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NASA Discovers 7 Planets That Could Support Life
Sick of news, politics, and that chatty co-worker who eats a garlic bagel every morning? A new life awaits you in the off-worlds! On Wednesday, NASA announced that they have found seven new Earth-sized planets. The best part? They’re just down the street, astronomically speaking.
The star TRAPPIST-1 is the sun for these seven worlds, just 39 light years away from Cape Canaveral. It’s located in the Aquarius constellation, visible every fall in the Northern Hemisphere. Technically, TRAPPIST-1 is known as an “ultra-cool dwarf star.” (Scientists probably added “ultra-cool” to make the sun feel better about that whole “dwarf” deal.)
All seven planets are considered temperate, meaning all could potentially have water. Of those, three are located in the habitable zone (shown above as d, e, and f), making them the most likely to support life. For all we know, they could already be flush with flora and fauna, or at least could be an excellent spot for humans to export our plants and critters.
“This discovery could be a significant piece in the puzzle of finding habitable environments, places that are conducive to life,” said NASA’s Thomas Zurbuchen. “Answering the question ‘are we alone?’ is a top science priority and finding so many planets like these for the first time in the habitable zone is a remarkable step forward toward that goal.”
TRAPPIST-1 got its name from the TRAnsiting Planets and PlanetesImals Small Telescope in Chile, which was used to discover some of its exoplanets. NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope identified the rest of the planets and provided the data leading to the space agency’s announcement.
You can watch NASA’s short video on the discovery here:
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Published in Science & Technology
Shhh. People don’t want to hear that.
Heh heh, yep. We’ll never go there, and they’ll never come here. Maybe the planet had intelligent life a million years ago, or will have life a million years from now. The one thing nobody ever factors in is TIME. We always assume if it’s 12 o’clock here, it is 12 o’clock on planet B1-prime.
No. It’s not well established. The theory and practice have only been around a few years. There is no independent means of verifying the theory or the conclusions from the data. It’s all just informed speculation.
The same is true with tidal lock, the life of red dwarf stars and most everything else.
But these publicists, er um, I mean “scientists” have really cool pictures of imaginary planets to make everyone think that they know more than they even claim to know, let alone what is really known.
I’m not an enemy of science. I’m an engineer. But especially after the past three decades of Al Gore politicizing science and the proven global fraud of climate change, I demand a lot more humility from scientific claims and I do not respond well to over stated claims.
The really interesting thing about TRAPPIST-1 is that it is relatively close. Most of the exoplanets we have discovered were found by Kepler, and it was looking at a field of stars hundreds to thousands of light-years away. Planets that distance are very hard to observe in any direct way. We might be able to get a hint of their atmospheres by looking at spectral changes in the starlight as they transit.
But 39 light years is in our backyard, cosmically speaking. The next generation of telescopes may be able to directly image them, and there’s a very good chance that we will be able to make detailed measurements of their atmospheres. And having a number of such planets in the same system gives us an unprecented ability to compare their development, which should really help us understand stellar and planetary evolution.
That’s because it’s a silly thing to say. There are all kinds of ways we could discover life on other planets. For one, we could detect biosignatures in their atmospheres, such as oxygen and methane. For another, we might be able to directly image them with large enough telescopes. Third, we could detect radio waves, laser pulses, or other communication methods if there was a technological civilization there.
The next generation of telescopes like the James Webb telescope and the WFIRST and TESS scopes are going to greatly enhance our ability to not just discover new exoplanets, but to directly image them and hopefully make fairly detailed measurements of their atmospheres.
You know, there’s nothing magical about a telescope. It’s just a big light collector. Denying direct evidence from telescopic observations is like refusing to believe that a distant airplane exists because you can only see it through binoculars.
That’s simply not correct. Exoplanets are referred to as ‘candidates’ until they are independently verified. And it takes three transits of the planet, with acceptably high signal to noise ratios before it passes the first test. That’s one of the reasons we’ve found so few Earth-like planets around sun-like stars – the habitable zones of those stars should require an orbital period of approximately an Earth year, so waiting for three transits takes three years of observations. That’s why the first announced exoplanets were very close to their stars with very short orbital periods.
Once you have two transits, you can make a prediction for when the third transit will happen if the object is orbiting the star. If you then find that third transition exactly when you expected it, that’s pretty good confirmation that whatever it is you are looking at, it’s big enough to occlude significant starlight, AND it’s in orbit around the star. By look at the amount of occlusion, we can get a good idea of the size of the object. And by looking at how the spectra changes, we may even be able to measure the composition of the atmosphere.
Many of these candidates have been confirmed using other methods. For example, other scopes can measure the wobble of the star due to the gravitational pull of the planet. If the period of the wobble matches the period found with the transit method, and the size of the wobble gives us the mass and it matches what we estimate from the transit method, that’s pretty good confirmation!
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Using the same procedures which are not corroborated by evidence from other procedures. I’m sure they are valid, but a scientist should not claim it as more than speculation at this point.
Then you can also directly image the planet. The problem with imaging planets is that the brightness of their parent star washes out the feeble light from the planet. But if you have a mechanism for blocking or cancelling the star’s light, you can then image the planet. In fact, here’s one such image:
That’s Beta Pictoris B, imaged with the Gemini Planet Imager, a Camera on the 8 meter Gemini south telescope. Do you want to claim that’s not a planet in orbit around the star? How about if you see enough images over time to actually see it orbiting?
Gemini is an 8 meter scope. There is a new class of 30 meter scopes coming online in the next decade, with advanced adaptive optics that can virtually remove all distortion from the atmosphere. I wonder what they’ll be able to see?
No, you’re an enemy of science, if you’re going to chalk up a mass of data across many instruments to being ‘imaginary pictures’. Look, I am a big skeptic of lots of science. I know there is a reproducability crisis. I know scientists have gotten things wrong in the past. I’m highly skeptical of the people who claim to be able to model our Earth’s future temperature within a few tenths of a degree, or economists who believe they can forecast what an economy will look like 50 years from now. So there’s a lot of bad science out there – especially in the ‘softer’ sciences. I even wrote an article about it on Ricochet.
But you have to be careful not to throw out the good science with the bad. Trying to predict the direction of a complex adaptive system 100 years into the future is not even remotely the same as direct empirical science such as this. We’re not talking about teasing tiny temperature effects out of a complex system with millions of variables and drawing sweeping conclusions from it. We’re talking about seeing, with our own eyes, objects obeying Kepler’s laws and orbiting around another star. And of course, science is never settled, and if someone ever came up with a better explanation for what we are seeing we’d have to accept it. But that seems highly unlikely given the massive amounts of evidence we have collected.
Oh, and if you think tidal lock is some kind of fake science, you might want to look up at the Moon some time and notice that the same side faces us all the time. The same goes for the Galilean moons around Jupiter. Tidal locking is well understood and has been for a very, very long time. If you’re going to deny our ability to predict tidal locking when the masses and orbits of objects are known, you might as well deny that Man walked on the Moon.
You do understand there are degrees of difference here, right? It’s one thing to speculate that there might be a civilization around a distant planet based on nothing but some strange light curves, but that’s not at all the same as the basic observation of orbital dynamics of planets. Yes, in science nothing is absolutely certain. But plenty of things have accumulated enough evidence and passed enough tests that we can add them to the catalog of accepted things for the purpose of moving science forward, even while recognizing that maybe some discovery in the future will show it wasn’t true.
But if you are putting astrophysicists working on the Kepler mission in the same category as Graham Hancock or Emmanuel Velikovsky, you need to have your view of science recalibrated.
You’re imagining things I’ve not said.
I said I don’t accept that they can determine that a planet 39 light years away is tidal locked.
I’ve said that I believe that the planets exist. I do demand more caveats from scientists when discussing their discoveries. The certainty is not 100%. It might be high, but it doesn’t include pictures of blue planets with shorelines and puffy clouds like they are trying to portray. These scientists are shamelessly and inaccurately portraying their discoveries in the hopes that gullible people will give them more money. I don’t like it.
Are the scientists saying that? Or the media? Science reporting is terrible. I watched the actual press conference. The scientists never said anything about shorelines and puffy clouds. In fact, in that press conference they pointed out that they don’t have a clue if these planets even have water on them, or if they’ve been baked try when their star was hotter. They don’t even know if they have atmospheres. But when they say “earth-like”, they just mean rocky planets roughly Earth sized, in roughly the habitable zone around the star.
I was at a talk by Alan Stern, the head of the New Horizons mission. In that talk, he made an offhand comment about Pluto that was speculation. He immediately caught himself and said, “I shouldn’t have phrased it that way. Now the media will probably report that as fact, and it’s not. It’s wishful thinking” or words to that effect. And sure enough, the media reports of that talk repeated his little aside as if it was fact, and left out his immediate qualification that it was not and was just him speculating. Because that’s the way the media rolls. For all their talk about their commitment to the facts, they never let them get in the way of telling a good story.
Just don’t blame the scientists for that. At least not in astronomy. All the astronomers I know are extraordinarily careful in how they talk about evidence. This isn’t climate science, and there are no big political oxen being gored.
I’m looking at the scientists being interviewed with the slick artist drawings in the background. I think the whole thing is a funding push. I half believe that there is a chance that the data might be faked so that they can get more funding.
Lynx hairs planted in animal studies. Climate change/global warming fraud. Northern spotted owls. Science has a lot of bad actors, and there are rarely any consequences for lying. Someone who presents like a nerd and has dry papers I’m more apt to believe. Photogenic people with massive budgets for propaganda material I am very reluctant to accept.
Yes, that’s what I said. We could detect radio waves from them. And we’ve been listening for that – and hearing nothing but static. That doesn’t prove there are no civilizations out there, it just indicates that the evidence for them is still zero, this discovery not withstanding. So our best answer based on the evidence to the question “Are we alone?” is still – yes. Anything else is mere speculation.
I am pushing back against the quote that says this discovery is a “remarkable step forward” in answering the question “are we alone?” It isn’t. We already knew there must be many Earth-like planets out there.
Detecting oxygen and methane in an atmosphere only proves life is there if life is the only way for oxygen and methane to be in an atmosphere. Is it?
The best answer is we don’t know. As I said earlier, insufficient data, which means assuming we are alone is as speculative as assuming we’re not. In fact, maybe more so… assuming uniqueness rarely works out.
It is? Who decided that? Is it more important than discovering a cure for cancer, or renewable energy research, or better ways to frack, the effort to establish permanent bases on Mars or the moon, among many other things? How about dealing with the possibility of an EMP from the Sun? That seems a heckuva lot more important to me than a wild good chase for signs of life on the other side of the galaxy.
The practical answer to the question “Are we alone?” is – yes. We will have to solve our energy problems on our own. No civilization 39 light years away will do it for us. We will have to find ways on our own to avoid nuking each other, avoiding an asteroid hit, dealing with earthquakes and floods, and all the other threats – political, economic, and natural – that threaten us. That’s your research priorities.
Years ago, some general said (and I’m going from a not too good memory here), “We’re either alone or we’re not. Either way, it boggles the mind.”
That is awesome! I had never seen that before. Thanks.
I had. That’s why I said I don’t much doubt that such planets probably exist.
Though I reserve some doubt in case they are lying.
Who is ‘they’? Exoplanets have been independently confirmed by numerous groups around the world, using both space-based and ground-based telescopes. An exoplanet has even been imaged by an amateur astronomer. All the raw data is easily available to the public, and the methods used to observe and calculate the parameters of these planets are also public.
There’s a fine line between healthy skepticism and straight-up conspiratorial woo. And sometimes that line isn’t that fine.
A few comments from a non-scientist:
(continued)
final question:
How close does the plane of the ecliptic match the plane of the Milky Way?
Thanks, John.
What is now seen through the telescope is what was there 39 years ago. Am I right about that? If so, does it matter. Probably not.
But say we have a rocket ship that can travel at the speed of light. If the rocket left and reached one of the Trappist planets, stayed for a year then returned to earth, 79 years later, how much time would have elapsed on earth? Thousands of years, yes?
Everyone who made the first voyage would likely either be dead or over 100 years old, so those making the return trip, actually a first trip for them, would be aliens on earth uncertain of what they were going to find or whether it would support life for them.
So, what’s all this add up to for earthlings? Or Trappistlings? Not much it seems.
Text messages would take a mere 39 years each way, though. Another 39 years before you’d know if it was delivered. Sender and recipient would likely both be dead by then
I agree with you that we are effectively alone whatever is discovered out there – but even at a pause of 39 years between communication, there is at least the bare possibility of a civilization-changing exchange of information in the form of a “dump” of technological information.
I think that’s inverted. You might have fun with this relativistic calculator. I tried using a ship with constant 1g acceleration. It takes 41 years of Earth time and only 7.25 years inboard the ship.
If I’m reading that right, the speed of light in a vacuum can be much greater than 186K/sec. Is that right? That changes things a lot doesn’t it? The rest of it I’ll have to absorb gradually to keep my head from hurting.
Heinlein’s Time for the Stars is based on this time dilation.
I’m not positive but I think he also explains it in Methuselah’s Children.