Planet EPIC 201238110.02 is the only one of the new planets cool enough to potentially host liquid water on its surface. Credit: NASA/JPL (Neptune), NASA/NOAA/GSFC/Suomi NPP/VIIRS/Norman Kuring (Earth), MPS/René Heller
Posted on 05/29/2019 10:25:41 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
Somewhat more than 4000 planets orbiting stars outside our solar system are known so far. Of these so-called exoplanets, about 96 percent are significantly larger than our Earth, most of them more comparable with the dimensions of the gas giants Neptune or Jupiter. This percentage likely does not reflect the real conditions in space, however, since small planets are much harder to track down than big ones. Moreover, small worlds are fascinating targets in the search for Earth-like, potentially habitable planets outside the solar system.
The 18 newly discovered worlds fall into the category of Earth-sized planets. The smallest of them is only 69 percent of the size of the Earth; the largest is barely more than twice the Earth's radius. And they have another thing in common: all 18 planets could not be detected in the data from the Kepler Space Telescope so far. Common search algorithms were not sensitive enough.
In their search for distant worlds, scientists often use the so-called transit method to look for stars with periodically recurring drops in brightness. If a star happens to have a planet whose orbital plane is aligned with the line of sight from Earth, the planet occults a small fraction of the stellar light as it passes in front of the star once per orbit.
(Excerpt) Read more at phys.org ...
Planet EPIC 201238110.02 is the only one of the new planets cool enough to potentially host liquid water on its surface. Credit: NASA/JPL (Neptune), NASA/NOAA/GSFC/Suomi NPP/VIIRS/Norman Kuring (Earth), MPS/René Heller
Ping / in before the pissing and moaning starts..
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I’ll bet you a full plate of Mongolian Beef & Rice (with chilli peppers!) that somebody or someTHINGS are living on some of those planets!
What are the odds that they are all empty villas?
If He builds a planet, ‘they’ will come.
"To consider the Earth as the only populated world in infinite space is as absurd as to assert that in an entire field of millet, only one grain will grow." -- Metrodorus, 4th c BC Greek philosopher
"Heaven and earth are large, yet in the whole of space they are but as a small grain of rice. How unreasonable it would be to suppose that, besides the heaven and earth which we can see, there are no other heavens and no other earths." -- Teng Mu, 13th c AD Chinese philosopher
If He builds a planet, ‘they’ will come.
...
How many planets and moons does the Solar System have? How many of them have life?
First, you will need to define ‘planet’,
Second, would you include ‘moons’ of those planets?
In any event, the numbers would range from over 10% to possibly close to half.
Until you get down to the molecular level and examine the staggering complexity of a single cell.
Humans may one day understand enough about the chemistry of life to create lifeforms in the laboratory but that will not be the same as the long theorized life spontaneously emerging from an uncontrolled primordial soup.
How could a primordial soup in an uncontrolled setting have spontaneously produced living cells?
Yes, a billion years is a long time for a primordial soup to ferment but how in such soup did the inorganic ions of a cell (sodium, potassium, magnesium, calcium, phosphate, chloride, and bicarbonate) combine with the hundreds of thousands of low molecular weight organic precursors (amino acids, nucleotides, and simple sugars) to form the staggeringly complex carbohydrates, lipids, proteins, and nucleic acids which make up a single cell knowing how from day 1 to take in nutrients, process those nutrients, expel waste, reproduce and multiply?
“Mongolian Beef” aka your cat or dog
Just once, I’d like to see a deity depicted as sitting in a Lazy-Boy lounger, with his feet propped up.
It used to be that way -- there was a Phoenician idol portrayed sitting with his feet up in a Hannibal Barca lounger.
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