9 ms·
NASA announces discovery of Earth-like planet with earth similarity index 0.98
- dr_zoidberg 11y agoAs of now, the content linked says nothing more than the PR announcement from yesterday -- so either the title is misleading, or the OP comes from the future. (I'm aware he might have other sources for the title, but it's still misleading)
- allcentury 11y agoI think the announcement is live at noon today (EST).
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- wrboyce 11y agoFor those who also dislike timezone-juggling: http://time.is/1200_23_July_2015_in_EDT?http://www.nasa.gov/news/media/newsaudio/index.html http://time.is/1200_23_July_2015_in_EDT?http://www.nasa.gov/...
- joshontheweb 11y agoThanks for sharing that. I've been looking for something like this. Traveling and juggling meetings in multiple timezones is a big source of anxiety for me. I'm always wondering if I did the math wrong or if there is a daylight savings I haven't accounted for.
- rndn 11y agoThere are actually plenty of tools for problems related to timezones, for example here is one for finding the best time for Skype conferences: http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/meeting.html http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/meeting.html
- tonyjstark 11y agoMaybe both, or none. It's complex: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5wpm-gesOY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5wpm-gesOY
- ParadigmBlender 11y agoI also recommend http://www.worldtimebuddy.com/ http://www.worldtimebuddy.com/. Sounds like it would fit your use case well.
- slayed0 11y agoNow can you link one that uses the ISO 8601 date standard, for those of us who also dislike date juggling?
- toxican 11y agoNow can you link one that uses unix time, for those of us who hate ourselves?
- johnchristopher 11y agoI think it uses the browser's locale.
- pyrophane 11y agoHey, you guys remember swatch beats?
- david-given 11y agoAm I the only one who that that beats was actually a pretty decent, if totally doomed, idea? cricket noises
- wuliwong 11y agoI haven't had my morning coffee and I misread 'reply' as the username and thought you were having a big, multi-threaded conversation with yourself. :) I even vaguely thought 'is that guy's name reply?'
- ArekDymalski 11y agoNo, you aren't alone :) However reading [1] influenced my opinion. [1] http://qntm.org/abolish http://qntm.org/abolish
- danielweber 11y agoPeople think they are being more precise by saying "EST," but, quick, are we in daylight savings time now, or out of it? It turns out we are, and I don't meant to suggest that GP didn't know this. But what if we weren't in daylight savings time, and GP said "EST"? Would we have to change an hour? I highly recommend just saying "Eastern Time."
- Asbostos 11y agoOr better yet, UTC or GMT since probably more people in the world know their offset relative to that, than EST.
- lostbit 11y agoTrue. We know our current offset from UTC (or legacy 'GMT'). I always use the real offset at that time. Thus, I just inform my clock saying UTC-3 (or UTC-2 when we are in daylight savings time).
- ycombobreaker 11y agoI agree, wrong timezone (DST or not?) is as bad as no timezone. I have gotten in the habit of using Olson timezone names, US/Eastern for example, because I have seen CT used to refer to both US and European Central time.
- danielweber 11y agoCrap, I was wrong. "S" doesn't stand for "Savings," it stands for "Standard." We really are in EDT. All the more reason to never specify it! :)
- joshstrange 11y agoWelcome the world of pain that is timezones and DST... As someone who has had to write an extensive amount of deal with these two concepts they are the worst things ever. We should just abolish timezones, DST, and move to the International Fixed Calendar. Time sucks. I'm even in favor of moving to a seconds-based time unit like kiloseconds, miliseconds, etc instead of minutes/hours/days/weeks/months/years/etc. "Metric Time" if you will...
- mathgeek 11y agoYou probably mean EDT, just FYI.
- comrade1 11y agoOnly on HN would a discussion about the discovery of an earth-like planet devolve into a discussion on the proper use of time zones...
- jeletonskelly 11y agoHow is this link even on the front page? There's no sauce for anything in the title unless OP works for NASA...
- sparaker 11y agoShows how much we are interested in finding another earth.
- myth_buster 11y agoEdit: I think OP is referring to the Kepler Candidate KOI-4878.01 [0] with the ESI as 0.98. [0]: http://exoplanetarchive.ipac.caltech.edu/cgi-bin/DisplayOverview/nph-DisplayOverview?objname=K04878.01&type=KEPLER_CANDIDATE http://exoplanetarchive.ipac.caltech.edu/cgi-bin/DisplayOver... _______________________________________________________________ This post is ridiculously clickbaity! There should be a {{citation needed}} tag there or the title be changed. Anyways, the anticipation for the 9AM PDT announcement is feverish.
- darkstar999 11y agoWe have a "flag" link. I believe it is appropriate for this post.
- 3327 11y agoOP has other source, this is been making the chatter rounds in SV last night. I overheard from a JPL source.
- ycombinatoracc 11y agoHow far away, tho I suppose not like it matters now that getting even into orbit is harder than before.
- waterlesscloud 11y agoWhat's an "earth similarity index"? Is there a definition somewhere?
- colinramsay 11y ago"The Earth Similarity Index, ESI or "easy scale" is a measure of how physically similar a planetary-mass object is to Earth. It is a scale from zero to one, with Earth having a value of one." Mars is at 0.697, for reference. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Similarity_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Similarity_Index
- underyx 11y agoWell, what has a value of zero?
- eddd 11y agoProbably Jupiter.
- jameshart 11y agoTo have an ESI, an object needs to have a mean radius, a density, an escape velocity, and a surface temperature. Gas giants and stars, therefore, don't really have a definable ESI, since they lack a 'surface' where you can take a temperature. If something has all of those properties, then because of the way it's defined, it has an ESI which is strictly > 0 and <= 1 (it can only be zero if, for one of its properties, x - x0 / x + x0 == 1, i.e. x - x0 == x + x0 - and since x0 is strictly nonzero, that can't happen). So nothing has an ESI of 0. But you yourself, to pick an object at random, probably have an ESI very very close to zero. Incidentally, the formulation of the ESI is a good generic formula for creating 'similarity' measurements for, for example, matchmaking algorithms or similarity searches.
- stcredzero 11y agoThen why didn't they just define it so that objects with an "undefinable surface" have an ESI of 0?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- qntty 11y agoHere are some other planets we've found with comparable similarity. Note that earth-like similarity does not imply that it is habitable. http://phl.upr.edu/projects/habitable-exoplanets-catalog/data http://phl.upr.edu/projects/habitable-exoplanets-catalog/dat...
- EA 11y agoA few zones some think need to overlap and be dialed-in to come close to offering a habitable place: water habitable zone ultraviolet habitable zone photosynthetic habitable zone ozone habitable zone planetary rotation rate habitable zone planetary obliquity habitable zone tidal habitable zone astrosphere habitable zone
- saiya-jin 11y agoquite a few of those are not relevant for habitability. for example tides, really? or you wouldn't survive if day would have 40 hours???
- SapphireSun 11y agoI think it's more like if the day was 100 msec that you have to worry about. Also, if the day is too slow, then one side of the planet bakes while the other side freezes. Think of the rotation axis as a spit roaster.
- Ecco 11y agoNice metaphor :)
- dandelany 11y agoThey are relevant, you're just misinterpreting. None of these are meant to imply "X must be like Earth for the planet to be habitable," they mean "X is an important factor for habitability and must be considered in our models if we want them to be meaningful, unlike the ESI which captures a mere handful of variables". For example, "tidal habitable zone" doesn't mean "we need [ocean] tides to survive," it means "tidal heating effects have an enormous impact on planetary conditions". For example, an Earth analogue in orbit around a tiny red dwarf in a seemingly "habitable zone" would be subject to tidal heating effects which would bake the surface, whereas a similar planet in a similar orbit around a sun-like yellow dwarf would not. Similarly, "rotation rate habitable zone" doesn't mean "the planet must have a ~24 hour day", it means "all else being equal, a planet's rotation rate can greatly affect habitability," mostly due to weather patterns and air/heat circulation. By including rotation rate in our models, some planets previously thought to be inhabitable may turn out not to be, and vice versa.
- coob 11y agoIs it this one? http://exoplanetarchive.ipac.caltech.edu/cgi-bin/DisplayOverview/nph-DisplayOverview?objname=K04878.01&type=KEPLER%5fCANDIDATE http://exoplanetarchive.ipac.caltech.edu/cgi-bin/DisplayOver...
- jMyles 11y agoSearching google news for "earth similarity index" gives me no indication that NASA will make this specific announcement. Is there a source? If not, it makes sense to change this title to "NASA to make announcement that 'astronomers are on the cusp' of finding 'another earth.'"
- sunseb 11y agoIt's crazy to think that there may be life everywhere in space and incredible things we haven't seen yet, that our mind can't even conceive.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- rndn 11y agoIn case you have questions about exoplanets, there is an ongoing AMA by exoplanet researchers on /r/science: https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/3ebavu/science_ama_series_were_the_planet_hunters_team/ https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/3ebavu/science_ama... (They mention the upcoming announcement, but they don’t know know what it is about either.)
- haarts 11y agoIt's interesting to note that the highest ESI so far has been Kepler-62e with a score of 0.83 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Similarity_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Similarity_Index). So a score of 0.98 would seem significant.
- bitshiffed 11y agoThat Wikipedia page doesn't appear to be updated very often. Here (http://phl.upr.edu/projects/habitable-exoplanets-catalog/data http://phl.upr.edu/projects/habitable-exoplanets-catalog/dat...) is a better list. KOI-4878.01 has been listed as a 0.98 since January 2015. The new may be that it is only now confirmed; but there are other confirmed KOIs with fairly close values of 0.93 and 0.91 already.
- shoo 11y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KOI-4878.01 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KOI-4878.01 Interesting comment by `admiralrewd` regarding KOI-4878.01 & general critique of ESIs on reddit from 6 months ago: http://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/2rbjo9/if_confirmed_kepler_candidate_planet_koi487801_is/ http://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/2rbjo9/if_confirmed_k... edit: the post links to a couple of papers making a few pretty reasonable points about the assumptions underlying the ESIs, and the errors involved in the calculation.
- Osmium 11y agoQuestion: why is 'escape velocity' part of the Earth Similarity Index when, presumably, it's just a function of radius and density (which are also in the index)? I feel like I'm missing something.
- logfromblammo 11y agoI'd take it as a proxy for surface gravity. They can't exactly say what the mean surface gravity is, because they don't know how much variation there is in altitude, and whether the exoplanet has a sea level. Even so, giving a rough estimate of mean surface gravity would make the tables more accessible to non-experts.
- _jomo 11y agoAccessing this with HTTPS Everywhere and Firefox leads to http://www.ustream.tv/embed/9407922 http://www.ustream.tv/embed/9407922 being blocked, so you don't see anything other than the text. However, The stream has reached "maximum capacity" at this time.
- alex95 11y agowhy do you give a fuck?
- jMyles 11y agoWhenever my imagination starts to run wild with the possibility of a huge announcement of this variety, I always like to remember what Terence McKenna said about this: "if aliens were to land on the front lawn of the white house tomorrow, it would not change the fact that the weirdest thing in the universe is DMT."
- motoboi 11y agoCould you elaborate on what is so weird on that molecule?
- dogma1138 11y agoIt's a psychedelic type substance similar to LSD. What he meant is that the weirdest things you can ever experience is you on acid.
- resolutionx 11y agoI wouldn't be so quick to say the two are identical. It's different for everyone obviously but they are very different psychedelic experiences for most. DMT is VERY powerful when administered correctly. Regardless this is a bit off topic.
- maaku 11y agoEh, I guess it's a matter of personal perspective. Anything in a hallucination is a hallucination. It's not constraint to conform to reality. For something to be REAL and weird automatically puts it on another level.
- jMyles 11y agoHe says it in a few different ways in his lectures, but he believed that the psychedelic experience is so strange and full of content that, even if aliens landed on the White House lawn and it made the biggest story in the history of news, it's still not as astonishing as human neurochemistry. I'm not sure I agree, but I think it's good to keep this perspective in mind any time we find ourselves tempted to think of something as 'the biggest thing ever.'
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- mkagenius 11y agoThat's exciting news. How far is this planet? Does 0.98 mean high probability of water being there?
- afarrell 11y agoIf there is life on that planet, I wonder if it would be similar enough to host infectious diseases. I know the Apollo team was quarantined when they got back from the moon. As someone living on a continent that has undergone one apocalypse, I hope we have a similar procedure to prevent the spread of spacepox.
- humanfromearth 11y agoIf there is life there is probably bacteria and viruses. But it's unlikely they would be harmful for us. They need to match our platform.
- tartuffe78 11y agoThey would need to match our platform to perform the mechanisms they have evolved for, but not necessarily to have adverse effects.
- jfoster 11y agoNew bacteria probably wouldn't be resistant to antibiotics. The bacteria on Earth is likely far more dangerous.
- stormcrowsx 11y agoIt'll be a very long time before we could reach any other planet. We may kill ourselves off long before its even a possibility for us to get spacepox.
- jfoster 11y agoSeems unlikely that anything would be physically going there and back any time soon. We haven't even been able to get some soil from Mars back to Earth yet.
- stcredzero 11y ago1) NASA already has such procedures. 2) Some types of molecules involved with life have chirality so the chances are small that our biological components as a whole would be compatible. (Think of it as several different kinds of "endianess." There would be a coin-flip for each molecule type with chirality.) So at worst, if we ate each other, we'd give each other molecular "indigestion." More complicated operations, like that of viruses hijacking our cells to replicate themselves are probably right out. Invading foreign cells couldn't get very far in our bodies if all of their enzymes malfunction and they find our material "indigestible."
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- pmuk 11y agoAccording to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Similarity_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Similarity_Index - Venus has an ESI of 0.44
- tremon 11y agorequires javascript; didn't read
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- bberrry 11y agoWould be awesome if it had a confirmed oxygen rich atmosphere.
- hughes 11y agoIt would, but the Earth Similarity Index doesn't consider the atmosphere.
- logfromblammo 11y agoSuch would be a strong indicator that something is continually generating gaseous oxygen. Otherwise, the O2 usually ends up oxidizing anything it can touch, and gets bound up in minerals, or as oxygen-containing gases. Awesome for potential terraforming would be an atmosphere containing gaseous NO2, H2O, CO2, NH3, and SO2. That would be oxygen-rich, but not as molecular O2, which is almost as good as putting up an "OCCUPIED" sign on the planet. Unless, of course, you're actually looking for alien life. In that case, any atmosphere with F2, Cl2, O3, O2, NO, CO, H2, or N2 is nearly a dead giveaway. Those don't persist for long in that form on a geological time scale, so if you detect them, something must be continually generating them.
- Benjamin_Dobell 11y agoApparently there's already a Kepler discovered planet with an ESI of 0.98: http://phl.upr.edu/projects/habitable-exoplanets-catalog/data http://phl.upr.edu/projects/habitable-exoplanets-catalog/dat... EDIT: Unless that list was literally just updated with ESI 0.98 planet this thread is referring to...
- pavlov 11y ago1,075 light years away... Assuming we could somehow accelerate a "New New Horizons" probe to near light speed, that's a disappointingly long time to wait for a flyby.
- andy_ppp 11y agoAnd once it arrived, slowed down (haha!) and performed the survey it would only take another millenia for us to start receiving back information. We need to work out how to bend spacetime.
- wuliwong 11y agoAlso they describe the table "These are mostly unconfirmed exoplanets discovered by the NASA Kepler mission (Kepler Candidates from the NASA Exoplanet Archive). Those already confirmed are listed by their Kepler name in the table above." So looks like it is going to get moved up to the confirmed table?
- BurningFrog 11y agoEarth itself is probably at 0.96 by now.
- skapadia 11y agoBut is it a Class M planet?
- jneal 11y agoLikely off-topic, but Nasa's site feels very weird to me. Like it think I'm on a tablet. Everything is huge. And I'm on a 1920x1080 laptop using Chrome. Okay, to make this slightly on-topic now, I am excited to hear about the discovery in about an hour and a half. Even if it was a 1.00 on the similarity scale, I'm more interested in finding out how habitable it would be for earth-like life.
- williamhpark 11y agoThis is so misleading. Even if it turns out to be true, this shouldn't be up here yet.
- 3327 11y agoI can leak some more info: its 1400 light years away in habitable zone and the sun is 8% different than ours (don't quote me on the 8% but its very close in size)
- frostirosti 11y agoIt's 1075 light years away. If there's life there and they looked at us, they'd see vikings colonizing northern France and they'd see the Maya civilization collapse.
- unprepare 11y agoGreat! they'll start hearing our radio broadcasts (1974) as soon as earth year 3049!
- V-2 11y agoThis similarity index only measures radius, density, escape velocity and surface temperature, so it doesn't mean nearly as much as one would think upon reading the headline
- sixothree 11y agoDoes surface temperature imply an awful lot in this situation? How accurate are we able to measure?
- Osmium 11y ago> How accurate are we able to measure? Quite poorly, I believe. I think surface temperature is estimated based on the distance from the star, and I think it assumes an albedo (reflection coefficient) and maybe a typical(?) atmosphere (though I'm not sure about this). In any case, I imagine the error's quite large. Unfortunately, we only have our own solar system to go on, and until we find better ways of studying these exoplanets, we have no good way of knowing if the planets in our solar system are really representative of what's out there or not. But that's why this research is so important.
- xamdam 11y agoELI5: until we flew next to Pluto this month all we had is blurry 16-pixel images. How can we get such precise data on something millions of times further?
- slater 11y agoIANAAP, but I saw a similar question about how the Hubble space telescope could only get blurry pictures of Pluto. The answer was that it was akin to using a microscope as a telescope (or vice-versa), if that makes sense?
- _kst_ 11y agoNot really. The problem isn't that Pluto is too close (Hubble has taken excellent pictures of Mars), it's that Pluto is tiny, specifically in angular size.
- jMyles 11y agoBy induction rather than direct observation. This page contains the measurements of the planet which might be the subject of the announcement; it gives you an idea of what kinds of metrics drive such an analysis: http://exoplanetarchive.ipac.caltech.edu/cgi-bin/DisplayOverview/nph-DisplayOverview?objname=K04878.01&type=KEPLER_CANDIDATE http://exoplanetarchive.ipac.caltech.edu/cgi-bin/DisplayOver...
- ccockerhamkc 11y agoDistance, time, and amount of light. All these things come into effect. The reason why Pluto took so long? Imagine trying to read a magazine with a pair of binoculars vs. somebody taking a picture right next to it. Which do you think will be easier to read? We've had a pair of binoculars up in space for a while, but it was designed to see way further than Pluto. That is why we have always had blurry images.
- _kst_ 11y agoWe've had blurry images of Pluto because of its tiny angular size. The fact that its closer than some of the things Hubble has taken better pictures of is not relevant. For example, here's a Hubble photo of Mars: https://milesobrien.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/mars_hubble.jpg https://milesobrien.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/mars_hubble....
- almost_started 11y agoIt HAD an ESI of 0.98 1075 years ago. By now, the inhabitants have burned through all their fossil fuels and then annihilated each other with nuclear weapons leaving the planet in both a long-term nuclear winter and with a runaway greenhouse effect. Its ESI must be at least 1.0 by now.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- psaintla 11y agoI'm not sure what fossil fuels and nuclear weapons have to do with this but 1075 years isn't a very long time. There may not be intelligent life on the planet yet.
- redcalx 11y ago"There may not be intelligent life on the planet yet" Sounds pretty similar.
- ck2 11y agoEven earth has survived 5000 years of civilizations with the last 200 at that level. Problem is even with a probe at 10% the speed of light we'll never even see it. Heck if it was 107.5 light years away it would still be "useless" but might inspire better telescopes.
- colordrops 11y agoFor reference, here are the ESIs of some planets in our solar system: Mercury (0.596), Venus (0.444), Mars (0.697).
- tiffanyh 11y ago... and humans have a similarity index of 0.98 with chimps as well.
- TomGullen 11y agoIs there any way at all for us to be able to see oceans/clouds/continents on such planets if we have a hundred billion dollars and built equipment specifically just to look at that one planet? Or would the star near it just haze everything too much? Is it impossible to observe a planet in more detail like that without travelling next to it?
- sktrdie 11y agoYeah I think so. You'd need a telescope bigger than our earth.
- tilsammans 11y ago"This content is not available in your area due to rights restrictions."
- bsbechtel 11y agoI'm disappointed by the negativity expressed in some of the top comments in this thread. This is an exciting discovery, and the most popular comments here are basically "humanity is destroying its own planet, if this place was anything like earth, the inhabitants there would have already destroyed their planet."
- GBond 11y agoIt is the new norm of HN. Almost ever top voted comment nowadays is a negative swipe or a nit-pick that is tangentially related to the OP.
- manifestsilence 11y agoYes, beware! The tendency to value clever quips and memes over actual content WAS the difference between Reddit and HN. And used to be the difference between the nicer parts of Reddit and 4Chan before that... :/
- ArekDymalski 11y ago"If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a common semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills." taken from https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html ;)
- manifestsilence 11y agoWhoops, my bad. :s
- dang 11y agoThat's not true at all! So not true that I went and checked the top comment on every page; not one of 30 came close to what you claim. Instead I saw top comments that: * provide substantive links: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9936945 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9936945 * point out possibly-critical missing information: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9936448 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9936448 * compare the author's approach with one's own: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9937333 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9937333 * describe showing the material to one's grandmother: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9934321 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9934321 * link to the commenter's presentation on the topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9935644 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9935644 * give detailed usability feedback: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9935477 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9935477 People often make false generalizations about HN. I doubt that's particular to HN—probably just humans in general being human, with sample bias and all. But getting the wrong generalizations in your head can prevent you from seeing things. Here that might mean seeing less of what's good about HN, and thus getting less out of it. This is on my mind because we've been thinking lately about new ways to highlight the positive and amazing things this community comes up with, many of which go unseen by the majority of readers.
- ck2 11y agoI sense a great disturbance in Hollywood like a screenwriter was just inspired to write something original...
- chucksmash 11y agoFor reference, a 195lb human being (who is assumed here to be spherical in shape) has an Earth Similarity Index of approximately 0.001: https://gist.github.com/anonymous/5351f6185e8473a3c002 https://gist.github.com/anonymous/5351f6185e8473a3c002
- jflatow 11y agoBriefing materials: http://www.nasa.gov/keplerbriefing0723 http://www.nasa.gov/keplerbriefing0723 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9936612 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9936612)