So Many Earth-Like Planets, So Few Telescopes - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Astronomers announced on Tuesday that they had found eight new planets orbiting their stars at distances compatible with liquid water, bringing the total number of potentially habitable planets in the just-right “Goldilocks” zone to a dozen or two
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As the ranks of these planets grow, astronomers are planning the next step in the quest to end cosmic loneliness: gauging which hold the greatest promise for life and what tools will be needed to learn about them.
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recalled that the first discovery of a planet orbiting another normal star, a Jupiter-like giant, was 20 years ago. Before that, she said, astronomers worried that “maybe the ‘Star Trek’ picture of the universe was not right, and there is no life anywhere else.”
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Finding Goldilocks planets closer to home will be the job of the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, to be launched in 2017. But if we want to know what the weather is like on these worlds, whether there is water or even life, more powerful instruments will be needed.
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hundreds of light-years away, too far for detailed study. We will probably never know any more about these particular planets than we do now.
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“but until we can observe the atmospheres and assess their greenhouse gas power, we don’t really know what the surface temperatures are like.”
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investigating the concept of a starshade, which would float in front of a space telescope and block light from a star so that its much fainter planets would be visible.
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The goal is to have a pool of dozens of “exo-Earths” to study in order to have any chance of seeing signs of life or understanding terrestrial planets
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perhaps because as planets get bigger their mass and gravity increase, and they are better able to hang on to gas and lighter components.
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The work complements and tightens studies done last year by Geoffrey Marcy and his colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley; that group looks into the nature of so-called super Earths, planets bigger than ours and smaller than Neptune.