Aliens Are Monitoring Our Nukes, Worry Ex-Air Force Officers

DCK

And, finally..

Found: An Earthlike Planet at Last

By MICHAEL D. LEMONICK – 44 mins ago
The star known as Gliese 581 is utterly unremarkable in just about every way you can imagine. It's a red dwarf, the most common type of star in the Milky Way, weighing in at about a third the mass of the Sun. At 20 light years or so away, it's relatively nearby, but not close enough to set any records (it's the 117th closest star to Earth, for what that's worth). You can't even see it without a telescope, so while it lies in direction of Libra, it isn't one of the shining dots you'd connect to form the constellation. It's no wonder that the star's name lacks even a whiff of mystery or romance.
But Gliese 581 does have one distinction - and that's enough to make it the focus of intense scientific attention. At last count, astronomers had identified more than 400 planets orbiting stars beyond the Sun, and Gliese 581 was host to no fewer than four of them - the most populous solar system we know of, aside than our own. That alone would make the star intriguing. But on Wednesday, a team of astronomers announced they'd found two more planets circling the star, bringing the total to six. And one of them, assigned the name Gliese 581g, may be of truly historic significance. (See an illustrated history of Planet Earth.)
For one thing, the planet is only about three or four times as massive as our home world, meaning it probably has a solid surface just like Earth. Much more important, it sits smack in the middle of the so-called habitable zone, orbiting at just the right distance from the star to let water remain liquid rather than freezing solid or boiling away. As far as we know, that's a minimum requirement for the presence of life. For thousands of years, philosophers and scientists have wondered whether other Earths existed out in the cosmos. And since the first, very un-Eearthlike extrasolar planet was discovered in 1995, astronomers have been inching closer to answering that question. Now, they've evidently succeeded (although to be clear, there's no way at this point to determine whether there actually is life on the new planet).
"We're pretty excited about it," admits Steve Vogt, of the University of California, Santa Cruz, a member of the team, in a masterpiece of understatement. "I think this is what everyone's been after for the past 15 years." (See the top 50 space moments since Sputnik.)
Planetary scientist James Kasting, of Penn State University, who wasn't involved with the discovery, agrees. "I think they've scooped the Kepler people," he says. Kasting refers to the Kepler space telescope, launched into space early last year on a mission to determine how common Earthlike planets might be. The "Kepler people" have a number of candidate Earths in the can, but are still working to confirm them. (See pictures of Earth from space.)
Being first isn't the main reason Vogt is excited, however. "Someone had to be first," he says. "But this is right next door to us. That's the big result." What's particularly big about it is a matter of simple arithmetic. With only 116 stars closer to Earth than this one, it was hardly a sure thing that so small a sample group would produce two habitable planets, including Earth. And two such planets may be an undercount, Vogt says, since just nine out of those 100-plus stars have been studied in any detail. Indeed, one of Gliese 581g's sister planets, known as Gliese 581d (OK, they truly don't put a lot of creative energy into naming these things) could conceivably be a habitable world itself.
One of the four planets known to orbit Gliese 581 before the latest discovery, 581d was found by a team of Swiss astronomers in 2007 and was thought to be outside the habitable zone, and thus too cold for liquid water. But a reanalysis last year brought it into the zone, albeit just barely. The problem is, Gliese 581d is also too big to be Earthlike; it's probably made mostly of nonwater ice, like Neptune and Uranus, which makes a poorer candidate for life than 581g. (Comment on this story.)
Lost in the excitement over possible life on the new world is what a remarkable achievement its mere discovery was. Detecting a planet this small is monstrously hard - and would have been impossible when Vogt and co-discoverer Paul Butler, of the Carnegie Institution of Washington first got into the planet-hunting game in the early 1990s. The instruments you use to detect tiny back-and-forth motions in the star - motions caused by the orbiting planet's gravitational tugs, which are often the only way to infer that the worlds exist at all - simply weren't sensitive enough. Since then, though, says Vogt, "I've been busting my gut to improve the instruments, and Paul has been busting his got to do the observations." In all, those observations span more than 200 nights on the giant Keck I telescope in Hawaii over 11 years, supplemented by observations from the Geneva group - and that painstaking work finally confirmed 581g's existence.
None of this proves that there actually is water on Gliese 581g. "Those are things we just have to speculate about," says Vogt. But he goes on to point out that there's water pretty much everywhere else you look. "There's water on Earth," he says, "and on the Moon, and Mars, and on Jupiter's moon Europa and Saturn's moon Enceladus, and in interstellar space. There's enough water produced in the Orion Nebula every 24 seconds to fill the Earth's oceans."
It's not hard to imagine, in other words, that Gliese 581g might have plenty of water as well. "It could have quite a good ocean," Vogt says. Certainly, it could still be a sterile, non-biological ocean. But unlike any planet found until now, there's nothing to rule out the idea that could also be teeming with life.

James

Read about that last night. Almost posted the article. That article leaves out crucial details.....

The newfound planet, known as Gliese 581g, is estimated to be 3.1 to 4.3 times as massive as Earth, and makes a complete circuit around its sun in just under 37 days. If the planet has a rocky composition like Earth's, it would be 1.2 to 1.4 times as wide as our own planet, qualifying it as a "super-Earth."
Even more intriguingly, the red dwarf star's dimness and the planet's orbital distance (0.146 AU, less than half the distance between Mercury and our sun) suggest that the planet's average surface temperature is not that far below water's freezing point (somewhere between 10 and -24 degrees Fahrenheit, or -12 and -31 degrees Celsius).

Although that average may sound chilly, the astronomers say Gliese 581g appears to be tidally locked to its star, with one side perpetually in the sun and the other side perpetually dark. That means the highs on the day side would be hellishly hot. The lows on the night side would be unendurably cold. But there would be a livable zone along the line between shadow and light.

http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/20 … t-for-life

It's a cool discovery no doubt. I just don't see the need for the dramatics surrounding it. The system itself sounds more interesting than this specific planet. Other exoplanets/systems discovered usually contain a massive gas giant that makes Jupiter look like a golf ball. That looks to be absent here. Other than the fact the planets orbit a red dwarf, looks to be the most stable system found yet.

When you get down to brass tacks, this sounds more like a super Mercury than a super earth. To insinuate life is thriving on a specific line between hotter than hell and colder than a witch's tit is a HUGE stretch. In other words, 99% of this planet is likely uninhabitable unless its microbes or a very extreme form of life never seen here. If life on earth is the litmus test being used here, this planet fails that test even though scientists have their panties in a bunch over it.

The tidal lock is what screwed this planet's pooch. Even IF it's in the so called Goldilocks zone, a planet tidally locked to its star isn't really in an environment that would allow an ecosystem to thrive. The fact it orbits a red dwarf does it no favors either. While red dwarfs are common, not enough is known about them to be able to say aliens are tiptoeing through the tulips on planets orbiting them.

The only thing in this planet/systems favor is time, as it's probably older than our system and no matter how harsh the conditions are, time itself increases the chances of something developing at some point.

edit: I certainly wouldn't rule life out but we're really pushing the limit with this system. Reading a bit more about it now and it sounds like a fairly unconventional system. Its planets are bunched together and orbit really close to its star. This system consists of six planets and all six orbit within the distance of the Sun to Venus, and one of these planets a borderline gas giant, which is the second planet in the system.

To quote DCK and that midget bitch from Poltergeist, "this house is clear".

I'm gonna point out the argument we haven't found em yet is pretty flawed. We've found the biggest planets or moons in our system because in quite simple terms, the bigger something is the easier it is to spot. I know that sounds dumb but even with the tech thats what it comes down to. Shoot waves in all directions wait for something to bounce it back, bigger objects are more likely to bounce back. We found all the big planets, they're the ones in our solar system: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars and so on. Most of the stuff we're finding now is small and uninhabitable. We have managed to examine the conditions necessary for life to grow and have even done so on a microscopic level in labs. That is why it is safe to assume that it is very unlikely that any planets found now will have intelligent life because if there was any we would probably have found it by now. Now all that seems to be discovered are small planets and planetoids which are either too hot or too cold to sustain any sort of life.

You sound like a huge proponent of the Fermi Paradox.

James

And it already starts.....

Does ET live on Goldilocks planet? How scientists spotted 'mysterious pulse of light' from direction of newly-discovered '2nd Earth' two years ago

An astronomer picked up a mysterious pulse of light coming from the direction of the newly discovered Earth-like planet almost two years ago, it has emerged.

Dr Ragbir Bhathal, a scientist at the University of Western Sydney, picked up the odd signal in December 2008, long before it was announced that the star Gliese 581 has habitable planets in orbit around it.

A member of the Australian chapter of SETI, the organisation that looks for communication from distant planets, Dr Bhathal had been sweeping the skies when he discovered a 'suspicious' signal from an area of the galaxy that holds the newly-discovered Gliese 581g.

The remarkable coincidence adds another layer of mystery to the announcement last night that scientists had discovered another planet in the system: Gliese 581g - the most Earth-like planet ever found.

Dr Bhathal's discovery had come just months before astronomers announced that they had found a similar, slightly less habitable planet around the same star 20 light years away. This planet was called Gliese 581e.

When asked about his discovery at the time Dr Bhathal admitted he had been really excited about what he had possibly stumbled across.
He said: 'Whenever there’s a clear night, I go up to the observatory and do a run on some of the celestial objects. Looking at one of these objects, we found this signal.
'And you know, I got really excited with it. So next I had to analyse it. We have special software to analyse these signals, because when you look at celestial objects through the equipment we have, you also pick up a lot of noise.'
He went on: 'We found this very sharp signal, sort of a laser lookalike thing which is the sort of thing we’re looking for - a very sharp spike. And that is what we found. So that was the excitement about the whole thing.'
For months after his discovery Dr Bhathal scanned the skies for a second signal to see whether it was just a glitch in his instrumentation but his search came to nothing.
But the discovery of Earth-like planets around Gliese 581 - both 581e and 581d, which was in the habitable zone - has also caught the public imagination.

Documentary-maker RDF and social-networking site Bebo used a radio telescope in Ukraine to send a powerful focused beam of information - 500 messages from the public in the form of radiowaves - to Gliese 581.
And the Australian science minister at the time organised 20,000 users of Twitter to send messages towards the distant solar system in the wake of the discoveries.

And Dr Steven Vogt who led the study at the University of California, Santa Cruz, today said that he was '100 per cent sure ' that there was life on the planet.
The planet lies in the star's 'Goldilocks zone' - the region in space where conditions are neither too hot or too cold for liquid water to form oceans, lakes and rivers.
The planet also appears to have an atmosphere, a gravity like our own and could well be capable of life. Researchers say the findings suggest the universe is teeming with world like our own.
'If these are rare, we shouldn't have found one so quickly and so nearby,'
'The number of systems with potentially habitable planets is probably on the order of 10 or 20 per cent, and when you multiply that by the hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way, that's a large number. There could be tens of billions of these systems in our galaxy.'

He told Discovery News: 'Personally, given the ubiquity and propensity of life to flourish wherever it can, I would say that the chances for life on this planet are 100 percent. I have almost no doubt about it'.
The planet is so far away, spaceships travelling close to the speed of light would take 20 years to make the journey. If a rocket was one day able to travel at a tenth of the speed of light, it would take 200 years to make the journey.
Planets orbiting distant stars are too small to be seen by telescopes. Instead, astronomers look for tell-tale gravitational wobbles in the stars that show a planet is in orbit.
The findings come from 11 years of observations at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii.
The planet orbits a small red star called Gliese 581 in the constellation of Libra. The planet, named Glieseg, is 118,000,000,000,000 miles away - so far away that light from its start takes 20 years to reach the Earth.
It takes just 37 days to orbit its sun which means its seasons last for just a few days. One side of the planet always faces its star and basks in perpetual daylight, while the other is in perpetual darkness.

The most suitable place for life or future human colonists would be in the 'grey' zone - the band between darkness and light that circles the planet.
'Any emerging life forms would have a wide range of stable climates to choose from and to evolve around, depending on their longitude,' said Dr Vogt who reports the find in the Astrophysical Journal.
If Gliese 581g has a rocky composition similar to the Earth's, its diameter would be about 1.2 to 1.4 times that of the Earth. It's gravity is likely to be similar - allowing a human astronaut to walk on the surface upright without difficulty.
'This planet doesn't have days and nights. Wherever you are on this planet, the sun is in the same position all the time. You have very stable zones where the ecosystem stays the same temperature... basically forever,' Vogt said.

'If life can evolve, it's going to have billions and billions of years to adapt to the surface. Given the ubiquity of water, it seems probable that this thing actually has liquid water. On the surface of the Earth, everywhere you have liquid water you have life,' Vogt added.
Astronomers have now found six planets in orbit around Gliese 581 - the most discovered in a planetary system other than our own solar system.
Like the solar system, the planets orbiting Gliese 581 have mostly circular orbits.
Two of its detected planets have previously been proposed as habitable planets. However they lie at the extremes of the Goldilocks Zone - one on the hot side, the other on the cold side.
Gliese 581g, in contrast, lies right in the middle.
The star has not been given a proper name. It appears in a catalogue of stars compiled by the German astronomer William Gliese where it has been given the reference number 581.
Astronomers name planets found orbiting stars with a letter.
The previous five planets found around Gliese 581 were named b to f, making the latest discovery Gliese 581g.
Its star is a red giant - a massive star near the end of its life. It is too dim to see in the night sky from Earth without a telescope.
Astronomers have found nearly 500 exoplanets - or planets outside our own solar system.

However, almost all are too big, made of gas instead of rock, too hot or too cold for life as we know it.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/ … z1135tbWTi

I love the artists picture of this planet....

Showing water and thriving plant life on the side facing the star isn't deceitful at all.

Its star is a red giant - a massive star near the end of its life.

WRONG. In an article trying to push this as a "2nd Earth" drowning in life that's sending out signals, the least you can do is get this basic info correct. A red dwarf is the exact opposite of a red giant.

Randall Flagg

Saw this topic and thought I'd chime in. It is highly unlikely that intelligent life exists within our own Solar System, though not impossible. Sagan described in his series Cosmos what large life may look like in a gas planet like jupiter. Obviously the lack of a stable platform would prevent any type of civilization or the stability to not worry about being eaten or starving to death and able to pick up pursuits such as mathmatics. It is possible that an intelligent species could exist benath the surface of mars or under the oceans of one of the many moons. However, defining what makes them intelligent is up for debate. Keep in mind that by our own detection standards, we would not be able to find ourselves if we existed as we did more than 150 years ago. Without an industrial revolution, there would be an absence of many chemicals in the air that would signify a civilization below. We only developed radio waves in the past 100 years or so, so any culture not yet at that point would be undetectable by us. An alien probe could have passed by our neck of the woods in 1820 and without deep scans to intentionally detect humans, it would have came up empty. 100 years is less than a blink of an eye in universal time keeping.

Most cosmologist do not find the idea of life as uncommon. In all probability, the universe is probably full of life. But the limiting factor is life the evolves into large mammal like creatures and eventually establishes sentience and is categorized as intelligent. When you factor in these variables, the liklihood of creatures like us is very small. The liklihood of creatures like us in our own solar system is extremely improbable - less so than every Playmate walking into my house right now to fuck my brains out and me continually hitting the powerball for the next 10 years.

The scientist that debate this issue reference the goldilocks zone not because it would create people like us, but because it allows for conditions hospitable to developing intelligent life. A desert world or one made of gas is not the environment microbes can evolve into large creatures and develop civilization. That is the catch 22.

Any species that made it to Earth would be vastly superior to us. Any idea of Star Wars or some space fight is foolish. They would possess the technology to wipe us out with no risk to themself. Imagine the United States declaring war on primitive humans 15,000 years ago. Now imagine the United States (if it existed) 1,000 years from now declaring war on humans 15,000 years ago. That is the parallell one would need to grasp to imagine an alien life coming to earth. Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking have discussed the topic in depth. I really suggest you watch Cosmos if you're interested in it and aren;'t inclined to read the books.

And on my final note, James you had stated earlier on that our solar system is still unmapped. Also that the 70s probes had not yet broken out. That is incorrect. The Voyager probes broke the Kuiper belt (the belt of asteroids and objects past Pluto and what defines the boundaries of our solar system)several years ago. There are no hidden or undiscovered planets. We can detect the gravitational pull of a planet on its sun billions of light years away. We can and obviously could do the same with objects relatively an arm's reach away.

James

And on my final note, James you had stated earlier on that our solar system is still unmapped. Also that the 70s probes had not yet broken out. That is incorrect. The Voyager probes broke the Kuiper belt (the belt of asteroids and objects past Pluto and what defines the boundaries of our solar system)several years ago.

Except that's not the actual boundary of the Solar System. Is it heading towards the exit door? Sure. Its not quite there yet and its really unfortunate that technology wasn't further along then as we could learn a LOT from these probes considering their location.

There are no hidden or undiscovered planets. We can detect the gravitational pull of a planet on its sun billions of light years away. We can and obviously could do the same with objects relatively an arm's reach away.

We heard this same thing for decades after the discovery of Pluto, yet many planets(well they no longer classify them as planets even though they have moons) have been discovered since and we're probably going to discover many more. Obviously when you get that far out, the Sun's influence starts to decline so we're eventually gonna run out of actual planets to discover. However, the Sun's influence supposedly reaches out more than a light year. Years ago I read maybe two light years but that's insanity as the Centauri system is 4 light years away and if it has a similar field, objects between the two would probably eventually collide and both systems could share objects.

Where we disagree is that I don't think the discoveries are over yet. We have NOT mapped 1 light year+ worth of space and are probably decades/hundreds of years from doing so. Ten years ago had you told scientists there would be a slew of planets/moons way past Pluto, they would have labeled you certifiably insane, yet that is the reality in 2010.

It is highly unlikely that intelligent life exists within our own Solar System, though not impossible.

Which is what I've been saying. As you know, I consider most if not all UFO sightings to be classified U.S. and Russian aircraft. Is there life out there? Probably. As advanced as us or even more advanced? That's where it gets dicey and I start to disagree with the UFO crowd that tons of aliens are using the Earth as a gathering place. I used to believe in all that stuff myself but as I get older and look at it from a different perspective I just don't think its likely.

Sagan described in his series Cosmos what large life may look like in a gas planet like jupiter.

I read that book years ago and if memory serves me correctly, he thought huge jelly fish like creatures could live in those huge storms.

Without an industrial revolution, there would be an absence of many chemicals in the air that would signify a civilization below. We only developed radio waves in the past 100 years or so, so any culture not yet at that point would be undetectable by us. An alien probe could have passed by our neck of the woods in 1820 and without deep scans to intentionally detect humans, it would have came up empty. 100 years is less than a blink of an eye in universal time keeping.

Good points and the Fermi Paradox mentions this as well(as pros and cons to the paradox itself). Not only should an industrial revolution be able to be detected, but so should technology much further advanced. We're just not seeing that in any direction we look. Which leads to....

In all probability, the universe is probably full of life. But the limiting factor is life the evolves into large mammal like creatures and eventually establishes sentience and is categorized as intelligent. When you factor in these variables, the liklihood of creatures like us is very small.

I totally agree with this and while I believe in that paradox to an extent, that is one of its main sticking points. Life doesn't just happen instantly causing a chain reaction to occur leading to humans and super duper aliens. Life looks to require quite a bit of luck and even when sparked, takes billions of years to develop. If certain mass extinctions timed almost perfectly do not occur, we don't even exist right now. Chances of these patterns being replicated everywhere else are near zero. Like the paradox states, while there may be bacteria thriving from here to the middle of the galaxy, we may be the most advanced life in the entire galaxy, if not the universe. What makes that proposition even scarier is that the universe may only last a few more billion years, meaning the window of opportunity for advanced life to evolve from scratch is nearing its end(and may in fact already be over).

The universe is approximately 13 billion years old. The sun and our planets have existed for five billion. Obviously that is near half the lifespan of the Universe, yet we're the first advanced life in that 5 billion years here capable of writing, flight, list goes on and on.

The search for super duper aliens just isn't looking good right now.

The scientist that debate this issue reference the goldilocks zone not because it would create people like us, but because it allows for conditions hospitable to developing intelligent life. A desert world or one made of gas is not the environment microbes can evolve into large creatures and develop civilization. That is the catch 22.

I realize this but when the public thinks goldilocks zone, they think of ET. Is bacteria sitting in a thawed out puddle in that small line on 581g? Possibly.

If fish do exist on Europa, that may be a similar miracle and what happened on earth to cause life to evolve from microbes to what it is now may have had a similar yet obviously smaller impact there.

We'll be lucky if we can find dinosaurs in the universe much less beings we can potentially communicate with.

Re: Aliens Are Monitoring Our Nukes, Worry Ex-Air Force Officers

Re: Aliens Are Monitoring Our Nukes, Worry Ex-Air Force Officers

Re: Aliens Are Monitoring Our Nukes, Worry Ex-Air Force Officers

Re: Aliens Are Monitoring Our Nukes, Worry Ex-Air Force Officers

Re: Aliens Are Monitoring Our Nukes, Worry Ex-Air Force Officers

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