Quote from: _INTER_ on 07/23/2015 04:33 pmWhy is this announceworthy?Many people ask for this.I read a similar first-page-news ona PAPER newspaper... around 20 years ago!But his time:Planet is 1.6 times the Earth.Its star has almost same temperature of our star.Its star sends it 1.1 times the energy our star sends to us.Its star is 1.1 AU from it.The solar system is older than ours, and the planet always staid in the habitable zone, for 6 billions of years (2 billions more than Earth).Its year is 1.1 times our year. I think this is the most unusual thing: till now I've always read of hours-lasting or days-lasting "years"; this could mean that now we have (or have analyzed) enough data to start finding earth-year-like systems at last! Even planets 1 YL apart rather than 1400. :-) And a planet like 452b but 1 YL far would be much intriguing!
Why is this announceworthy?
Quote from: mcgyver on 07/28/2015 09:12 amQuote from: _INTER_ on 07/23/2015 04:33 pmWhy is this announceworthy?Many people ask for this.I read a similar first-page-news ona PAPER newspaper... around 20 years ago!But his time:Planet is 1.6 times the Earth.Its star has almost same temperature of our star.Its star sends it 1.1 times the energy our star sends to us.Its star is 1.1 AU from it.The solar system is older than ours, and the planet always staid in the habitable zone, for 6 billions of years (2 billions more than Earth).Its year is 1.1 times our year. I think this is the most unusual thing: till now I've always read of hours-lasting or days-lasting "years"; this could mean that now we have (or have analyzed) enough data to start finding earth-year-like systems at last! Even planets 1 YL apart rather than 1400. :-) And a planet like 452b but 1 YL far would be much intriguing!Let me rephrase it: Why does a planet, that's more similar to Earth in certain aspects and is way less similar elsewhere get more attention than exoplanets more habitable (note that ESI scale of Kepler 452b got corrected in wiki). Either ESI scale is not representing "potentially habitable" correctly enough or my interest in "potentially habitable" worlds is not that interesting to other people / scientists / media.
Let me rephrase it: Why does a planet, that's more similar to Earth in certain aspects and is way less similar elsewhere get more attention than exoplanets more habitable (note that ESI scale of Kepler 452b got corrected in wiki). Either ESI scale is not representing "potentially habitable" correctly enough or my interest in "potentially habitable" worlds is not that interesting to other people / scientists / media.
Quote from: K-P on 07/23/2015 04:51 pm[quote author=Eer link=topic=16581.msg1408529#msg1408529 date=1437670019And because of the fact that it is so far from the star (orbital period of 300+ days) I find it much better place to live (in my imagination) than those other ESI Top-10 planets, which have orbital period of about 30 days. No matter if the star they orbit is small, it still might have harmful flares etc. scorching the nearby planets... Also tidal locking is guaranteed with those planets.Flares might strip away the atmosphere*, but I don't think tidal locking is necessarily a problem. From what I've read, oceans & atmosphere would redistribute heat rather well so the temperature range would be rather Earth-like: permanent Saharan summer noon at the subsolar point and permanent polar winter night at the opposite point, but with large pleasant areas in between.*would a magnetic field protect sufficiently? If so, it would probably be fine. The heat output variations should be mitigated by oceans and atmosphere.
[quote author=Eer link=topic=16581.msg1408529#msg1408529 date=1437670019And because of the fact that it is so far from the star (orbital period of 300+ days) I find it much better place to live (in my imagination) than those other ESI Top-10 planets, which have orbital period of about 30 days. No matter if the star they orbit is small, it still might have harmful flares etc. scorching the nearby planets... Also tidal locking is guaranteed with those planets.
Quote from: _INTER_ on 07/28/2015 03:17 pmLet me rephrase it: Why does a planet, that's more similar to Earth in certain aspects and is way less similar elsewhere get more attention than exoplanets more habitable (note that ESI scale of Kepler 452b got corrected in wiki). Either ESI scale is not representing "potentially habitable" correctly enough or my interest in "potentially habitable" worlds is not that interesting to other people / scientists / media.Two reasons I can see, one technical one scientific. Kepler was designed to detect all sorts of planets but specifically it was meant to detect planets like Kepler 452b. It is the only instrument that has a reasonable chance of doing so. Bigger planets are detectable using other methods like radial velocity. Smaller worlds orbiting close to their stars offer many more chances to catch a transit. Kepler provided an uninterrupted view for over four years with enough sensitivity to detect terrestrial worlds. With only 4 potential transits over the entire lifetime of the mission if Kepler had blinked once they could have missed it. The detection of Kepler 452b represents not only an impressive technological feat but a validation of the Kepler mission and its goals.The other reason I think this was announcement worthy is due to the type of star it orbits. This was an important data point as the method of exoplanet detection biases the type of worlds discovered. We know now that a G class star can form planets like the ones around our sun. This had been theorized as likely but now we have proof. The number of known G class stars with small planets went from one to two and likely more as those candidates mentioned at the press conference are confirmed. Furthermore the most studied star is a G class star and we know they are great stars to host habitable planets. They are stable, calm, and long lasting. M and K class stars we know less about. What we do know raised serious concerns about the habitability of planets orbiting in the habitable zones of those stars. Other planets may rank higher on the ESI scale but that scale tends to be optimistic when it comes to M and K class stars.
Quote from: Vultur on 07/28/2015 12:27 amQuote from: K-P on 07/23/2015 04:51 pm[quote author=Eer link=topic=16581.msg1408529#msg1408529 date=1437670019And because of the fact that it is so far from the star (orbital period of 300+ days) I find it much better place to live (in my imagination) than those other ESI Top-10 planets, which have orbital period of about 30 days. No matter if the star they orbit is small, it still might have harmful flares etc. scorching the nearby planets... Also tidal locking is guaranteed with those planets.Flares might strip away the atmosphere*, but I don't think tidal locking is necessarily a problem. From what I've read, oceans & atmosphere would redistribute heat rather well so the temperature range would be rather Earth-like: permanent Saharan summer noon at the subsolar point and permanent polar winter night at the opposite point, but with large pleasant areas in between.*would a magnetic field protect sufficiently? If so, it would probably be fine. The heat output variations should be mitigated by oceans and atmosphere.I figured the atmosphere and oceans would evaporate off of the subsolar point and freeze out at the anti-solar point. Everything would eventually accumulate in the frozen zone and not be recycled back.
The paper finds each explanation wanting, save for one. If another star had passed through the unusual star’s system, it could have yanked a sea of comets inward. Provided there were enough of them, the comets could have made the dimming pattern.But that would be an extraordinary coincidence, if that happened so recently, only a few millennia before humans developed the tech to loft a telescope into space. That’s a narrow band of time, cosmically speaking.And yet, the explanation has to be rare or coincidental. After all, this light pattern doesn’t show up anywhere else, across 150,000 stars. We know that something strange is going on out there.When I spoke to Boyajian on the phone, she explained that her recent paper only reviews “natural” scenarios. “But,” she said, there were “other scenarios” she was considering.Jason Wright, an astronomer from Penn State University, is set to publish an alternative interpretation of the light pattern. SETI researchers have long suggested that we might be able to detect distant extraterrestrial civilizations, by looking for enormous technological artifacts orbiting other stars. Wright and his co-authors say the unusual star’s light pattern is consistent with a “swarm of megastructures,” perhaps stellar-light collectors, technology designed to catch energy from the star.“When [Boyajian] showed me the data, I was fascinated by how crazy it looked,” Wright told me. “Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilization to build.”Boyajian is now working with Wright and Andrew Siemion, the Director of the SETI Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley. The three of them are writing up a proposal. They want to point a massive radio dish at the unusual star, to see if it emits radio waves at frequencies associated with technological activity.If they see a sizable amount of radio waves, they’ll follow up with the Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico, which may be able to say whether the radio waves were emitted by a technological source, like those that waft out into the universe from Earth’s network of radio stations.Assuming all goes well, the first observation would take place in January, with the follow-up coming next fall. If things go really well, the follow-up could happen sooner. “If we saw something exciting, we could ask the director for special allotted time on the VLA,” Wright told me. “And in that case, we’d be asking to go on right away.”
I happen to be one of the co-authors. Yes it is very strange and a unique system as far as we know but I wouldn't call it aliens right yet, that's just sensationalism. It has stumped a lot of clever people so far though.
Well yeah I know, just feel a bit of a duty to set the record straight. Sadly whenever a scientist mentions the a-word you get a lot of people who may not understand the nuance getting overexcited, already starting on Twitter.Yeah the article is about this other paper being worked on, but as far as I understand it this is to be a theoretical paper trying to explain away features, there is no actual evidence whatsoever of a*****. I'm well versed in light curves and while this one is odd, nothing about it indicates a***** at all, just no one can come up with a satisfactory explanation for all the features right now. I have seen planets being ripped apart, stars being rung like bells, worlds where other planets come so close to fill much of the sky, and on and on and on. The universe is awesome, it doesn't need aliens to make it awesome.Don't get me wrong I'd love to have stumbled upon the greatest discovery in the history of mankind, but we probably haven't. Doesn't mean the mystery is any less fascinating.