Has NASA finally found an Alien Earth?

[Valmy]

Leather Goddesses of Phobos?

The Latex Babes of Estros

[Josephus]

Can't wait till we colonize it and make all its inhabitants our slaves.

[Valmy]

Can't wait till we colonize it and make all its inhabitants our slaves.

But then they prove difficult to enslave on their home turf so we have to import slaves from another planet.

[KRonn]

No planets have really actually been seen, just indirectly presumed to exist.  And any surface properties are just wild guesses and assumptions.

I am not suggesting that there is no proof of planets around other stars...it would extraordinarily dense to presume otherwise.  I just think NASA is overhyping this "ZOMG alien earth worlds!" angle a bit too much.   

If the James Webb Telescope is actually able to see them...now that will be pretty friggen awesome.

Agreed. And the Webb Scope is scheduled to launch in 2017, so maybe not too many years after that we can start to see more detail like they hope/expect from it.

[DontSayBanana]

No planets have really actually been seen, just indirectly presumed to exist.  And any surface properties are just wild guesses and assumptions.

I am not suggesting that there is no proof of planets around other stars...it would extraordinarily dense to presume otherwise.  I just think NASA is overhyping this "ZOMG alien earth worlds!" angle a bit too much.   

If the James Webb Telescope is actually able to see them...now that will be pretty friggen awesome.

Ironically, the most ill-informed suppositions here are yours.  We're not going to "see" these planets for a couple hundred years- there is just no material yet known to man with optic properties that will allow that kind of magnification: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffraction-limited_system

While photometric transit timing has got its problems (mainly false positives), that's why Kepler isn't fully automated- the trick is separating out false positives.  Once they've got a solid positive, though, the guess about the materials and atmospheric composition are actually really well-informed- they can use the incoming information like a really "blurry" spectrometer to figure out the major core and atmospheric elements, and since they know how those elements behave at certain temperatures (especially in the "habitable zone" of a star), they can hazard a very shrewd guess at whether those materials are more likely to be solid (a core) or gaseous (an atmosphere).  It's not just "wild guesses and assumptions."

[jimmy olsen]

No planets have really actually been seen, just indirectly presumed to exist.  And any surface properties are just wild guesses and assumptions.

I am not suggesting that there is no proof of planets around other stars...it would extraordinarily dense to presume otherwise.  I just think NASA is overhyping this "ZOMG alien earth worlds!" angle a bit too much.   

If the James Webb Telescope is actually able to see them...now that will be pretty friggen awesome.

Ironically, the most ill-informed suppositions here are yours.  We're not going to "see" these planets for a couple hundred years- there is just no material yet known to man with optic properties that will allow that kind of magnification: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffraction-limited_system

While photometric transit timing has got its problems (mainly false positives), that's why Kepler isn't fully automated- the trick is separating out false positives.  Once they've got a solid positive, though, the guess about the materials and atmospheric composition are actually really well-informed- they can use the incoming information like a really "blurry" spectrometer to figure out the major core and atmospheric elements, and since they know how those elements behave at certain temperatures (especially in the "habitable zone" of a star), they can hazard a very shrewd guess at whether those materials are more likely to be solid (a core) or gaseous (an atmosphere).  It's not just "wild guesses and assumptions."

Jame's Webb Space Telescope will be able to directly image them. They'll just be a dot of light, but it counts.

http://jwst.nasa.gov/origins.html

JWST and Exoplanets

One of the main uses of the James Webb Space Telescope will be to study the atmospheres of exoplanets, to search for the building blocks of life elsewhere in the universe. But JWST is an infrared telescope. How is this good for studying exoplanets?

One method JWST will use for studying exoplanets is the transit method, which means it will look for dimming of the light from a star as its planet passes between us and the star. (Astronomers call this a "transit".) Collaboration with ground-based telescopes can help us measure the mass of the planets, via the radial velocity technique (i.e., measuring the stellar wobble produced by the gravitational tug of a planet), and then JWST will do spectroscopy of the planet's atmosphere.

JWST will also carry coronagraphs to enable direct imaging of exoplanets near bright stars. The image of an exoplanet would just be a spot, not a grand panorama, but by studying that spot, we can learn a great deal about it. That includes its color, differences between winter and summer, vegetation, rotation, weather...How is this done? The answer again is spectroscopy.

Spectroscopy

Spectroscopy is simply the science of measuring the intensity of light at different wavelengths. The graphical representations of these measurements are called spectra, and they are the key to unlocking the composition of exoplanet atmospheres.

When a planet passes in front of a star, the starlight passes through the planet's atmosphere. If, for example, the planet has sodium in its atmosphere, the spectra of the star, added to that of the planet, will have what we call an "absorption line" in the place in the spectra where would expect to see sodium (see graphic below). This is because different elements and molecules absorb light at characteristic energies; and this is how we know where in a spectrum we might expect to see the signature of sodium (or methane or water) if it is present.

Why is an infrared telescope key to characterizing the atmospheres of these exoplanets? The benefit of making infrared observations is that it is at infrared wavelengths that molecules in the atmospheres of exoplanets have the largest number of spectral features. The ultimate goal, of course, is to find a planet with a similar atmosphere to that of Earth.

[Maximus]

Kepler is solid as hell.

Real hell or the frozen kind?

[Josquius]

I demand one of those dark side of the moon observatories that we were meant to have by 2000 (according to hand me down science books I had as a kid).

[Eddie Teach]

I demand one of those dark side of the moon observatories that we were meant to have by 2000 (according to hand me down science books I had as a kid).

First we have to defeat the space Nazis.

[Liep]

You should've elected Newt.