3 posts tagged “planet hunting”

The Discovery Channel website has an article on a different idea for locating extrasolar planets that are more earth-like... water, atmosphere, maybe habitable. The idea is to take a look at earth the way we are trying to look at other planets - from a distance. Of course, we can't get as far away from earth as we have to be from anything else we're looking at, but hey, that's what math is for, right? At the moment it seems that scientists are making some use of Deep Impact's telescopes to peek back at earth as Deep Impact makes its lonely way out to comet Hartley 2.

The article says:

For example, at a planet-hunters conference in France last month, researchers reported that from the perspective of space, light from Earth twinkles as clouds pass in and out of view.

"A distant extraterrestrial observer would see Earth as a point source of light that varies in brightness in a repeating, predictable pattern, just like spots on a spinning ball," Science magazine reported in an article last month about the research, which was headed by Enric Palle of the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands.

More about Deep Impact's new missions can also be found here.

I ran across an article full of niftiness today while surfing at work. You know, instead of working...

From Live Science and Space.com, apparently not only are people emitting waves of noise out into deep space that might some day attract the attention of some far-flung alien being, but the Earth itself is blasting out radio waves approximately 10,000 times greater than anything we measly inhabitants can manage. The radio waves are created by "charged particles from the solar wind collide with Earth's magnetic field." The sounds are not audible to Earthlings, even dogs, because they are blocked by Earth's ionosphere (the last layer of atmosphere around our planet).

Even more nift lies in the fact that any planet which produces an aurora also produces these sounds, so scientists can also add this to the arsenal of planet hunting techniques. Locally, it seems Jupiter and Saturn also produce these radio waves.

The Space.com link above has an audio clip of the sounds. Oddly, the link to listen says "Buy Now," but when you click the link it just plays, and no fee is required. The sound is eerie, but pretty cool.

I've been wasting some time surfing while I should be getting ready for school, and ran across two articles of interest, both from the New York Times (ya know, one link leads to another, and so on...).

The Interesting: A new method of planet hunting proves successful.

The Depressing: America to the dumbth degree.