NASA discovery, speculation inside

[Gauss]

Originally Posted by Angerz

Actually, I would say it is extraordinarily complex.

Yes, it does seem to ignore how science progresses, which is usually a random event as a result of the ingenious thinking of one person which inspires thousands more. Science does not simply "follow" from anything: The right people have to be in place at the right time.

[Millie]

Originally Posted by Angerz

Actually, I would say it is extraordinarily complex.

Well, obviously. I mean, jeez louise. I can't make one snarky comment on these boards without twenty supporting statements, a mathematical model, and a works-cited page. :\

[K`Lag]

Originally Posted by Burf

So, I have a question. Ok, the LHC is being built in Europe that will smash the crap out of stuff and find other smaller stuff that may be the building blocks of the universe.
We have telescopes and other detectors that can see radiation, etc blah blah science stuff.

So....what? I'm definitely not some scientific genius, but, at the end of the day, what does this get us except jobs for smart people?

In the 18th century the same could be said about electricity. A mere scientific fascination... the truth is you can never estimate the long term impact of basic research such as this. However, like electricity it could could completely change the way the species lives. As Millie said basic research lays the ground work for understanding the properties of the world you live in and then using this as the base for building upwards.

[Dontauro]

Originally Posted by Millie

Well, obviously. I mean, jeez louise. I can't make one snarky comment on these boards without twenty supporting statements, a mathematical model, and a works-cited page. :\

Any sources to support this theory of yours?

[Bladefury]

I think it'd be kind of cool if it's another planet capable of supporting human life. Is that a possibility here?

[K`Lag]

Originally Posted by Bladefury

I think it'd be kind of cool if it's another planet capable of supporting human life. Is that a possibility here?

Probably very unlikely, since this involves the Chandra X-ray Observatory which isn't used to locate Earth sized planets around stars.

[Ninajrr]

Not really. Our current technology isn't that amazing. Any solar-system close enough for our current technology to check for Earth-like planets have likely already been checked. That said, we have found tons of similar solar-systems to ours throughout the Milky Way (similar being single single star-jupiter systems) so I don't think it'd be something along those lines either.

Edit: Would be awesome if it was something relating to dark matter, though I don't see the galactic relationship.

[Angerz]

Originally Posted by Millie

Well, obviously. I mean, jeez louise. I can't make one snarky comment on these boards without twenty supporting statements, a mathematical model, and a works-cited page. :\

To be fair, I was only being snarky back.

[Gauss]

Originally Posted by Ninajrr

Not really. Our current technology isn't that amazing. Any solar-system close enough for our current technology to check for Earth-like planets have likely already been checked.

Definitely the case. I remember in kindergarten back when Hubble first was put into orbit back in the early 90's, a guy from NASA came to school and showed off pictures of pluto (God rest its planetoid soul) and they were blurry as fuck. Considering Hubble is what we're still using today for a lot of our imaging, I don't expect us to have amazing data from more than a handful of planets outside our solar system nor to even have the capability to do much more.

Getting clear pictures of stuff from Earth is definitely out of the question too. Even minute fluctuations in temperature in the atmosphere produce things like twinkling stars that distort distant objects.

[Schatze]

Well, in Hubble's defense, pluto is a tremendously small object very far away. Hubble was made to image very, very, very large things at a stupendous distance away (plus we've got new horizon's which is awesome). Don't forget that up until hubble we had no real idea if the universe was closed, open, or would reach a homeostatic point. With Hubble's measurement of Hubble's constant, and the fact that the speed at which things are moving away from each other is speeding up, it answered a major question; that our galaxy is an open one. Hubble was really built to answer that question, which brought dark energy to the forefront. Everything else about Hubble was a bonus.

Honestly I can't think of anything that chandra could have observed that have been sought after for 50 years. Well, one thing; superstrings. Perhaps Chandra was able to image gravitic lensing from one from an xray source? But that doesn't necessarily pertain to our galaxy either.

P.S. Pulsars, magnetars, and neutron stars are all the same thing with different characteristics that make them detectable :P But yeah, not all stars go nova, only relatively massive ones where the collapsing mass is enough to overcome the neutron degeneracy pressure. Brown dwarfs I don't think are a step on the path of stellar evolution, or at least my H-R diagram never included them.

[ChewieTobbacca]

The truth is we actually don't see many of the Earth-like planets due to sampling size. THe majority of planets detected are by using the wobble of the star and so only very massive or close to the star (or both) get detected easily.

The plan though, is with adaptive optics and other techniques, we will have things in space and on the ground designed to image extra solar planets within the next decade. One technique is to block out the light coming from the star (which is often 10^6 times brighter than planets in orbit) to get a better image of the planet in orbit.

[Schatze]

They're already discovering exosolar planets via occlusion, the problem is that the instruments aren't sensitive enough to detect earth sized planets. So yeah, not disagreeing just being a pedant.

The problem is this method won't work on solar systems where the ecliptic is not lined up in a direction where the planets will occlude the star, which will mean that the use of such a method is useless for most stars. Fortunately, we have an abundance of stars to observe. This is of course assuming that the standard theories on solar system formation hold true and that other solar systems have something roughly equivalent to the ecliptic.

As for nasa; what they need to do is find planet X. Not the bullshit conspiracy theory one, but the one that exists or has existed, based upon current models, that explains the kuiper cliff. The drop off in density of observed kuiper objects versus models indicates there is a fairly massive celestial object orbiting at the fringes of the kuiper belt.

edit: adaptive optics as I understand it would not be of use in imaging exoplanets crossing in front of a star; rather, the mechanical components of the optic system are adjusted to compensate for atmospheric distortion, using a laser as a calibrator. I'd think it'd be more masking and filtering advances that would allow imaging of exoplanets as they transit across their parent star that is the important part.

[AladainAF]

Any solar-system close enough for our current technology to check for Earth-like planets have likely already been checked.

I'm pretty sure Europa has plenty of life underneath its ice. I can't wait for NASA to confirm it one day.

[Soriak]

Good Ted video about a planned mission to Europa. Would be incredibly amazing if they could pull this off. (has a computer simulation of how it'd work, very impressive)



You can skip ahead to around 05:30.

[Kais[]]

Just to chime in about the hubble telescope, the original lens it was sent in orbit with was flawed and was replaced as soon as they could get a new one made. Since then, there have been a couple lens and imaging surface upgrades allowing it to generate a magnitude increase in resolution.