Dimitar Sasselov: How we found hundreds of Earth-like planets

[n2doc]

About this talk
Astronomer Dimitar Sasselov and his colleagues search for Earth-like planets that may, someday, help us answer centuries-old questions about the origin and existence of biological life elsewhere (and on Earth). How many such planets have they found already? Several hundreds.

talk at link:

http://www.ted.com/talks/dimitar_sasselov_how_we_found_hundreds_of_earth_like_planets.html

[old mark]

1. But the "religious" conservatives can't believe in other earth like planets-

that might mean that jesus went there, too and they KNOW we are the special chosen ones here on the 6 thousand year old earth.

So this "science" is all wrong...

rec.

mark

[Ready4Change]

2. Wow.

I had no idea that Kepler had discovered signs of so many earth like planets. (Yes, even if that is just Earth like in a vague range of size and orbital distances.)

But the info in this speech doesn't match what is on the Kepler web site? Any idea why? Slow website updates? Over optimism on Sasselovs part?

[Posteritatis]

3. There's a delay between when the data shows up and when it's publicly available

There'll be people working on the stuff before it's available to the general public, just a smaller set of people.

Release timelines here: http://keplergo.arc.nasa.gov/ArchiveSchedule.shtml

[txlibdem]

4. Earth-sized is quite different from Earth-like

The video calls them "planets like Earth" not "Earth-like planets" and there is a big distinction between the two. Earth-like means a similar atmosphere and presence of liquid water. Perhaps it's the language barrier or the speaker is too eager to tout his discoveries and so chose the term "like Earth." He would have been just as accurate to have said "like Venus" or "like Mars" because they have yet to do detailed studies of any of the newly found bodies. So let's not get too giddy over this yet.

That being said, I'm hopeful that when the eggheads are done doing all the detailed study we will indeed have evidence of several truly Earth-like planets. It's just going to take time for them to do all the work, get things published and peer-reviewed and corroborated by independent analysis.

[Ichingcarpenter]

5. If we found just one 'earth like planet' in a thousand star system

It would mean there are billions and billions of them in our galaxy