Kepler discovered a system of 11-billion-year-old PLANETS!

MissMeYet

M
From the article:

"The star is called Kepler-444. It’s a bit cooler, more orange, and smaller than the Sun (a K0 dwarf, if you want the details), and is about 117 light-years from Earth. That’s relatively close! Amazingly, it’s actually a triple-star system: There’s a pair of cool red M dwarfs orbiting each other, and the pair in turn orbits the K star. The binary is about 10 billion kilometers from the K star, about twice the distance Neptune is from the Sun."

I'm going to check it out.

http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/01/kepler-discovered-a-system-of-11-billion-year-old-planets/
 
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kile

K
I read about that on my news site, but I fail to be amazed by these. These planets are supposedly 2 billion years younger than the universe, so what? Now, if they turned out to be 2 billion years OLDER than the universe - that would be newsworthy ;)
 

nexxo

N
kile said:
I read about that on my news site, but I fail to be amazed by these. These planets are supposedly 2 billion years younger than the universe, so what? Now, if they turned out to be 2 billion years OLDER than the universe - that would be newsworthy ;)
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The older a planet is, the more chance of there being advanced life on it. If one of them is in the Goldilocks zone, they're a prime candidate for SETI.
 

nexxo

N
Thanks. Also interestingly, this find has overthrown previously held ideas of how long it takes for solid rocky planets to form. If rocky planets can form this early in the life of the universe, then it vastly improves the chances of advanced life existing elsewhere in the universe.
 

Avnas

A
it'd be pretty funny if they found a colonisable planet in that system.

"oh we've been scanning across thousands of lightyears worth of stuff but we found something useful in our back yard"
 

Dash

Dash
Avnas said:
it'd be pretty funny if they found a colonisable planet in that system.

"oh we've been scanning across thousands of lightyears worth of stuff but we found something useful in our back yard"
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Sure, 117 ly is a breeze with an upgraded FSD. Not sure if backyard is really the terminology when FTL is by current understanding, never going to be possible.
 

mythar

mythar
maybe there should be a dedicated astronomy thread where people talk about all the new neat stuff that's being discovered, like this, J1407b, etc...
 

Avnas

A
Dash said:
Sure, 117 ly is a breeze with an upgraded FSD. Not sure if backyard is really the terminology when FTL is by current understanding, never going to be possible.
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on a stellar scale 117 ly is close. i could fit this same distance into the galaxy ~8-900 times.


 

Zenith

Zenith
The system is already on the Galaxy Map with 3 stars, so all it will take is for someone to go there and scan it for planets.

LHS 3450 or HIP 94931
 

Dash

Dash
Avnas said:
on a stellar scale 117 ly is close. i could fit this same distance into the galaxy ~8-900 times.


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On a astronomical scale, Andromeda is close. It's all relative; but relative to human ability to travel in a life-time, 117ly is not close.
 

Grimghast

G
I was reading that myself. Also this latest story about the super ancient solar system discovered. Interesting how the deeper we look into what is essentially the past, (Starlight obeys the same rules as everything else, as in maximum velocity and such. The light you see tonight from some stars took billions of years to reach you at that moment. You are seeing the stars of these systems as they were billions of years ago. Genuinely looking at the past.), we find that it keeps getting stranger and stranger. And we begin to realize the majesty of what surrounds us. If you are looking for God, don't go to church, get into astronomy and astrophysics. You don't have to understand the math to enjoy it. Merely the concept behind the numbers.
 
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