Our Modest Rocky and Wet Planet Around Our Modest G-Type Star. 
Spectacular news from two teams of astronomers who produce not only the first ever directly
observed exoplanet, the 25-light-year away Fomalhaut b (left), but also three additional exoplanets in orbit of 128-light-year distant HR 8799 (below right, those three red dots are exoplanets). These four planets are certainly gas giants, from three times Jupiter to five to ten times Jupiter, but they are distinctly planets not undersized stars. Using ground-based telescopes fitted with adaptive optics to remove the atmosphere distortion, and to block out most of the light of the central star, the teams now have started down the road that will produce tens of thousands of planets directly observed in the next decades. Last Sunday 9 I spoke with Harvard astronomer Dmitar Sasselov about his astro-comb technology that is improving results from all observations, and he he hinted that there were amazing announcements in train. These four planets are just the beginning. The Kepler probe to be launched next year is a dedicated planet hunter that will go looking for fifty Eden
like Earths in a small piece of the Southern sky, one hundred square degrees in the constellation Cygnus. Until now, we had tabulated approximately 300 exoplanets, all observed indirectly, deduced by how the planets made the central star wobble. Now we add these four directly observed exoplanets, and we await Kepler. Our modest rocky and wet planet around a modest star in the modest limb of a modest galaxy is about to become lost in a blizzard of planets, from gas giants to uncles and nieces of Earth.
Search for Extreme Life
What this immediately means to the planet hunters is that the likelihood of identifying planets capable of sustaining life as we know it is going to climb along with the numbers of the directly
observed, because it is much easier to measure the chemical composition, and therefore the conditions, of a planet you can see. But we must not think narrowly. Consider also the recent report of a South African gold mine near Johannesburg where in fracture water at a 2.8 km depth scientists identified and assembled DNA into a single complete genome of a single bacterium that lives without sunlight. Candidatus Desulflorudis audaxviator. It lives an independent life style, a natural ecosystem from a single genome. It is alive -- what is called an extremophile. If an organism can live inside rock, where it has never interacted with sunlight, oxygen, the atmosphere at all, then similar robust creatures could be shot through the other planets in our solar system and those exoplanets out there. The search for life on Mars, with the two rovers and the Mars Phoenix lander, has been pursuit of life as we are, carbon-based creature that interact with the photosphere. The gold mine bug, D. audaxviator, which is technically bacteria, shrugs us off as extremophiles, too. Life is opportunistic, busy and adaptive. Gas giants like Fomalhaut b may be most hospitable to our gold bug creature's cousin. DNA may not have discernible limits.
Epsilon Eridani
There is no better time than the moment, when end of the world scenarios are routine and the G-20 meets in Washington to argue about seats in the lifeboat, to look away from the hothouse
of the Libor and toward the cold vastness of the Milky Way. I spoke also last Sunday 9 to Dmitar Sasselov about Epsilon Eridani, a planetary system that is only 10.5 light years distant and that resembles our system closely with the detail that it is only one-fifth our age (artists's rendition right). It has two asteroid belts, deduced (not directly observed) planets and a sun a little smaller than ours. Extremophiles may be routine and random, given that at 850 million years our Solar System was undergoing constant asteroid bombardment and planetary cataclysms, and the surface of the baby Earth was molten from collisions. Three and a half billion years from now, Episolon Eridani may have a rocky and wet planet in the habitable zone that features Credit Default Swaps and a Goldman Sachs. It may be the DNA tool kit that explains our predicament. No matter to me, looking at the new pictures, there are worlds without end. The fresh facts of those three planets orbiting HR8799, and of sturdy Fomalhaut b, and of toddler Episilon Eridani, they make all the doom talk fade away. Do the gold bugs D. audaxviator rule?
God provides.
The biggest problem on Earth is overpopulation and the inability of man to curb the reproductive processes. Bringing children into a destitute and starving existence of misery is ignorance and God does not provide for them. Their own family does not provide for them and all the good people of Earth choose not to provide for them.
It's nice to see all the science that leads us nowhere, though.
JB, if you find a planet out there with good coffee and wifi, sign me up for the next shuttle launch to it.
This rock we happen to be on is in for some turbulence.
Reuters: "Whitehead sees slump worse than Depression"
http://www.reuters.com/article/Finance08/idUSTRE4AB7HT20081112
"Bringing children into a destitute and starving existence of misery is ignorance and God does not provide for them"
God has no problems providing for anyone. Why He allows suffering in this world is a mystery, but He has His reasons - and they're all ultimately good. We live in time. God is outside of time.
Spencer,
Hysteria becomes no one.
Uhh? What did I say?
I think all I said was that there are certain populations who haven't figured out where babies come from... they are ignorant.
If that's hysteria, then all reality is hysterical, too.
Mr. Batchelor,
Do any of these wonderful new gadgets have the capacity to detect free oxygen in exoplanetary atmospheres?
My understanding is that the Kepler probe is going looking for Edens, that is Earth equivalents in size and habitable zone orbit to G-Type stars. This will include the spectrometry that will identify elements. Earth acquired its oxygen nitrogen atmosphere just half a billion years ago. A young earth wd not show oxygen. J
It seems to me like it would be easier and quicker (not to mention cheaper) to figure out how to place space heaters at optimum intervals around the planet Mars. As for water, well, that might be problematic, but we haven't seen a drop of rain for two years here in SoCal and we're surviving. Just hook up a water IV to Mars from Mono Lake and Hetch Hetchy and we're open for business.
I suspect that E-Eridani is more appealing than Mars for the same reason that fishermen always fish at the opposite end of the lake from where their boats are docked.
I don't know Spence, I have 5 kids and my wife is one of 13. All seem to be doing fine as far as I know. May be personal responsibility works, and BTW, I know where kids come from and it's fine with me. Smile.
JB:
With 100 billion stars in our galaxy and 100 billion galaxies, there has to be other planets out there, and planets just like our own (no tin foil hats necessary, but do you think Obama would disclose information if we were visited by ETs?). Of course there is hope. While Kepler will be a great tool, it's a shame they can't get Hubble fixed. http://hubblesite.org/
It seems to me that looking for life-sustaining planets with rockets and telescopes is a little like trying to unearth dinosaur bones with dynamite. The concept rests on the assumption that life is somehow fragile and co-dependent. But, John, you yourself say that "life is opportunistic, busy and adaptive”. Personally, I subscribe to your version which would make space exploration (in search of life) largely superfluous.
On another, but not dissimilar matter: I just finished reading "The English Teacher" by the utterly delightful South Indian author R. K. Naryan. Of all his many novels, this one is considered to be his most autobiographical. In it, he tells of losing his wife at a very young age; and then, quite unexpectedly, having her contact him from the other side. The story is told so modestly - in classic Naryan fashion - it seems not only believable but entirely probable. It offers up yet another angle from which to approach the questions we all have about life, that is infinitely more economical and much more green to boot. ...and isn't it really "human life" we think of when we talk of "life" on other planets?
What about the discovery of "life" ((bacterium~~~) that was found living in solid rock that came from out of a gold mine?
The search for life need not be so distant and inaccessible. It's science fiction that man can reach those stars, though, it is wonderful science that we can examine them from afar. Very far.
As far as my remark concerning overpoulation and the ignorance that creates it, I think you all know what I meant.
Peter:
I am not so sure about your comparison of dynamite and dinosaur bones, but soon enough there will be technology to find these things out and with greater detail fairly easily. The question is, what then?
Spencer, you were born 100 years too late. You and Margaret Sanger would have gotten along famously.
Guys,when speaking of overpopulation:speak for yourself! Tis a problem of distribution, drought and an inability of people to realize that anytime soon we could all be starving...and you can't just expect condoms to change the world. Niether does valueless education help anything. As for outer space: Are there no areas man will not conquer? Can he not stick to conquering his own lusts? Can he stick to conquering
starvation and savagery that seems to be the modus operandi of tribal people? Be benevolent.
It’s never too late to educate!!
Any number of populations around the globe keep making babies when they are unable to care for the ones they already have. That’s just a fact. These little ones are doomed by their circumstance and even if they reach some maturity there will not be any opportunities for them and they are most likely to just repeat the cycle.
Look at the “nations” who parade their youngest in military garb, with mock weaponry, and teach them to hate a perceived enemy that has been concocted by their elders. I don’t need to name them, you know who they are because you are “educated.” They are not and they are raising warriors who are being taught to be hardhearted. They are more destructive than productive. They have nothing else to do and their offer to the rest of the world is what? What is more dangerous than young people manipulated and trapped in poverty, hunger, ignorance, idleness, and a resentful ideology?
Others are just powerless to overcome their humanness and realize that creating more babies who will starve is not what their humanness should represent. In this modern age, how many cycles of the generations are acceptable before they learn and break the circle. It seems to me that these adults are somehow able to survive while the young innocents are left to linger in neglect.
As far as Sanger or the others, I’m not sure what their discussion has to do with anything I have said. On the contrary, I was relating the immense efforts and dedication of resources to projects meant to try and understand how we have come to be here on Good Earth by dissecting the expanse of the Universe for the discovery of some reasonable facsimile. We will learn some things as always, but, we will never physically be able to go there. We are here right now and we have immense work to do and in that work we are made more and more aware of how unique our place and position actually is.
Or maybe it’s better said... at the least, we are here for the time being.
Well Spencer, it seems you have your work cut out for you. I wish you well in going to all these places in the world and change their hearts and minds, educating them in the process and thus saving the world. Good luck and godspeed.
Wow, you just won't let it go, will you, Jim...
What is it that you don't comprehend in the discussion? Is it that I don't believe escapism is the solution to an overpopulated planet? Is it that I believe there are great discoveries yet to be made on our own readily accessible Earth? Is it that you don't accept that the misery wrought on the innocents is really caused by ignorance?
Or do you think that it's best just to ignore the truth? The premise is that the sustainability of life on Earth is in the balance and the collective sciences may hold the tare measure that will save and preserve it.
I don't have the tare... does that mean I can't ask questions or shouldn't seek understanding?
I was wishing you well in your endeavor. Nothing more or less, other than being a little sardonic or sarcastic.