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There are two amazing pieces of space news today to shock and astonish you. First, we have found a near-analog to planet Earth orbiting a red dwarf star—and it is “only” 11 light-years from our Solar System. The exoplanet is named Ross 128b and it is orbiting a quiet red dwarf star (most red dwarves are subject to solar flares which release life cleansing jolts of exotic radiation, but, like our delightful Sun, Ross 128 seems to be much more sedate (perhaps its placid life has something to do with its bland name which makes it sound like a dullard clone friend on an 90s sitcom). In this age of exoplanet discovery, it is easy to lose sight of what an astonishing find this is, but I grew up in a world with only nine known planets. Remember back when Ferrebeekeeper was rhapsodizing about weird icy oddballs like Gliese 581 g? Ross 128B seems like it roughly the same size and temperature as Earth and it is right in our backyard. Additionally, it is moving towards us, in a mere 78000 years it will be the closest exoplanet to Earth!
The other “news” is more conditional and vague, but no less exciting to me. NASA has been floating the concept of a balloon mission to Venus. I have been hoping for more attention to our nearest neighbor (since I harbor fantasies of living there, in the sweet spot above the merciless clouds) a balloon probe to see what the atmosphere is actually like would let us know whether his fantasy is at all workable. The Soviet Union actually sent some balloon probes to Venus back in the early days of interplanetary exploration, but they were crude things which were not built to last and they told us little. Let’s do it right this time and find out everything about our mysterious sister planet! It is going to be a little while before Ross 128B is in range so let’s explore the immediate neighborhood and get to work on living abroad while there is still time!
During the excitement of Ming Week, we missed NASA’s announcement about new discoveries from the orbital telescope Kepler. Ever since the reaction wheels used to point Kepler started failing, the plucky space observatory has been in real trouble. Kepler’s mission has been steeply downgraded and it is not the mighty force of discovery it once was…but…a huge amount of data which had been collected prior to these malfunctions had not yet been analyzed. On May 10th, NASA announced that they had gone through this information and discovered another 1284 planets, a handful of which are somewhat Earthlike.
This is more than 30% more planets than we previously knew about, all dumped on the public in one day. It is a phenomenal number: more than a thousand new planets to think about. It is surprising to me that none of these planets have the (approximate) same mass and orbital distance from their respective stars as Earth. Maybe our solar system really is unusual. There sure do seem to be a lot of weird hot Neptunes and giant fast rocky planets and other strange & unanticipated worlds. What’s going on, planetary physicists? Could you start explaining some of this stuff?
However Kepler’s mission to find Earthlike planets was not a wash. There are indeed other planet in the habitable zone. Some of them could have liquid water and clement atmospheres.
The real excitement of this data is that astronomers will already know where to point the next generation of exponentially more powerful telescopes as they come online in the next decade. I can hardly wait for astronomers to point the Webb Space Telescope and the Large Magellan Space Telescope at some of these newly discovered worlds!
ferrebeekeeper 