A Jupiter-sized planet passes in front of its star in this artist's impression of a transiting exoplanet -- Photo credit: NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon
Posted on 08/11/2008 1:34:54 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
Astronomers using a variety of techniques have discovered more than 300 planets circling other stars since 1995, when a Swiss team announced finding the first Jupiter-mass planet orbiting a sun-like star, but few of them bear any resemblance to rocky planets like Earth. Because planets are far smaller and dimmer than the star they circle, most techniques rely on detecting not the planet itself, but its effects on its star, such as changes in the star's light or wobbles in the star's rotation due to a planet's gravitational tug as it circles. Consequently, most of the planets found so far have been large gas giants such as our own solar system's Jupiter, Saturn, or Neptune, thought to be incapable of sustaining life...
At the conference, Christophe Lovis, a scientist at the University of Geneva who is collaborating with the Harvard Origins of Life Initiative, announced findings that small, rocky worlds are not only present in the universe, they're common, outnumbering the large gas giants by as much as a 3-to-1 ratio...
Sasselov said rocky planets up to five times Earth's size should be detectable with the new generation of instruments coming on line such as the Harvard Origins of Life Initiative's spectrometer equipped with the new laser astro-comb, developed at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. The spectrometer which will be deployed in the Canary Islands for exoplanet research sometime in 2010.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.harvard.edu ...
A Jupiter-sized planet passes in front of its star in this artist's impression of a transiting exoplanet -- Photo credit: NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon
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LOL.
“sister Earths”
“super-Earths”
“Earth-like planets”
Use of these terms shows that the scientists have a purpose and a preconceived outcome in their studies.
The inconvenient truth is that, while life on other planets somewhere is a good probability, actual contact is extremely unlikely within any reasonable time period.
A mind boggling number like the number of atoms in the universe to one.
[snip] “There are three types of lies - lies, damn lies, and statistics.” - Variously
attributed to Benjamin Disraeli, Alfred Marshall, Mark Twain and many others [end]
http://liesdamnliesandstatistics.blogspot.com/
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