(Feb 22, 2017 02:46 AM)Yazata Wrote: NASA has scheduled a major press conference concerning a "Discovery Beyond our Solar System" for 1pm EST on Wednesday Feb 22 in Washington DC . Nature has a paper associated with whatever is to be announced, but it's embargoed until after the announcement. Nothing seems to have leaked about what the announcement is about. (How is that Possible in Washington DC?)

Here's the announcement:

https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-to-host-news-conference-on-discovery-beyond-our-solar-system

I wondered if I could perhaps figure out what this is about by examining the research areas of the participants.

One is a NASA administrator. Another is the guy in charge of the orbiting Spitzer space telescope at Cal Tech.

Another is Sara Seager of MIT who says that she is searching for "another earth" including signs of life by detection of "biosignature gases". If that's what this is about, it could be huge (or at least controversial).

http://www.saraseager.com/research/

Another one is Nikole Lewis of the Space Telescope Science Institute at Johns Hopkins. Her research is once again into exoplanet atmospheric composition.

http://www.stsci.edu/~nlewis/

The last one is Michael Gillon of the University of Liege in Belgium. He also has an interest in the search for extraterrestrial life. His research concerns transiting exoplanets around small dwarf stars, detection of "super earths" and their physicochemical characterization.

http://reflexions.ulg.ac.be/cms/c_22687/en/gillon-michael

This is going to be interesting.

Somehow I expect that's whatever is announced will be more disappointing than the discovery of "another earth" showing possible signs of life in its atmosphere. That's too much to hope for.

My guess/speculation is that they've found a rocky roughly earth-sized exoplanet with an atmosphere that might include oxygen. We'll know tomorrow.

(Feb 22, 2017 08:22 PM)Yazata Wrote: [...] bringing the total to 7. All of them are rocky planets roughly the same size as Earth, none are gas giants. And three of the planets are in the star's habitable zone. [...] The star's planetary system is very close to the star compared to our solar system. The planets' orbital periods (years) vary from 1.5 to 20 days. The innermost ones are probably tidally-locked to the star. All seven are closer to their star than the Earth is to the Sun. [...] The planets are crammed close to one another in their orbits and would only be about 2x the Earth-Moon distance at closest approach to each other. So from one of these planets, the other planets wouldn't just be dots of light in the sky like Venus, they would be discs like the Moon and perhaps even bigger. A very science-fictionish sky.

One of the questions asked is whether material could be transferred from one planet to another (that's been known to happen in our much larger solar system), making them one giant ecosystem assuming there's any life there. The answer was we don't know.