Some logical space objectives are, monitoring Earth (agriculture, desertification water conditions at sea etc.), asteroid interception, clean power generation from solar concentration, chemical and biological materials in zero G etc. There are lots of real things to do, and within our foreseeable energy budget, things that you don't need mass approaching any percentage of the speed of light for.
For human, this is the lesson we should learn from this knowledge. And of course, most don't really care.
Don't know about its looks, but they can get its mass and radius pretty easy w the techniques they use now. As for age they are diagnosing that from the starlight, estimating for the whole solar system. We understand stellar evolution well enough that the light can tell us the star's age.
That quote is spot on- I haven't seen NASA so imaginative in a long-time about something so speculative -- they're usually painfully careful not to overdue it, but not in this case. They use the known size of the star and additional observations from ground based scopes and Hubble once a candidate pops up in the data. The amount of dimming the planet causes and the light spectrum tells them a great deal about the planet as well -- there are so many variables though. Kepler doesn't use the 'wobble' method -- its exoplanet detection is much more advanced. The first planets were found using the 'wobble', but this method only detects massive planets very close to the star.
I know you're joking, but they name them sequentially. Kepler 452a is believed to exist, but it is unconfirmed, which probably indicates a longer orbital period (i.e. a wider orbit). The only real reason you're hearing about 452b is because of the relative similarity to earth.
My point was the Kepler space observatory produces much if not all of the data, to be deciphered on the ground. Any additional resources trained on the target are only for primary candidates. Keep in mind, Kepler is sending us a fixed field of data. It doesn't move. The amount of data Kepler has sent to us is more than the scientist can handle, so they have to comb through that data with computers looking for key signatures with few variables....like a small wobble vs a large one.
Pssshhhh, ye of little faith. Morey would trade a comet, some asteroids, and naming rights to 453 for it.
Actually, "a" refers to the star. The first planet in the system is always called "b." For example, the following text is taken from the wiki page for 51 Pegasi b: "As with all extrasolar planets, the 'b' is used to indicate that this planet was the first discovered orbiting its parent star. Further undiscovered planets of 51 Pegasi would be designated c, d, e, f, and so on. All extrasolar planets have lowercase letters to differentiate from companion stars in the system (which are designated with an uppercase letter)." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/51_Pegasi_b#Name
Fair enough. I had not yet seen the 50/50 or 40/60 number from the Kepler team yet. With all the hype, it sounded as if they were making a much stronger claim. Which would not be unprecedented. I recall a group of astronomers from Santa Cruz claiming to have found a habitable planet back in ~2010, and the leading researcher going so far as to claim that he was absolutely positive it had life on it. With further observations, it turned out the planet in question most likely did not even exist.
Meanwhile on Kepler-452b, the planet has been abuzz with the discovery of a miniature Kepler-452b-esque sized planet called Earth.
