NASA took time off from freaking out about a trace gas to do some actual stuff in space, and found something exciting. Then they gave it a boring name, Kepler 22b.
Kepler 22b is a newly-discovered planet that has the hallmarks of being a liveable place. It’s close enough to its Sun to be about 22°c, and has an atmosphere. What the surface is like is unknown:
Spinning around its star some 600 light years away, Kepler 22b is 2.4 times the size of the Earth and orbits its sun-like star every 290 days. Scientists do not know, however, if the planet is rocky, gaseous or liquid. The planet’s first “transit”, or star crossover, was captured shortly after NASA launched its Kepler spacecraft in March 2009.
Planets like Kepler 22b probably aren’t rare, but only because the Universe is so,well, infinite. But planets like Kepler 22b in our cosmic neighborhood are rare.
Newspapers have already called Kepler 22b ‘New Earth’, which isn’t terribly imaginative, but sounds exciting. The good news is that there are likely to be lots more potentially habitable planets found as Kepler wanders through space. The Swiss found one even ‘closer’ just last August:
… planet, HD 85512b, about 36 light years away seemed to be in the habitable zone of its star.
The bad news is we can’t get there from here. Consider Voyager 1, the longest space mission so far. Voyager 1 is about to leave the solar system, heading toward the Milky Way. It left Earth 30 years ago and has travelled 11 billion miles, which sounds like a lot, until you stop and ponder just how big space is.
11 billion miles is only 0.001871 of a light year. Which means a craft travelling at Voyager 1 speed would reach planet HD85512b in a tad over 19,241 years. Getting to Kepler 22b would require a journey over 320,000 years at Voyager 1 speed. It’s a journey so long that there’s a chance your destination won’t be there when you arrive, or if it is there, that the once-liveable climate has changed (no doubt due to pesky alien SUV’s). No matter how you look at it, a spacecraft making either journey would need to be huge, just to hold the Tang supplies.
If moving around the galaxy is ever to be possible outside of science fiction, Einstein needs to be wrong about the speed of light being the maximum speed at which matter (or energy) can travel. CERN is working on that after discovering a sprightly neutrino doing things Albert said can’t be done. Whether the boffins at CERN made a mistake, or found something that’ll rock the physics world to its core, remains to be seen.
President John F. Kennedy had a vision in 1962, a grand dream of space exploration that would not only send man into space, but create jobs, invent technologies and create wealth here on Earth too:
And finally, the space effort itself, while still in its infancy, has already created a great number of new companies, and tens of thousands of new jobs. Space and related industries are generating new demands in investment and skilled personnel, and this city and this State, and this region, will share greatly in this growth. What was once the furthest outpost on the old frontier of the West will be the furthest outpost on the new frontier of science and space. Houston, your City of Houston, with its Manned Spacecraft Center, will become the heart of a large scientific and engineering community. During the next 5 years the National Aeronautics and Space Administration expects to double the number of scientists and engineers in this area, to increase its outlays for salaries and expenses to $60 million a year; to invest some $200 million in plant and laboratory facilities; and to direct or contract for new space efforts over $1 billion from this Center in this City.
Today, we’re stuck with a President who canceled manned space flight, dreams only of his father and blames new technology for killing jobs. Not all things improve with time.
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Now just hang on a cotton-picking minute! It seems only yesterday that POTUS was extolling the job-creating potential of the white-hot face of Green technology. Internet shopping produces less of the Demon Carbon in the transfer of goods from producer to customer. Has someone made an error on the teleprompter?
22c is in the “Goldilocks” zone…for Kepler 22b.
But for us, at least according to Weepy Bill, Hansen and Joe Romm—we’re all going to roast in the flames of Hell.
If you could just managed to propel a massless particle out yer backside *fast* enough, the equal and opposite . . . lessee, carry the zero . . . huh, still nothin’?
dear mr. bayonet:
don’t be such a grump.
the closer one is a mere 35 light years away. see, simple.
now the only problem is to figure out how many years it will take to accelerate the human body to the speed of light within acceptable g-loads, and how many years it will taken to decelerate the human body to a velocity that will allow landing on such a planet, whatever its gravitational loads are.
keep in mind, you get a little optimistic about such matters, and you’ve delivered soup to the destination.
and, oh, yeah, you got any ideas how you accelerate a space ship to the speed of light, let alone how you keep it together, when you do so? and, such a vehicle traveling at such speeds have a fair amount of “mo.” not generally recognized by your average joe, is that brakes must absorb as much energy in slowing a car as went into it to get it to speed, so a spacecraft would have to carry as much or more “fuel” to slow a vessel as took to accelerate it.
take a good book, i would suppose.
john jay
milton freewater, oregon usa
Only to find out that our whole planetary system is a spot on something elses bed sheet. Every 5000 years or so it does the laundry.
Just thinking outside the box.
looks like the CERN Neutrino issue was a “clocking” problem - at http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/27260/