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Nasa press conference


khol

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6 hours ago, psyche101 said:

However, the paper does acknowledge that the "comet as an emission source" hypothesis has not been empirically tested, and that a potentially long-lived emission source does not explain why only one of the feed horns detected the Wow! signal.

Am I getting confused here? I thought the Big Ear was a Kraus-type meridian radio telescope. I didn't think it was one of the horn-type radio telescopes, such as the one that first detected the cosmic background radiation.

Edit: Ignore the above. The detector itself had two horn feeds.

Edited by Derek Willis
Idiocy
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10 hours ago, psyche101 said:

There seems to be pros and cons with the hypothesis, what Antonio Paris and Evan Davies have proposed is that the diffuse head of a comet could produce H I emission like the Wow! signal, and have also identified a pair of comets that were in the right area of the sky by extrapolating the orbits back to the 1977 date. However, the paper does acknowledge that the "comet as an emission source" hypothesis has not been empirically tested, and that a potentially long-lived emission source does not explain why only one of the feed horns detected the Wow! signal. Paper at the link.

LINK - Hydrogen Clouds from Comets 266/P Christensen and P/2008 Y2 (Gibbs) are Candidates for the Source of the 1977 “WOW” Signal

I guess we'll find out relatively soon. 

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First time newbie here. Just want to say it's nice reading your posts and sharing enthusiasm for space exploration. 

Whether or not these planets sustain life, I feel this such a great discovery because it shows there are solar systems

similar to ours with multiple planets in the habitable zone.  I look forward to reading more on this topic as we get

additional data, especially from the James Webb telescope once it goes up. Thank you. 

 

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3 minutes ago, Sushibar said:

First time newbie here. Just want to say it's nice reading your posts and sharing enthusiasm for space exploration. 

Whether or not these planets sustain life, I feel this such a great discovery because it shows there are solar systems

similar to ours with multiple planets in the habitable zone.  I look forward to reading more on this topic as we get

additional data, especially from the James Webb telescope once it goes up. Thank you. 

 

Welcome to the forum sushibar, hope you enjoy it!

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10 hours ago, taniwha said:

Incredibly strong winds more frequently mean incredibly harsh conditions to grow in. 

Just how incredibly strong are the winds you 'imagine'?

Besides, how do you reconcile no atmosphere with strong winds? 

I don't understand you question

I understand that it's an alien planet, but the laws of physics it's subjected should be the same our planet is subjected to. 

It isn't "Earth 2"  that has been discovered.  Let's keep it realistic.

- Since you are the one making stuff up, please define in a quantitative way (like km/h) how much "strong" is, according to you. 

 

- the question is pretty easy: without atmosphere there can't be wind, so how do you combine the presence of the latter with the lack of the first? 

It's like saying that  there are strong winds on the Moon. 

 

- please, define "realistic" according to you then. 

You are the one going woo, not me. Unless we discover differently, the basic laws of physics apply everywhere in the universe in the same way. 

So, unless it's the fairies home planet, without atmosphere there's no wind. 

 

10 hours ago, taniwha said:

And what about the pterodactyl? 

Life forms can harness wind power in mysterious ways.

What do you mean by "Life would be different, that's all I can let you know for now".

Dp you know something he/we don't know? 

And you don't want to provide disclosure? 

Yes.  No one knows.  

End transmission

- only because you stick together random words that sound smart as a sentence, what you wrote doesn't prove anything. 

Again, unless we are talking about magic, "mysterious ways" doesn't make up for unsubstantiated claims. 

Try to magically drop a pterodactyl in an environment with 300+ km/h winds and let's see how he performs. 

Carnoferox knows more than me on the topic, but it's probable that, besides having difficulty in flying in such conditions, their wings would end up ripped apart. 

 

- no, you didn't say that no one knows, but "that" is all you can let him/us know for now. They are two completely different things. 

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31 minutes ago, Sushibar said:

 James Webb telescope once it goes up. Thank you. 

 

Somebody tell the admin to Fire! up a booster under the tails of the people in charge of the Jimmy Webb Project! WE NEED THAT UP THERE YESTERDAY !

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2 hours ago, MWoo7 said:

Somebody tell the admin to Fire! up a booster under the tails of the people in charge of the Jimmy Webb Project! WE NEED THAT UP THERE YESTERDAY !

Here's a thought perhaps only the older folk among us will understand. The obvious song to accompany the launch of the the James/Jimmy Webb Telescope will be: "Up, Up and Away". 

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3 hours ago, Parsec said:

- Since you are the one making stuff up, please define in a quantitative way (like km/h) how much "strong" is, according to you. 

- the question is pretty easy: without atmosphere there can't be wind, so how do you combine the presence of the latter with the lack of the first? 

It's like saying that  there are strong winds on the Moon.

In fact there are.

Ever heard of the solar wind?

Over 750km per second would be pretty strong don't you think? 

Quote

The moon does not have a uniform magnetic field, so it experiences intense solar wind storms....  http://sciencing.com/moon-solar-wind-storms-3746.html

I highly recommend you read it :)

But because you wish there to be an atmosphere, let's work on that assumption.  

Think of the lifeforms that live in caves, deep underground habitats, and the fantastic underwater creatures right here on Earth. Think of a simple earthworm.

The wildest wind does not bother them. Natural features provide the shelter.  It's not such a big stretch to believe the same opportunity for shelter exist on dwarf sun planets.

- please, define "realistic" according to you then. 

Keeping things realistic means don't try putting words in my mouth or deliberately pull apart the foundations of discussion. 

Think before you speak and read what I say with a sensible tone of voice.  Keep an open mind to correction and other people's ideas and I believe you will benefit the more from it :innocent:

You are the one going woo, not me. Unless we discover differently, the basic laws of physics apply everywhere in the universe in the same way. 

So, unless it's the fairies home planet, without atmosphere there's no wind. 

Try to refrain from fantastical rambling

- only because you stick together random words that sound smart as a sentence, what you wrote doesn't prove anything. 

What was it again you wanted me to prove?

Again, unless we are talking about magic, "mysterious ways" doesn't make up for unsubstantiated claims. 

Mysterious ways does not mean magical ways. You are only adding to your own confusion.

Try to magically drop a pterodactyl in an environment with 300+ km/h winds and let's see how he performs. 

Carnoferox knows more than me on the topic, but it's probable that, besides having difficulty in flying in such conditions, their wings would end up ripped apart.

Hahaha. Look who's "wooing" now.

Do you own any pets? Just curious...:whistle:

no, you didn't say that no one knows, but "that" is all you can let him/us know for now. They are two completely different things. 

Have a cup of coffee and think again.

:tu:

 

 

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There are a few things that I see coming out of this.

1. NASA announces it. The assumption is therefore that NASA found all these planets. No, they did not. To give credit where credit is due, at least three were detected by telescopes belonging to the European Southern Observatory using, among other resources, the TRAPPIST telescope which is Belgian - Swiss and operated remotely by the University of Liege in Belgium. These planets were announced quite a few months ago. Other telescopes including the Very Large Telescope in Chile, another in the Canary Islands and the Spitzer Space Telescope were used.

2. Within hours of the announcement, some of the lunatic fringe of Christianity were claiming that the seven planets detected so far were the seven heads of the dragon in the Book of Revelation. How that will pan out if another planet or more is detected around this star I do not know, but if the idea gets too set in the "minds" of these folk, they may start calling the eighth discovery a lie.

3.  If it happens to be far enough from its star to have a temperature below 100C or so we hear all the speculation about the presence of liquid water on the surface yet again. As far as I know, the three most common chemical compounds in the Universe are carbon dioxide, methane and water. Unless a planet is baked like Mercury, it would be a peculiar planet indeed if it did not have some water, whether as solid, liquid or gas.

4.  As soon as any rocky planet is discovered with the possibility of liquid water out comes the tiresome drivel about space boogiemen. Life on other planets, if it exists, does not have to be bug eyed monsters building star cruisers with death rays, it might only be the local equivalent of bacteria.

5.  Some people seem to have difficulty in understanding that an "artist's impression" of what some remote planet might be like is not a statement that it is like that. Then some of them start accusing astronomers and NASA of lying and this only feeds paranoia and idiot conspiracy theories. "Never A Straight Answer". Perhaps the illustrations are too good in quality.  

Edited by Codenwarra
only half of what I wrote appeared at first.
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37 minutes ago, Codenwarra said:

There are a few things that I see coming out of this.

1. NASA announces it. The assumption is therefore that NASA found all these planets. No, they did not. To give credit where credit is due, at least three were detected by telescopes belonging to the European Southern Observatory using, among other resources, the TRAPPIST telescope which is Belgian - Swiss and operated remotely by the University of Liege in Belgium. These planets were announced quite a few months ago. Other telescopes including the Very Large Telescope in Chile, another in the Canary Islands and the Spitzer Space Telescope were used.

Not sure how you missed it but the announcement was very clear about who was involved and what they did.  From the linked article, second paragraph:

This exoplanet system is called TRAPPIST-1, named for The Transiting Planets and Planetesimals Small Telescope (TRAPPIST) in Chile. In May 2016, researchers using TRAPPIST announced they had discovered three planets in the system. Assisted by several ground-based telescopes, including the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope, Spitzer confirmed the existence of two of these planets and discovered five additional ones, increasing the number of known planets in the system to seven.

The new results were published Wednesday in the journal Nature, and announced at a news briefing at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

Using Spitzer data, the team precisely measured the sizes of the seven planets and developed first estimates of the masses of six of them, allowing their density to be estimated.

Quote


2. Within hours of the announcement, some of the lunatic fringe of Christianity were claiming that the seven planets detected so far were the seven heads of the dragon in the Book of Revelation. How that will pan out if another planet or more is detected around this star I do not know, but if the idea gets too set in the "minds" of these folk, they may start calling the eighth discovery a lie.

I hadn't heard that but honestly, there will always be the lunatic fringe, nothing much you can do about it but change as many young minds as you can.
 

Quote

 

3.  If it happens to be far enough from its star to have a temperature below 100C or so we hear all the speculation about the presence of liquid water on the surface yet again. As far as I know, the three most common chemical compounds in the Universe are carbon dioxide, methane and water. Unless a planet is baked like Mercury, it would be a peculiar planet indeed if it did not have some water, whether as solid, liquid or gas.

4.  As soon as any rocky planet is discovered with the possibility of liquid water out comes the tiresome drivel about space boogiemen. Life on other planets, if it exists, does not have to be bug eyed monsters building star cruisers with death rays, it might only be the local equivalent of bacteria.

5.  Some people seem to have difficulty in understanding that an "artist's impression" of what some remote planet might be like is not a statement that it is like that. Then some of them start accusing astronomers and NASA of lying and this only feeds paranoia and idiot conspiracy theories. "Never A Straight Answer". Perhaps the illustrations are too good in quality.  

 

All you can do is try and preach the truth in as interesting a away as possible and hope to get to them before the ignorant do.

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1 hour ago, Merc14 said:

Not sure how you missed it but the announcement was very clear about who was involved and what they did.  From the linked article, second paragraph:

This exoplanet system is called TRAPPIST-1, named for The Transiting Planets and Planetesimals Small Telescope (TRAPPIST) in Chile. In May 2016, researchers using TRAPPIST announced they had discovered three planets in the system. Assisted by several ground-based telescopes, including the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope, Spitzer confirmed the existence of two of these planets and discovered five additional ones, increasing the number of known planets in the system to seven.

The new results were published Wednesday in the journal Nature, and announced at a news briefing at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

Using Spitzer data, the team precisely measured the sizes of the seven planets and developed first estimates of the masses of six of them, allowing their density to be estimated.

 

I didn't miss it, and neither did you, but all of those who posted questions on Yahoo! Answers Astronomy & Space yesterday seem to have missed it and a quick look at YouTube reactions seems to show the same sort of thing. I didn't watch all the videos though.   Of course, many Y!A users are juvenile.  

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49 minutes ago, Codenwarra said:

I didn't miss it, and neither did you, but all of those who posted questions on Yahoo! Answers Astronomy & Space yesterday seem to have missed it and a quick look at YouTube reactions seems to show the same sort of thing. I didn't watch all the videos though.   Of course, many Y!A users are juvenile.  

Well Waspie runs a pretty tight ship here so it tends to stay on the science side here

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7 hours ago, taniwha said:

 

Oh gosh, I knew you would have pulled out from your hat the solar "wind". 

 

Nevermind, I also see you are well entreched in your ideas and not interested in testing them to see if/how much you are "wooing" or not. 

And you are the one putting words in other people's mouths. 

 

For all these reasons it's pointless for me to continue engaging in this "conversation". 

I will leave the fun to others, if someone will feel the need to point out all your wrong logic. 

 

Live long and prosper. 

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5 hours ago, Parsec said:

Oh gosh, I knew you would have pulled out from your hat the solar "wind". 

 

Nevermind, I also see you are well entreched in your ideas and not interested in testing them to see if/how much you are "wooing" or not. 

And you are the one putting words in other people's mouths. 

 

For all these reasons it's pointless for me to continue engaging in this "conversation". 

I will leave the fun to others, if someone will feel the need to point out all your wrong logic. 

 

Live long and prosper. 

Sure.  Cheers.

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On ‎23‎/‎02‎/‎2017 at 2:17 PM, Merc14 said:

There are very few scientists/people who think that life off this planet isn't possible, what they don't see as likely is that said life has visited our little corner of the galaxy.

I was referring to "old thinking", such as those who thought the Earth was flat. The power of hindsight was my point. Back when Galileo was being ridiculed for defending Heliocentrism there was plenty of that thinking going on.....

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6 hours ago, Silent Trinity said:

I was referring to "old thinking", such as those who thought the Earth was flat. The power of hindsight was my point. Back when Galileo was being ridiculed for defending Heliocentrism there was plenty of that thinking going on.....

I don't think you need to g back  that far ST, seriously, look back just a couple of decades, before we knew just how many planets there really were, and you'll see that most thought life would be rare in the universe, that the conditions were so hard to get right that very few planets could even support it.   Fast forward to today and it is just the opposite. 

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12 hours ago, Merc14 said:

I don't think you need to g back  that far ST, seriously, look back just a couple of decades, before we knew just how many planets there really were, and you'll see that most thought life would be rare in the universe, that the conditions were so hard to get right that very few planets could even support it.   Fast forward to today and it is just the opposite. 

The belief in the likelihood of life existing elsewhere has waxed and waned. Here is a quote from The Astronomer's Telescope, written in 1962 by the famous British astronomer Patrick Moore:

"Mars is certainly a fascinating world. It has an atmosphere, though we could not breathe it; it has a little water, since the white polar caps are certainly made up of some icy or frosty deposit; and very probably it supports vegetation. But we do not believe men live there, and even animals are not likely to be found."

The optimistic belief that Mars very probably supports vegetation was ended just three years later when Mariner 4 sent back images which showed a very barren and crater-pocked planet. We may yet find life on Mars, but it will not be the vegetation Patrick Moore envisaged.  

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5 hours ago, Derek Willis said:

The belief in the likelihood of life existing elsewhere has waxed and waned. Here is a quote from The Astronomer's Telescope, written in 1962 by the famous British astronomer Patrick Moore:

"Mars is certainly a fascinating world. It has an atmosphere, though we could not breathe it; it has a little water, since the white polar caps are certainly made up of some icy or frosty deposit; and very probably it supports vegetation. But we do not believe men live there, and even animals are not likely to be found."

The optimistic belief that Mars very probably supports vegetation was ended just three years later when Mariner 4 sent back images which showed a very barren and crater-pocked planet. We may yet find life on Mars, but it will not be the vegetation Patrick Moore envisaged.  

It is truly amazing how much our understanding of our solar system, galaxy and universe has changed in my lifetime.  

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On 2/24/2017 at 11:49 PM, Merc14 said:

I guess we'll find out relatively soon. 

I hope so. Id like to hear how the follow up this year went. Have not been able to find anything myself on the latest observations. 

And I hope it wasn't comets just between you and me ;) 

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23 hours ago, Merc14 said:

It is truly amazing how much our understanding of our solar system, galaxy and universe has changed in my lifetime.  

What amazes me is that the wow! factor of these discoveries never diminishes. For example, the first Mars missions I can remember are the Mariner 6 and 7 fly-bys in 1969. Back then I had a terrestrial hand-held telescope which my dad helped me make a stand for. All I could see of Mars was a tiny red speck of light, but I remember the wow! of seeing the images sent back by the probes. Then in 1971 there was Mariner 9, which went into orbit and transmitted images of huge volcanoes and ancient river systems. In July of 1976 I bunked off school to see the first images of the surface sent back by Viking 1. I still have a poster NASA produced of the first panoramic views. There was a lull until the missions of the 1990's, during which time imaging technologies had greatly advanced. And then came the rovers culminating in the spectacular success of Curiosity. On each occasion I still feel like a kid and I am still wowed by what the scientists and engineers are achieving. With the Space Launch System and Orion spacecraft coming on stream, the technology will be there to send people to Mars. Hopefully the political and public desire to do this will mean we older folks who can remember the early days of space exploration will still be around. I feel privileged to have seen some amazing advances, but I can't help feeling a tad envious of the those people who will see what unfolds throughout this century.     

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On 27/02/2017 at 1:11 AM, Derek Willis said:

The belief in the likelihood of life existing elsewhere has waxed and waned. Here is a quote from The Astronomer's Telescope, written in 1962 by the famous British astronomer Patrick Moore:

"Mars is certainly a fascinating world. It has an atmosphere, though we could not breathe it; it has a little water, since the white polar caps are certainly made up of some icy or frosty deposit; and very probably it supports vegetation. But we do not believe men live there, and even animals are not likely to be found."

The optimistic belief that Mars very probably supports vegetation was ended just three years later when Mariner 4 sent back images which showed a very barren and crater-pocked planet. We may yet find life on Mars, but it will not be the vegetation Patrick Moore envisaged.  

That is a brilliant snippet from the past, thanks for posting it. 

Envisioning what life might be like on other worlds is a harmless practise.

It leads to interesting ideas and discussions and perhaps greater understanding.

I do not know why some people are offended by any new idea that is alien to their own personal interpretation of life beyond earth.

To dream is to see.  If that wasn't the case it would have been pointless even mounting cameras on mariner 4.

Surely all space technology designed to answer the question of exo life , requires the greatest measures of foresight?

Hence why such grand projects as the Webb telescope and Martian rovers are years in the making.

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