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Welcome, aliens! Wait, just gimme a sec to clean up

Welcome, aliens! Wait, just gimme a sec to clean up

By on 23 Jul 2015commentsShare

It’s been a good week for alien hunters. First, the Russian billionaire Yuri Milner pledged $100 million to SETI, the real-world search for extraterrestrial intelligence that inspired the movie Contact. And today, NASA announced that its Kepler Mission — which searches for Earth-like planets — has found its most Earth-like planet yet. Here’s more on that news from a NASA press release:

The newly discovered Kepler-452b is the smallest planet to date discovered orbiting in the habitable zone — the area around a star where liquid water could pool on the surface of an orbiting planet — of a G2-type star, like our sun. The confirmation of Kepler-452b brings the total number of confirmed planets to 1,030. …

“We can think of Kepler-452b as an older, bigger cousin to Earth, providing an opportunity to understand and reflect upon Earth’s evolving environment,” said Jon Jenkins, Kepler data analysis lead at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, who led the team that discovered Kepler-452b. “It’s awe-inspiring to consider that this planet has spent 6 billion years in the habitable zone of its star; longer than Earth. That’s substantial opportunity for life to arise, should all the necessary ingredients and conditions for life exist on this planet.”

Unfortunately, scientists can’t really confirm whether or not those conditions exist. They’d first need to know how massive the planet is before they can even say whether the planet is “rocky” (like Earth) or gaseous (like Neptune). Jenkins told The New York Times that there was between a 50 and 62 percent chance that the planet was rocky, which would be awesome … but also make 452b look less like a cool older cousin and more like a horrifying glimpse into Earth’s inevitable future. Here’s why, from a SETI press release:

“If Kepler 452b is indeed a rocky planet, its location vis a vis its star could mean that it is just entering a runaway greenhouse phase of its climate history,” says Doug Caldwell, a SETI Institute scientist working on the Kepler mission.  “The increasing energy from its aging sun might be heating the surface and evaporating any oceans.  The water vapor would be lost from the planet forever.”

“Kepler 452b could be experiencing now what the Earth will undergo more than a billion years from now, as the Sun ages and grows brighter.”

Please, take a moment for your existential crisis.

Now, all of this exciting news doesn’t mean that we’re about to find [fill in your favorite movie alien here]. And besides, even if and when we do find extraterrestrial life, it will most likely be in the form of little microbes that are decidedly not intelligent … or are they? (Seriously, though, they’re not).

But as long as we’re all so eager to meet the neighbors, let’s play this out. Say — just for fun — we find sentient life out there: First, we’ll get all excited, hoping that the newcomers are super chill and will want to hang out all the time. Then, when we eventually go over to introduce ourselves, we’ll just cross our fingers and pray that they’re not dicks. Finally, after deciding that they’re in fact not dicks, we’ll invite them over for dinner and then immediately look around our apartment — er, planet — in horror as we realize how disgusting it is.

That’s obviously not going to happen, but just in case — if not for ourselves, then for our hypothetical neighbors: Let’s clean this place up a bit, shall we? It is, after all, objectively the coolest planet that we know about (yet).

Source:
NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth

, NASA.

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Welcome, aliens! Wait, just gimme a sec to clean up

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Welcome, aliens! Wait, just gimme a sec to clean up

No, You Can’t Officially Rename a Planet. But No One Can Stop You From Trying

An artist’s rendition of Gliese 581 g, a potentially habitable exoplanet with a decidedly boring name. Photo: NASA / Lynette Cook

The Kepler spacecraft is hunting down planets outside our solar system at a rapid clip. The total number of confirmed exoplanets is now at a whopping 861 and there are 2,903 more potential exoplanet candidates waiting in the wings. Space, it seems, is less of an empty void with each passing day.

The pace of discovery and the uncertainty in each finding—with exoplanets first being considered “candidates” before moving to full-fledged “discovered” status with subsequent observations—means that exoplanets are often given unwieldy placeholder names. Gliese 667Cc, for example, is the second planet around the third star in the Gliese 667 system. Gliese 581 g is the 6th planet around the star Gliese 581. But as useful as these names are for astronomers—more road map than moniker—they don’t exactly roll off the tongue.

A new organization—Uwingu–wants to fix this little dilemma. They’re offering a platform for you to suggest and vote on new planetary names. Their general goal is not to assign a specific name to a specific planet, but rather to tabulate a ready-made list from which astronomers can draw. They did, however, recently launch a contest to rename the planet Alpha Centauri Bb, the closest exoplanet to Earth. Drawing a wary eye from some, Uwingu wants you to back your votes with cash: one dollar, one vote.

Uwingu’s project to give exoplanets new names has drawn the ire of another group – the people who actually name exoplanets. The International Astronomical Union, says the CBC, wants to remind everyone that only they have the power to officially name extraplanetary bodies. Even if your exoplanet name of choice wins Uwingu’s contest, they say, it will have “no bearing on the official naming process.” Uwingu points out, however, that while the International Astronomical Union controls planets’ official names, they have no control over their common names. And, just because a name isn’t official doesn’t mean people won’t use it.

Back in October, The Weather Channel tried a similar trick when they unilaterally decided to start giving names to winter storms without first talking to the World Meteorological Organization or other large meteorological bodies. If you remember Winter Storm Nemo, thank The Weather Channel.

So while it may be true that you can’t vote your way to an official new planet name, the CBC adds that for many celestial objects their unofficial common name (say, the North Star) is used by many in place of the official name (Alpha Ursa minori).

Besides, says Phil Plait for his blog Bad Astronomy, the money being raised is going toward real science. Uwingu “will use the profits to fund scientific research. People will be able to submit proposals for the funding, which will be peer reviewed to ensure high-quality work. And it’s not just research: they hope to fund space-based projects, education, and other science-supporting ventures.”

Indeed, says Plait, even though only the IAU can make planet names official, the names on Uwingu’s list “will be seen by planetary astronomers, and eventually those planets are going to need names. Why not yours?”

More from Smithsonian.com:

Dennis Hope Thinks He Owns the Moon
What the Discovery of Hundreds of New Planets Means for Astronomy—and Philosophy
What if All 2,299 Exoplanets Orbited One Star?

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No, You Can’t Officially Rename a Planet. But No One Can Stop You From Trying

Posted in alo, ALPHA, FF, GE, ONA, solar, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on No, You Can’t Officially Rename a Planet. But No One Can Stop You From Trying