A portrait of the HR8799 planetary system as imaged by the Hale Telescope. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Palomar Observatory).
Posted on 11/23/2013 7:08:18 PM PST by SunkenCiv
A quiet milestone in modern astronomy may soon come to pass. As of today, The Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia lists a current tally of 998 extrasolar planets across 759 planetary systems. And although various tabulations differ slightly, very soon we should be living in an era where over one thousand exoplanets are known.
The history of exoplanet discovery has paralleled the course of the modern age of astronomy. It’s strange to think that a generation has already grown up over the past two decades in a world where knowledge of extrasolar planets is a given. I remember hearing of the promise of such detections growing up in the 1970’s, as astronomers put the odds at detection of planets beyond our solar system in our lifetime at around 50%.
Sure, there were plenty of false positives long before the first true discovery was made. 70 Ophiuchi was the site of many claims, starting with that of W.S. Jacob of the Madras Observatory way back in 1855. The high proper motion exhibited by Barnard’s Star at six light years distant was also highly scrutinized throughout the 20th century for claims of an unseen companion causing it to wobble. Ironically, Barnard’s Star still hasn’t made it into the pantheon of stars boasting planetary worlds.
But the first verified claim of an exoplanetary system came from a bizarre and unexpected source: a pulsar known as PSR B1257+12, which was discovered to host two worlds in 1992. This was followed by the first discovery of a world orbiting a main sequence star, 51 Pegasi in 1994.
(Excerpt) Read more at universetoday.com ...
A portrait of the HR8799 planetary system as imaged by the Hale Telescope. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Palomar Observatory).
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Yes, but are they “Class M”?
More than 1,000 exoplanets have now been confirmed and cataloged (PHL @ UPR Arecibo)
Who knew that planets looked like Peanut M & Ms cut in half? What if, and I’m just saying “What if” here, we are all just living in a large Peanut M & M Blizzard from a universal Dairy Queen? What if I’m a tasty hard-shell covering? Maybe I’m a nut. That didn’t come out the way I wanted it to.
So, what’s the chance for life, any kind, out of condensed matter, hm?
Since travelling faster than light will probably never be possible, people assume that humanity can never defeat the distance to a habitable planet in a another solar system.
But if it is looked at strictly as a matter of travel time, then the technology for moving to another terran planet is almost within our reach already.
Yes, we have to accept that those who left our system will never arrive at the destination — but their descendants many generations down will.
The telescopes don’t have sufficient resolution to see Mounds on these distant worlds.
FTL travel is possible, we just don’t know how it’s done.
Multigenerational colony ships would have to be preceded by some sort of prospector missions, high-speed sprints to the nearest stars, to survey any systems they find and send back the data (which would just take a few years to return; the mission would take more than a human lifetime).
Once a candidate planet or two get identified, a big seeding mission (plants, beneficial microbes, perhaps some forms of multicellular animals) would have to be assembled in orbit, then sent at a velocity appropriate for eventual looping braking at the candidate star and planet.
The colony ships would likewise be built in orbit, stocked with every kind of information needed, some kind of self-sustaining food supply (including the food crops which the planetary colonists will rely on), communications, and probably technology to make fuel in different ways for those “just in case” unexpected scenarios. They could start some years after the seeding missions. And they’d have to include something that could make the landings possible and still be in working order after literally centuries en route.
I’m not optimistic a multigenerational colonizing mission is feasible. And as in sci-fi, by the time the colony ships reach the destination, they’ll likely find themselves overtaken by events, arriving at a world that has already been colonized by people arriving aboard FTL developed after their ancestors set out.
:’)
Pretty! How many have you done, do you think? They always look great.
When they figure out a ‘periodic table’ for planets, I am certain that Terran sized bodies orbiting within a star system’s habitable zone will be called ‘class M’.
It won’t be the first scientific nomenclature lifted from Star Trek! LOL! :-)
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