Excellent. Next step, find life.
Good luck with that.
The planets we can 'see' at this time are the giants similar to Jupiter and Saturn, possibly even Neptune sized.
Finding the smaller planets, Earth/Mars/Venus sized is the next step.
“Excellent. Next step, find life.
Good luck with that.”
I think the entire Kook to Kook program today was devoted to ETs and the Roswell incident.
It is now nice to know that they can now have some planets
to claim that ET comes from, hahaha.
I did not read just how many light years away they are.
Next step is still to just find a planet in what is considered a “habitable” zone that isn’t a gas giant outside our solar system. Let alone find life.
The funny thing about all this is, even if we found a planet that we thought could sustain life, with current technologies, how do you even begin to prove it has life?
The closest star to ours is 4.4 Light Years away(41,800,000,000,000 km) , voyager 2 is travelling at about 3.3 AU per year 450,000,000 KM per year. That means at that rate of travel, its would take about 93,000 years for a spacecraft to reach Alpha Centauri, let alone land successfully and then let us know (4.4 years later after those 93,000 years) if it found anything.
Now obviously Voyager wasn’t built strictly for speed though it is the fastest spacecraft to date, so we could probably do better, but even a 10 fold increase in speed is still 9,300 years.
Drake Equation original estimate (1961) for the fraction of stars with planets was 0.50. That may turn out to be a reasonable estimate.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation for more details.
Jack