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  1. #1
    Banned Kontinuum's Avatar
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    NASA Announces a Single Star Is Home to At Least 7 Earthlike Planets

    The galaxy is getting very crowded. There may be 300 billion stars in the Milky Way, but until just over 20 years ago, we knew of only one of them that was orbited by planets. In the years since, the galactic census has exploded, with more than 4,700 confirmed or candidate planets discovered so far and astronomers concluding that every star in the galaxy is parent to at least one world.

    What has always been harder to spot are Earthlike planets — relatively small ones with a rocky surface, orbiting their sun at the not-too-close, not-too-far distance that would allow liquid water to exist. Today, however, that changed in a big way, as NASA announced that a single star relatively close to Earth is home to no fewer than seven Earthlike planets. If you're looking for extraterrestrial life, there may be no place better.

    The new findings, published in the current issue of Nature, are the result of more than six years of study of the small star Trappist-1, located just over 39 light years from Earth — barely one town over in a galaxy that measures 100,000 light years across. The star got its name from a rough acronym of the telescope in the Chilean desert that has studied it the most: the Transiting Planets and Planetesimals Small Telescope. As the name suggests, the Trappist telescope looks for planets by watching for the portion of their orbit in which they transit — or pass in front of — their star, causing a tiny but regular dimming in starlight.

    Three Earthlike planets were discovered around Trappist-1 early in 2016 using this method. That prompted the astronomers who made the find — led by Michaël Gillon of the University of Liège in Belgium — to bring in some bigger guns. Conducting more surveys with ground-based telescopes in Morocco, Hawaii, South Africa, Spain and Liverpool, as well as with NASA's orbiting Spitzer Space Telescope, the investigators found four more planets. All seven except the outermost one are closely grouped, and all orbit Trappist-1 at the right, cozy distance to sustain biology, at least theoretically.
    http://time.com/4677103/nasa-announc...-solar-system/

  2. #2
    How many light years away and how long would it take for us to get there using current tech?
    .

    "This will be a fight against overwhelming odds from which survival cannot be expected. We will do what damage we can."

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  3. #3
    Quote Originally Posted by Hubcap View Post
    How many light years away and how long would it take for us to get there using current tech?
    39 light years from Earth.

  4. #4
    The Insane Underverse's Avatar
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    Wow that's pretty damn cool.

  5. #5
    Quote Originally Posted by Hubcap View Post
    How many light years away and how long would it take for us to get there using current tech?
    A trip to Alpha Centauri (the nearest star at only 4 lightyears) would take tens of thousands of years. So this one would be somewhere in the hundreds of thousands or more.

  6. #6
    Quote Originally Posted by effs View Post
    39 light years from Earth.
    So this says it would take 270000 to travel 10 light years so 39 ly is a very, very long time?

    https://www.reddit.com/r/Spaceexplor...0_light_years/

    Quote Originally Posted by zorkuus View Post
    A trip to Alpha Centauri (the nearest star at only 4 lightyears) would take tens of thousands of years. So this one would be somewhere in the hundreds of thousands or more.
    I see.
    .

    "This will be a fight against overwhelming odds from which survival cannot be expected. We will do what damage we can."

    -- Capt. Copeland

  7. #7
    Banned Kontinuum's Avatar
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  8. #8
    Ojou-sama Medusa Cascade's Avatar
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    Time to build a nuclear pulse drive though it would still theoretically take a thousand years

  9. #9
    Ah I remember hearing they had a big discovery they were going to announce, forgot to check in on it. Thanks

  10. #10
    Quote Originally Posted by Hubcap View Post
    How many light years away and how long would it take for us to get there using current tech?
    Going as fast as the New Horizons probe (~16 km/s) it would take ~700k years.
    Quote Originally Posted by Djalil View Post
    I am ACTUALLY ASKING for them to ban me and relieve me from the misery of this thread.

  11. #11
    Damn, that's a lot.

    If I weren't adverse to jumping to conclusions I'd say that almost sounds like the kind of situation that implies terraforming.

  12. #12
    Quote Originally Posted by Soeroah View Post
    Damn, that's a lot.

    If I weren't adverse to jumping to conclusions I'd say that almost sounds like the kind of situation that implies terraforming.
    That's jumping way past conclusions here, because all they really know about the planets are their general location. Not even if they have water, elements to sustain life, or even some form of viable atmosphere.

    It's akin to saying that our solar system has 3 "earthlike planets", based on the relative size and distance to the star of venus, earth, and mars.

  13. #13
    Quote Originally Posted by Hubcap View Post
    How many light years away and how long would it take for us to get there using current tech?
    It says 39 in the article.

    Two years ago, I would have said it may as well be in another galaxy. But if there is any truth to the hype on the new NASA engine...well....who knows now?

  14. #14
    Quote Originally Posted by Halicia View Post
    That's jumping way past conclusions here, because all they really know about the planets are their general location. Not even if they have water, elements to sustain life, or even some form of viable atmosphere.

    It's akin to saying that our solar system has 3 "earthlike planets", based on the relative size and distance to the star of venus, earth, and mars.
    On the NASA stream that was just on they said that they'll more than likely have a large percentage of water ice from their formation as they are all relatively close to their star. Though answering another question about solar activity they stated that although the star has limited solar activity now the early phase of the star would have been very active and it could have burned away the atmosphere. They said they'll be able to comment more in 5 years or so when they have the atmospheric data they need.

  15. #15
    Quote Originally Posted by Soeroah View Post
    Damn, that's a lot.

    If I weren't adverse to jumping to conclusions I'd say that almost sounds like the kind of situation that implies terraforming.
    If we were capable of terraforming, could we not easily solve our own climate issues? Just sayin...

  16. #16
    The Insane Kujako's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Tijuana View Post
    If we were capable of terraforming, could we not easily solve our own climate issues? Just sayin...
    Our climate issues ARE terraforming, just not in a controlled manor.
    It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the beans of Java that thoughts acquire speed, the hands acquire shakes, the shakes become a warning.

    -Kujako-

  17. #17
    Quote Originally Posted by Halicia View Post
    That's jumping way past conclusions here, because all they really know about the planets are their general location. Not even if they have water, elements to sustain life, or even some form of viable atmosphere.

    It's akin to saying that our solar system has 3 "earthlike planets", based on the relative size and distance to the star of venus, earth, and mars.
    Yeah, when I read the NASA article I saw that "Earthlike" just meant "Earth sized" rather than atmosphere and all that.

    Only three are in the habitable zone, even, and they are thought to he tidal locked, so that's far different from what I thought was being implied.

    Quote Originally Posted by Tijuana View Post
    If we were capable of terraforming, could we not easily solve our own climate issues? Just sayin...
    I didn't mean we were the ones who did the terraforming in that scenario.

  18. #18
    Quote Originally Posted by Tijuana View Post
    If we were capable of terraforming, could we not easily solve our own climate issues? Just sayin...
    One might argue we are capable of doing so with our current capabilities. The thing is..... we don't.

    Expanding forestation, decreasing pollution, taking efforts to return human population output towards past decades and centuries through new technology efficiencies, and so on and so forth we should theoretically be able to reverse changes by reverting the earth towards previous models (so to speak). But we don't and likely aren't gonna.

  19. #19
    Quote Originally Posted by Kujako View Post
    Our climate issues ARE terraforming, just not in a controlled manor.
    Exactly. What makes us think we are so smart that we can alter an entire planet's climate, when we can't move our own temperature 2 degrees in the right direction?

  20. #20
    The Insane Kujako's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Tijuana View Post
    Exactly. What makes us to smart that we think we can alter an entire planet's climate, when we can't move our own temperature 2 degrees in the right direction?
    We could do that easily, just pump sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere. Not without side effects of course...
    It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the beans of Java that thoughts acquire speed, the hands acquire shakes, the shakes become a warning.

    -Kujako-

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