beliefs, should have a passing knowledge about what is going on in the world?
I am a great fan of human space exploration and I'm already familiar with these ongoing studies and Kepler spaceborne telescope mission, which will be able to screen thousands of stars in our galactic neighborhood for earth-sized planets in the habitable zones. This can be used to narrow the SETI programs current needle-in-a-haystack search for intelligent radio signals. Fascinating stuff - but the subject of other web sites, not Commondreams.
If this was a commentary, I would agree with you. This is in the news section, and I think commondreams ought to expand that part of the website. Right now, (with the strange exception of this article) everything posted as "news" has a political bent. So, for example, we see an article on Evo Morales winning in Bolivia but nothing on the conservative winning yesterday in Chile. If a US ally commits an atrocity, it will be here. If Zimbabwe or North Korea commits an atrocity, it will not be here. And so on. I would like to see more news---regardless of how it plays politically. And, were it not for this article, I would not have known about these exo-planets; neither Drudge nor the HuffPo are linking to this.
I'm sure glad I renewed my passport. In a few million years it just might come in handy.
So, since humanity is incapable of traveling at the speed of light, exactly how long might it take for any human to travel to this "earth-like" planet? As has already been pointed out, it would be cheaper to use the energy and investment of such a venture in fixing the problems we have already created here.
What a waste!
Poet
Knowing about the other planets is not a waste. Attempting to colonize those planets with the technology we now have would certainly be a waste, heck as other posters have said we're still arguing about who's going to (if we're going to) pay for a return visit to the moon. How long would it take to get there at a sublight speed, over a century. If faster than light travel is possible (given what we now know it's not, but the big E could be wrong.) than it would take much less time...
Finding out new things is always going to be a good investment, if only because the argument that we shouldn't invest in research would lead us to where the Islamic world is today. They were on the cutting edge of science in the 1100s, they could have - were it not for the anti-science fundamentalists - established themselves as the dominant force of the world centuries ago. But they thought research and knowing about facts were a waste...
Once upon a time, humanity was incapable of passing the speed of sound... We have absolutely no idea what wonderful inventions our grandchildren will dream up. I wish I could live to be 200 years old and (hopefully) visit another star.
We don't deserve another; we're making such an Obamanation of this one!
Great. And?
The Virgo people must be liberated from their oil.
Finally! A place for Republicans.
Hear hear! Ship 'em off! They've been masquerading as humans for far too long anyway. Good riddance!
- Insurgent
Considering the comments so far, you are probably right. While the people no this site complain about how evil "European Americans" and their ilk are, the Republicans will be out conquering the universe.
If you are nice, they might even leave a planet or two for you...
The fact that one light year is 5,912,956,545,363 miles might present some technical difficulties.
If there are intelligent lifeforms out there they may view us as tasty morsels or they may, with justification, view us as a virulent and dangerous pollution that must be eradicated for the safety of the universe.
If they are realtors they may have a client interested in the Earth property and tell us all to clear off.
[If there are intelligent lifeforms out there they may view us as tasty morsels or they may, with justification, view us as a virulent and dangerous pollution that must be eradicated for the safety of the universe.]
Or we might just regard them as the same, for the same reasons... Who knows. After all, how are you going to start a conversation with a creature with whom you have few, if any, point of reference? You could say "hi" and it might hear 'we're going to kill you all' or 'please eat us'... Snicker...
"After all, how are you going to start a conversation with a creature with whom you have few, if any, point of reference?"
Conversations with 'other intelligent' life forms in sci-fi often start with mathematics e.g. by signalling the first 100 primes. They then move on through mathematics to atomic physics, chemistry etc. In this way scientific discourse should be possible.
Yah, I agree that's how it would start. But the learning of the language would be a nightmare, with another human we can read their body language and that helps with translations. Aliens, if they exist at all, would certainly not look like us and might just provoke a very negative reaction just on their physical appearance alone. I think I remember reading about a study that was done on the likely reaction most humans would have on meeting an alien, it didn't bode well for a productive future.
But what if they do look like us? What if we are the spawn of aliens.
Ever wondered why Jesus, Mohamed, Quetzalcoatl, Viracocha, and a few more who's names I forget are ALL relatively light skinned, bearded men who either came from or departed to the sky? Ever seen the ruins of Monte Alban in Mexico? It is a friggen airport is what it is...
Any intelligent lifeforms out there would rightly eliminate us before we got any kind of foothold there. Earth people, at least Euro-American ones, live to exploit. Humanity takes a distant place behind money and power for too many of us earth people. To the universe I say, "stop us before we kill another planet again."
I don't know, I kind of take it as a sarcastic joke that this was posted on CD... They know what we're going to say...
So, this is their solution to Climate Change? Ha!!!
Don't get me wrong,I love Battle Star Galactica... and I am a kind of seeker, explorer type. But I have come to understand that you have to think before you leap. Plus, you guys are right. When are we supposed to be able to go there?
COME ON, LET'S FOCUS PEOPLE, FOCUS!!!!!
"Don't Worry, Scientists Suggest, New Earth Just 'Few Years Away'".
Hurrah! - Now we don't have to care for this planet excessively. Just limit CO2-emissions for a brief while, waiting for the new planets to open for business -fatter times are "just a few years away". When Earth's filled up and used up we can move on and continue growing exponentially. Unlimited planets, unlimited growth. Great plan.
Guess that's why most people aren't overly worried about climate-extreming, they sense intuitively that there's more room to pollute in the universe, and we'll get to it soon. Right?
When I first saw the article I thought it was going to be about the effects climate change had on this earth... Ah, well, it's a fun article and something that is interesting to think about. I'd love to see the reaction of the fundies and the creationists to the news that there exist other worlds that contain life. It'd be funnier to introduce them to Grok, the dominant and intelligent species that lives on Betelgeuse and exists only to eat fundamentalists and others who refuse to think for themselves.
I shouldn't post this, I really really shouldn't post this.... biscuits, it's too tempting.
Uh huh. And we're selling advance tickets, presumably?
well---if it comes to that --
just be sure to LEAVE some things behind...
1) American "way".
Capitalism
and things will be a bit more tolerable "out there"..
oh - leave religion behind.
Just a few years away ! ( These guys must be friends with Bush ) How about looking around down here a little more first.
They mean light years, it's a joke. Scientific style...
I wish I could see the faces of those people who get to those planets only to find they haven't even cooled from a molten surface to a solid one which would mean they would have to turn around and come back, just like the first expedition to mars will just be a snap or since there is water on the moon we can land there a again and start growing gardens.
oh come on...a new planet would be fun to colonize.
You could all have more kids, consume more stuff, and then blame the corporations for all your troubles while having lunch, or better yet, Twittering with people from another planet.
what do you mean? we are blaming corporations for most of our problems anyways in the right here and now! i mean, hell, capitalism, is destroying the planet, so i am sure it can do it anywhere in the universe.
[ Twittering with people from another planet.]
Fabulous idea, shame it'd take 4-30 years for the twits to pass back and forth...
Three of the exoplanets orbit the star 61 Virginis.
It won't be a Virginis if man ever makes it to it.
Yeah well, there are no virgins. Sex is sex and it feels too good no matter where.
Having searched, since the inception of science, for intelligent life on this planet, scientists have thrown up their hands and started searching the heavens.
Could this all be one huge cosmic joke?
Hell, maybe the answer really is 42.
FINDING new Earths will be easy. GETTING to them is going to be the dificult part.
the only "being" that could ever reach these places from earth is an A.I. bot. we don't even have enough oil left here to get us through the next 30 years of driving to and from the office.
The pessimism evinced by this and many other comments here goes a long way to explaining why "progressives" never win elections in America. We are an optimistic people. If we run out of oil "in 30 years" (doubtful), then we will simply come up with something else. There is a great big ball of fire called the "sun" in the sky that offers us a literally limitless supply of energy. We just have to figure out how to tap it. Running out of oil would certainly focus our minds on the "how" of that problem real quick.