For a little over an hour today, CNN's homepage covered a story about exoplanets- planets similar in size to Earth orbiting a star like our Sun.
Boring day in news or not, I'm glad to see that this topic is getting a bit more attention. We will NOT find intelligent life on another planet during our lifetime, but our technology today is up to speed enough to take our first steps. No matter how narcissistic one may be, this has to be one of the most interesting topics to be discussed- no matter your intelligence, age or background.
Since astronomy is my foremost passion, I'm going to write a bit about it whether you like it or not. But if you don't want to hear all of it, I'll give you an emergency exit after the next paragraph.
The significance of this story on CNN was to introduce the Kepler mission launching next week from Florida that will basically send a super telescope into orbit to find... well, aliens. Yes, Congress signed a bill to give $700 million for the U.S. to find aliens. What's even MORE significant than that is the architect behind the mission, Dr. Geoff Marc of UCB, will be giving a lecture at the Academy of Sciences in the planetarium on Apr. 6 (tickets and info HERE). I attended a lecture on Monday and I have to say- it was amazing. The topic was "NEA: Near Earth Asteroids". Just imagine a lecture with a live professor, but the visual is a planetarium sky with 3D animation. All for $5, too. So if you're interested, come with me to this lecture and we'll rock out.
Emergency exit...
ALIEN SEARCH UPDATE 2/25/09
So how close are we to finding aliens? Not very. To put things to scale, finding a planet that orbits a star at juuuuuust the right distance and size is equivalent of someone in San Francisco counting the number of bacteria on a grain of sand in Saudi Arabia. But NASA scientists have already found 330 of these "grains of sand". We'll call them exoplanets.
How do they do it? Since there's no telescope strong enough to see so far, astronomers have to rely on a different method. You see, when a body orbits another stationary body, that stationary body moves ever so slightly. Like your hips to a hoola-hoop. Your hips move just a bit to swing the large hoola-hoop in big circles. But here, we're talking about a star millions of miles in diameter moving about 2-3 miles. But the light and radiation it emits during this motion is detectable by our telescopes. So when a star moves ever so slightly, boom- it's got a planet.
A paper was published lately from researchers at the University of Edinburgh revealed that their studies yielded 38,000 forms of life in our own Milky Way Galaxy alone! Of that, an estimated 361 of them are... gulp, intelligent life forms. All this done through models on a supercomputer. Even if they are off by .0000001%, that still means there is one other form of life in our galaxy. Not universe, but galaxy.
I call this nuts.
