There Has Been A Rush By Astronomers To Find Habitable Planets....?

Question

Do they know something we don't? (i.e. is the world about to end?)

Answer 1

Probably not. The idea of finding life elsewhere has been around a very long time - people were burned at the stake during the Spanish Inquisition for suggesting that life might be elsewhere.

Scientists have a host of techniques they can use to discover life (spectral analysis, etc) but the need to observe the actual light reflected by a planet from the host star. We do not have observatories capable of that yet, although the are expected in the next 10-20 years. Right now no one really knows what life is capable of. Earth may hold the only life in our solar system, or it may be on the water moons of Jupiter and Saturn, the clouds of Venus, or under the Martian soil. Until we actually get there, the question remains unanswered.

But if there are roughly a dozen planets and moons around a star, and there are billions of stars in our galaxy, and trillions of galaxies out there, it's a safe bet we are not alone.

Answer 2

Yes there has been a rush. And yes, I think they know something that you don't. I know it though. It is that we have no way of ever moving the Earth's population there. The rush is not a rush to find a place to move to, it is a rust to do the newest and most exciting thing that astronomers do, which is to find planets orbiting other stars.

Why is it exciting? Because we know that none of the planets orbiting our Sun (other than Earth) is habitable, and we have assumed that most other stars have planets orbiting them, and we have assumed that some of them must be habitable, but until recently we did not have the technology to be able to detect those other planets. We can detect them now, but just barely, and only indirectly. We cannot see them like we can Mars or whatever. But it is a new and exciting field of study and any astronomer would give his right arm to be the first one to prove that there was an inhabitable planet orbiting some star. He would become the new Galileo!

OK so you don't find that exciting. Well, that is why you aren't an astronomer. I find it exciting! I find it exciting to just look at Saturn with my small telescope, but my wife does not. Go figure! Different people get excited about different things.

Answer 3

Why do so many posters turn this decent question about space exploration into a forum for expressing their opinions about global warming? They are COMPLETELY unrelated!

BTW, it take about 6-8 months to get to Mars, not 3 years!

Now that, I'm done correcting mistakes by previous posters, I will try to shed some light on your questions:

I wouldn't say there is a "rush" to find habitable planets. It may SEEM like that lately because it's been getting more press, but astronomers have been interested in this quest for many years. Whether Earth is alone and unique in its ability to support life is a fundamentally important question to all of humanity.

Also, it may seem more like a rush lately because new technologies have been developed that can find such planets in other star systems. So far 200 extra-solar planets have been discovered, but most are too big and too close to their sun to support life (probably).

The only thing these scientists know that you don't know is: how to find an extra-solar planet. It's like trying to find a firefly in front of a lighthouse.

And, no. The world is not about to end.

Answer 4

It is the "hottest" topic on the market today. Astronomers prior to 1996 could detect extrasolar planets indirectly. Given the boom of large planets that were discovered. The scale of planets naturally runs to the smaller being discovered in the next generation of telescopes.

We can find large worlds (bigger than Jupiter easily now)but, do they have satilites? Are there smaller earth like planets inside the orbits, or outside. Or even, orbiting the gas giants themselves? Only time will tell!!
They're just giddy with the excitement of discovery, that's all. Kinda like reading a manga where you dont what will happen.

Answer 5

There is really no need to find any habitable planets because Mars is surely where human beings will colonize in the next hundred years. This will inevitably happen due to overpopulation, limited fossil fuels, food shortage, and a degrading environment. It has the perfect conditions for terraforming using oxygen-producing plants like blue-green algae; it even has water and cave systems where people can install their living biospheres. For more on Mars and its environment, go to Macrocosm Magbook through the link below.

Answer 6

No one has asked us (yet) to find habitable planets. Not that we could, mind you.

With present instruments, it is easiest to find giant planets very close to stars (the 'hot Jupiters' because they would be big like Jupiter and close enought to their stars to be hot). Big and close causes lots of wobble in the star's position. Small and far is difficult to detect.

The rush is to find (or design) better instruments or search techniques so that we can find planets that are closer to Earth in size and distance from their stars (so called 'habitable planets' from an old definition of the 'habitable zone').

Not so much because we need to move (although, some days, I would not mind...) but because this would give us solar systems that we can compare to our own (so that we can better understand how solar systems are formed).

In terms of time left (other than a bout of global warming), many people think that we are safe until the sun goes 'red giant' in five billion years. Actually, the sun will grow slightly and really raise our temperature is "as little" as 500,000 years.

Get in line.

Answer 7

Assuming (constantly a foolish factor to do at the Internet) out of your title and percent that you're feminine, I'd be completely happy to come back alongside however we're going to have a giant accountability to populate the brand new planet in combination - simply the 2 folks.

Answer 8

Who knows, but it isn't really a bad idea to start looking considering how long it will take to get there. The world is ending just like it was ending in the year 2000.

Answer 9

No. We just want to find out how likely it is that life has evolved somewhere else. Besides, most of these planets we're finding with possible life are too far away to get to. It takes 3 years to get to Mars, and that's our closest planet - most of these are millions of times further away.

Answer 10

global warming is killing us and we need to find another source to dump our garbage and get more fuel or another place where we can live just in case anything happens

astronomers have always wanted to find habitable planets...they've been pretty lucky so far so of course they really want to find more