First direct image of extrasolar planet.

[Locut0s]

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap080919.html

Of course these are special circumstances but it's still humbling to see. Will be quite some time before we manage to image earth like extrasolar planets.

 

[Jeff7]

:thumbsup:

Impressive.

That's still ridiculously far from its parent start. That's way farther out than Pluto is from our Sun.


I feel a bit dirty now, for looking at these voyeurish pictures of a young, hot, naked planet.

 

[JohnCU]

we're so small and insignificant in the grand scheme of things.

/deep

 

[cirrrocco]

Beautiful...wonder what lies beyond...........................

 

[chuckywang]

Originally posted by: JohnCU
we're so small and insignificant in the grand scheme of things.

/deep

dude ...

 

[Baked]

God put that on the Gemini Observatory telescope.

 

[Pocatello]

Originally posted by: JohnCU
we're so small and insignificant in the grand scheme of things.

/deep

And yet, quite rare. The probability of a planet to align perfectly from the sun to sustain life, the right conditions for all the organic molecules to come together to create life, and to have the gas giants outside to protect us from asteroids and comets...it's been an amazing ride.

 

[Jeff7]

Originally posted by: Pocatello

Originally posted by: JohnCU
we're so small and insignificant in the grand scheme of things.

/deep

And yet, quite rare. The probability of a planet to align perfectly from the sun to sustain life, the right conditions for all the organic molecules to come together to create life, and to have the gas giants outside to protect us from asteroids and comets...it's been an amazing ride.

Rare - percentage-wise, maybe. But it's a damn big Universe.


Our wee little speck, from about 4 billion miles away.
When Voyager 1 took the picture, Earth only showed up as 0.12 pixels across.
The "sunbeam" effect resulted from internal reflections in the lenses; it was coincidence that Earth was in the middle of one.

 

[bsobel]

Originally posted by: Pocatello

Originally posted by: JohnCU
we're so small and insignificant in the grand scheme of things.

/deep

And yet, quite rare. The probability of a planet to align perfectly from the sun to sustain life, the right conditions for all the organic molecules to come together to create life, and to have the gas giants outside to protect us from asteroids and comets...it's been an amazing ride.

Another person unfamiliar with the law of large numbers.

 

[dbk]

seems fake../runs

 

[Pocatello]

Originally posted by: bsobel

Originally posted by: Pocatello

Originally posted by: JohnCU
we're so small and insignificant in the grand scheme of things.

/deep

And yet, quite rare. The probability of a planet to align perfectly from the sun to sustain life, the right conditions for all the organic molecules to come together to create life, and to have the gas giants outside to protect us from asteroids and comets...it's been an amazing ride.

Another person unfamiliar with the law of large numbers.

Are you saying that every star system has a bunch of planets supporting life?

 

[vital]

hey I don't get it.. if our telescopes can capture images of planets 500-light years away... why can't they have satellite views like google map for all the planets in our solar system?

 

[BW86]

sweet

 

[Jeff7]

Originally posted by: Pocatello

Originally posted by: bsobel

Originally posted by: Pocatello

Originally posted by: JohnCU
we're so small and insignificant in the grand scheme of things.

/deep

And yet, quite rare. The probability of a planet to align perfectly from the sun to sustain life, the right conditions for all the organic molecules to come together to create life, and to have the gas giants outside to protect us from asteroids and comets...it's been an amazing ride.

Another person unfamiliar with the law of large numbers.

Are you saying that every star system has a bunch of planets supporting life?

I think he's saying that there are well over 100 billion stars in this galaxy, and billions upon billions of galaxies.
Even if just one star system per galaxy had planets, and one in a million could support life, you'll still have a hell of a lot of planets in the Universe with life.

From our discoveries though, planetary systems appear to be fairly common. Right now, we can only detect very large planets, mainly by their gravitational influence on their parent stars. As telescope technology advances, it might be possible to directly observe planets in orbits similar to what we know here. Sure, life may well exist in other kinds of environments, but for now, we only have Earth as a baseline, so that's the kind of place we are looking for.

 

[dennilfloss]

Read about this a couple of days ago on AM. Neat.

http://www.astrobio.net/news/m...thread&order=0&thold=0

 

[Pocatello]

Originally posted by: Jeff7

Originally posted by: Pocatello

Originally posted by: bsobel

Originally posted by: Pocatello

Originally posted by: JohnCU
we're so small and insignificant in the grand scheme of things.

/deep

And yet, quite rare. The probability of a planet to align perfectly from the sun to sustain life, the right conditions for all the organic molecules to come together to create life, and to have the gas giants outside to protect us from asteroids and comets...it's been an amazing ride.

Another person unfamiliar with the law of large numbers.

Are you saying that every star system has a bunch of planets supporting life?

I think he's saying that there are well over 100 billion stars in this galaxy, and billions upon billions of galaxies.
Even if just one star system per galaxy had planets, and one in a million could support life, you'll still have a hell of a lot of planets in the Universe with life.

From our discoveries though, planetary systems appear to be fairly common. Right now, we can only detect very large planets, mainly by their gravitational influence on their parent stars. As telescope technology advances, it might be possible to directly observe planets in orbits similar to what we know here. Sure, life may well exist in other kinds of environments, but for now, we only have Earth as a baseline, so that's the kind of place we are looking for.

Indeed. But no matter how different life maybe, the right conditions still have to be met to sustain it. When I say rare, I don't mean to say "Earth is the only one".

 

[eLiu]

Originally posted by: bsobel

Originally posted by: Pocatello

Originally posted by: JohnCU
we're so small and insignificant in the grand scheme of things.

/deep

And yet, quite rare. The probability of a planet to align perfectly from the sun to sustain life, the right conditions for all the organic molecules to come together to create life, and to have the gas giants outside to protect us from asteroids and comets...it's been an amazing ride.

Another person unfamiliar with the law of large numbers.

Do -you- know what the law of large numbers is? Roughly speaking, it states that repeated tests of a random event (does a planet have life on it, yes/no) will converge, for a sufficeintly large number of tests, to the average.

The existence of hundreds of billions or trillions or trillions of trillions of planets in the universe does not at all imply that some of them should support life. Just b/c you think it's improbable does not mean it's impossible.

Edit: at the same time, it's just as likely that only the planets we've found so far don't support life, and everything else out there does. We currently just have no way of knowing.

 

[jpeyton]

Originally posted by: Pocatello
Indeed. But no matter how different life maybe, the right conditions still have to be met to sustain it. When I say rare, I don't mean to say "Earth is the only one".

The known universe is so large that there could *realistically* be hundreds of millions of life-bearing planets, many unknown or undetectable to each other.

As suggested earlier, you may *think* you understand large number theory, but you probably don't. We're talking about immeasurable amounts of distance *and* time.

Why is time important? Humans are the only highly intelligent life forms on our planet, and we've only been around in total for 200,000 years (equivalent to a cosmic speck of dust in a galaxy of time).

We've only been transmitting radio waves (something that could be detectable by other intelligent life through space) for less than 100 years. And we've only been searching the stars for signals for a few decades.

What if a planet 100 light years away produced a highly intelligent life form 1 billion years ago. After 200,000 years of evolution, and only a few thousand years of civilization, the entire population died off of ______ (war, disease, catastrophic extinction level event, lack of resources, etc.). And maybe in another galaxy, on another planet, a different highly intelligent life form only got to the beginnings of civilization before they were destroyed. And how long will humans on our planet last? What if a meteor hits our planet and kills us all 100 years before an alien species looks in our direction?

The chances of life, even intelligent life, to develop in our universe is incredibly large. The chances of a life form to become intelligent enough to detect other life is small, and the chances of actually detecting other life is even smaller. We would have to hit the cosmic jackpot to be in both the right place and time to detect other intelligent life, at least at our current stage of evolution.

If our species survives and progresses technologically for another 100,000 years, we might produce the technology needed to explore the vastness of our universe with a high enough level of efficiency to increase our chances of detecting other life.

It sounds weird, but it is wholly possible for another intelligent life form on another planet on the other side of the universe to be having this exact same conversation that we're having right now. And we may never know of their existence.

 

[Vic]

Maybe it's because I'm fascinated with the scale of the universe, but what's really mind-boggling IMO is reading the text below the picture. The star is roughly sun-sized, the planet is 8 times the mass of Jupiter, and it's orbiting 330 AU away! Puts things in perspective.

It's great to see we finally got a picture of an extrasolar planet, but was there even any doubt that such planets existed? Gravity kinda dictates that planets should be around most every star. One capable of supporting life, now that's another issue... that begs the question, what is life? And would we recognize it if we found it?

 

[BUTCH1]

Originally posted by: jpeyton

Originally posted by: Pocatello
Indeed. But no matter how different life maybe, the right conditions still have to be met to sustain it. When I say rare, I don't mean to say "Earth is the only one".

The known universe is so large that there could *realistically* be hundreds of millions of life-bearing planets, many unknown or undetectable to each other.

As suggested earlier, you may *think* you understand large number theory, but you probably don't. We're talking about immeasurable amounts of distance *and* time.

Why is time important? Humans are the only highly intelligent life forms on our planet, and we've only been around in total for 200,000 years (equivalent to a cosmic speck of dust in a galaxy of time).

We've only been transmitting radio waves (something that could be detectable by other intelligent life through space) for less than 100 years. And we've only been searching the stars for signals for a few decades.

What if a planet 100 light years away produced a highly intelligent life form 1 billion years ago. After 200,000 years of evolution, and only a few thousand years of civilization, the entire population died off of ______ (war, disease, catastrophic extinction level event, lack of resources, etc.). And maybe in another galaxy, on another planet, a different highly intelligent life form only got to the beginnings of civilization before they were destroyed. And how long will humans on our planet last? What if a meteor hits our planet and kills us all 100 years before an alien species looks in our direction?

The chances of life, even intelligent life, to develop in our universe is incredibly large. The chances of a life form to become intelligent enough to detect other life is small, and the chances of actually detecting other life is even smaller. We would have to hit the cosmic jackpot to be in both the right place and time to detect other intelligent life, at least at our current stage of evolution.

If our species survives and progresses technologically for another 100,000 years, we might produce the technology needed to explore the vastness of our universe with a high enough level of efficiency to increase our chances of detecting other life.

It sounds weird, but it is wholly possible for another intelligent life form on another planet on the other side of the universe to be having this exact same conversation that we're having right now. And we may never know of their existence.

I'm with you, Chariots of the Gods man...they planted us here.

 

[hellokeith]

Originally posted by: jpeyton

Originally posted by: Pocatello
Indeed. But no matter how different life maybe, the right conditions still have to be met to sustain it. When I say rare, I don't mean to say "Earth is the only one".

The known universe is so large that there could *realistically* be hundreds of millions of life-bearing planets, many unknown or undetectable to each other.

As suggested earlier, you may *think* you understand large number theory, but you probably don't. We're talking about immeasurable amounts of distance *and* time.

Why is time important? Humans are the only highly intelligent life forms on our planet, and we've only been around in total for 200,000 years (equivalent to a cosmic speck of dust in a galaxy of time).

We've only been transmitting radio waves (something that could be detectable by other intelligent life through space) for less than 100 years. And we've only been searching the stars for signals for a few decades.

What if a planet 100 light years away produced a highly intelligent life form 1 billion years ago. After 200,000 years of evolution, and only a few thousand years of civilization, the entire population died off of ______ (war, disease, catastrophic extinction level event, lack of resources, etc.). And maybe in another galaxy, on another planet, a different highly intelligent life form only got to the beginnings of civilization before they were destroyed. And how long will humans on our planet last? What if a meteor hits our planet and kills us all 100 years before an alien species looks in our direction?

The chances of life, even intelligent life, to develop in our universe is incredibly large. The chances of a life form to become intelligent enough to detect other life is small, and the chances of actually detecting other life is even smaller. We would have to hit the cosmic jackpot to be in both the right place and time to detect other intelligent life, at least at our current stage of evolution.

If our species survives and progresses technologically for another 100,000 years, we might produce the technology needed to explore the vastness of our universe with a high enough level of efficiency to increase our chances of detecting other life.

It sounds weird, but it is wholly possible for another intelligent life form on another planet on the other side of the universe to be having this exact same conversation that we're having right now. And we may never know of their existence.

The simple truth is that there exists no piece of evidence for extraterrestrial life, and certainly not intelligent at that.

After 14 billion years (current estimate of age of the universe):

* no ancient ET probes in space
* no ancient ET artifacts on earth
* no ancient ET skeletons on earth
* no ancient structures nor carvings on earth of ET design (except for perhaps the first Great Pyramid of Giza and the terrain designs in South America)
* none of the above observed on any planetary body in our solar system
* no galactic empire (14 billion years is certainly enough time)
* no extraterrestrial communication
* no organized EMR of any kind

Math and statistics cannot provide any remote form of accuracy when no scientific evidence exists. Extra Terrestrial Intelligence is akin to mythology, if you want to believe it, more power to you, but there is no evidence of it whatsoever.

 

[Jeff7]

Originally posted by: hellokeith
The simple truth is that there exists no piece of evidence for extraterrestrial life, and certainly not intelligent at that.

After 14 billion years (current estimate of age of the universe):

* no ancient ET probes in space
* no ancient ET artifacts on earth
* no ancient ET skeletons on earth
* no ancient structures nor carvings on earth of ET design (except for perhaps the first Great Pyramid of Giza and the terrain designs in South America)
* none of the above observed on any planetary body in our solar system
* no galactic empire (14 billion years is certainly enough time)
* no extraterrestrial communication
* no organized EMR of any kind

Math and statistics cannot provide any remote form of accuracy when no scientific evidence exists. Extra Terrestrial Intelligence is akin to mythology, if you want to believe it, more power to you, but there is no evidence of it whatsoever.

14 billion years? There may have been loads of "evidence" during that time.
The problem is, we've had the ability to make some sort of direct record of our history for what, a few hundred thousand years? A vast majority of any records made during that time would be woefully inaccurate anyway. And our ability to detect EM radiation from distant places came up in the past hundred years or so. We've had our eyes open to the Universe for a fraction of a blink, and since we didn't see anything alive in that tiny amount of time, we figure, "Oh well, there must be nothing there."
It's also possible that Earth simply hasn't appeared to be all that interesting. Our EM chatter, leaking out into space, only started in the modern technological era. We may simply have appeared to be a tiny planet, with a strong spectral reading which hinted at the presence of a lot of water. Yeah well, water, no big deal. Lots of places have it in some quantity. Catalog the planet, and move on to the next one.

You mention our planetary system - maybe there's life under the icy crust of Europa, in the vast sub-surface ocean theorized to be there. They could wonder just as easily why there's no life anywhere else, and yet, here it is, right in their own solar system. Why hasn't it contacted them yet, and left structures, artifacts, or skeletons on their world?
We've had space flight for less than 100 years, out of the solar system's 4.6 billion years of age.


Given the sheer numbers of stars and planets in existence, I think it is far more improbable that we are the only place with life. Unfortunately, we've barely even gained the ability to crawl with respect to venturing from our birthplace. It's likely going to be more than a century before we start to take our first true steps, and venture out of this solar system.



Sorry if that seemed rambling or anything, I'm kind of low on sleep this week. Some engineering students naturally have the necessary ability to sleep for less than 20 minutes a week. I have yet to hone my skills in this respect.

 

[judasmachine]

when do we go, and where do i sign up?

of coarse the answer is as soon as we can accelerate something of notable mass to near light speed...

and of coarse it'll still take 500+ years....

 

[geno]

the young star has a likely companion positioned above and left - a hot planet with about 8 times the mass of Jupiter

Wow. That's a lotta mass...

 

[sandorski]

Originally posted by: hellokeith

Originally posted by: jpeyton

Originally posted by: Pocatello
Indeed. But no matter how different life maybe, the right conditions still have to be met to sustain it. When I say rare, I don't mean to say "Earth is the only one".

The known universe is so large that there could *realistically* be hundreds of millions of life-bearing planets, many unknown or undetectable to each other.

As suggested earlier, you may *think* you understand large number theory, but you probably don't. We're talking about immeasurable amounts of distance *and* time.

Why is time important? Humans are the only highly intelligent life forms on our planet, and we've only been around in total for 200,000 years (equivalent to a cosmic speck of dust in a galaxy of time).

We've only been transmitting radio waves (something that could be detectable by other intelligent life through space) for less than 100 years. And we've only been searching the stars for signals for a few decades.

What if a planet 100 light years away produced a highly intelligent life form 1 billion years ago. After 200,000 years of evolution, and only a few thousand years of civilization, the entire population died off of ______ (war, disease, catastrophic extinction level event, lack of resources, etc.). And maybe in another galaxy, on another planet, a different highly intelligent life form only got to the beginnings of civilization before they were destroyed. And how long will humans on our planet last? What if a meteor hits our planet and kills us all 100 years before an alien species looks in our direction?

The chances of life, even intelligent life, to develop in our universe is incredibly large. The chances of a life form to become intelligent enough to detect other life is small, and the chances of actually detecting other life is even smaller. We would have to hit the cosmic jackpot to be in both the right place and time to detect other intelligent life, at least at our current stage of evolution.

If our species survives and progresses technologically for another 100,000 years, we might produce the technology needed to explore the vastness of our universe with a high enough level of efficiency to increase our chances of detecting other life.

It sounds weird, but it is wholly possible for another intelligent life form on another planet on the other side of the universe to be having this exact same conversation that we're having right now. And we may never know of their existence.

The simple truth is that there exists no piece of evidence for extraterrestrial life, and certainly not intelligent at that.

After 14 billion years (current estimate of age of the universe):

* no ancient ET probes in space
* no ancient ET artifacts on earth
* no ancient ET skeletons on earth
* no ancient structures nor carvings on earth of ET design (except for perhaps the first Great Pyramid of Giza and the terrain designs in South America)
* none of the above observed on any planetary body in our solar system
* no galactic empire (14 billion years is certainly enough time)
* no extraterrestrial communication
* no organized EMR of any kind

Math and statistics cannot provide any remote form of accuracy when no scientific evidence exists. Extra Terrestrial Intelligence is akin to mythology, if you want to believe it, more power to you, but there is no evidence of it whatsoever.

You have no concept how vast the Universe is or how Improbable what you demand as Evidence could even be found by us if it happened to exist.