Exoplanetary News
In April, NASA will launch the Kepler telescope to look for other planets that could support life.
When it detects the slight dimming of a star – which could mean an orbiting planet passing in front of it – Kepler will watch to see if this happens periodically. If alien telescopes were watching our sun, they might detect the earth’s passage in front of it once a year.
They would have to marvel at earth’s amazing precision — completing its orbit in exactly one year, and making a full rotation in exactly one day.
No? You think those are tautologies? Then why haven’t tautologies been discovered on other planets?
Kepler is expected to discover at least 50 earth-sized planets circling distant stars, many of them within the habitable zone, neither too hot nor too cold for water to remain liquid.
A Russian satellite will run around and plant flags on all of them. Since few of these will be Christian worlds, missionaries will soon follow, then capitalists.
That last paragraph isn’t true and wasn’t part of my original draft. It may have been carved into stone tablets and placed there by methods unknown to our science.
There is no other rational explanation, except that we’ll have to get some new writers in here.
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You know, that bit about the shadow passing in front of a star, that only works if you’re coplanar with that star’s orbital system. If you’re hovering above the thing, there could be fifty planets around it and you won’t see a thing.
Comment by Mark — December 17, 2008 @ 7:08 pm
So much for THAT grand scheme for recovering NASA’s glory days!
By the same reasoning, if Earth were tilted to the orbital plane by 90 degrees, the sun would rise over the north pole and set over the south pole, and we wouldn’t even know it was there. But we’d all be frantic that the equator might melt because of global warming.
Actually, the plan is for Kepler to maintain a fixed gaze on an entire sector of stars — hundreds of thousands? — so that the percentages would dictate finding enough of them with orbital planes properly oriented. But don’t believe the ignorant bastard who wrote this post.
Comment by Al — December 17, 2008 @ 7:21 pm
PS — I checked. The sector of sky Kepler will look at for three years consists of about 100,000 stars in the general area of Cygnus. After that (and the estimated 50 earth-size planets it yields) I assume they’ll move on to other sectors
Comment by Al — December 17, 2008 @ 10:08 pm
Cygnus? Oh for Christ’s sake. Cygnus? Nobody goes there anymore. It is simply Not Done.
And besides, the whole project comes down to looking for shadows billions of miles away in the dark. Not only will it be hard to see something, it will be as hard to prove they didn’t see something.
Remind’s me of Winston Churchill’s fearless promise to provide an estimate of the cost of WWI to the Empire. When his staff gasped and said an accurate estimate could not be assembled for 17 years, he said “Right … we can’t be wrong for 17 years.”
Comment by Mark — December 17, 2008 @ 10:22 pm
I stand in awe of your familial perspicacity. If I were smarter, or a committed Evangelical, I’d point out the errors in your reasoning. But since I’m neither, I’ll just enjoy a chuckle.
Comment by Steve Alber — December 18, 2008 @ 11:13 am
Steve — If I were smarter, I’d have had dumber kids. I can’t keep up with the ones I have.
Mark — Are you sure you’re not thinking of the constellation Sphincter? Cygnus, in Chinese lore, is the site of the once-a-year magpie bridge, so I assume it has 1.2 billion admirers even though we look at it askance.
Comment by Al — December 18, 2008 @ 3:10 pm