Found Over 600 Alien Planets So Far

I read MSNBCs site daily. They always are showing a new find intheir Tech/Science forum. As long as we are the most advanced species out there, I thinks it's awesome. If not, we're in trouble....

 

I have recently been playing GOG versions of Master of Orion I and II so I second this opinion.

 

The interesting part to me is that when we first started identifying planets in other solar systems about 15 years ago, we were only able to detect the really big ones. Like, if there was some similarly advanced civilization in some other solar system, they could look at our solar system and find Jupiter. Those planets are thought unlikely candidates to support life. While we don't have hard a fast rules since the only example we currently have for life being able to evolve is our planet, we're more inclined to look for rocky planets as candidates.

Now technology has advanced that we can see much smaller planets, and indeed, we have found many rocky planets. Just this week, I saw a result of a rocky world that they believe is in a stable orbit around its parent star, and also in the "habitable zone" around the star. The term "habitable zone" is also murky, because we also base that on us being the only known example. We assume that for a planet to be a good candidate for evolving life, it must be a) rocky; b) have a stable orbit (some planets have been discovered with eliptical orbits that take them either very close or very far from their parent star); and c) located in the "habitable zone" which is defined as a distance from the star where liquid water would be likely to exist.

This planet is thought to be an excellent candidate for life. They term it a "super earth", in that the planet is several times larger than earth. They said that is actually a good thing for life. A larger rocky planet probably has a liquid core to generate a magnetic field around the planet that would take a lot longer than earth's to cool off. (Which is one theory as to why Mars shows signs of being more conducive to life in the past than it is now - it's smaller than earth, cooled quicker, and lost it's magnetic field.)

Also announced in that article is the Europeans are working on a telescope, thought to be done in the next two years, that would allow us to see a chemical composition of the atmosphere of these worlds. It won't be a precise measuremet of the atmoshpere, but it would tell you the major components. To use the analogy of some similarly advanced civilizaiton looking at earth, this telescope would tell them that the major components in the atmosphere would be nitrogen and oxygen.

 

Little known fact - the U.S. Department of Defense has a super spy telescope which has discovered that Sarah Pailn has a home on that planet, and she can see Michelle Bachman from her house.