USA Today (9-2-04, pg 8D, No wonder E.T. couldn't get through) says that "an engineering team" (Christopher Rose (Rutgers)& Gregory Wright (Antiope Associates)) thinks that something like messages in capsules (shades of Ol'Lon's muddy-bottom bottle) like spacecraft or shorter radio messages than the current long ones beamed into space by the SETI (Search for Extrarrestrial Intelligence) project would be more cost effective and less energy intensive.

I am reminded of articles I saw in newspapers some years ago showing pictures of the etched or engraved tags placed in unmanned research spacecraft. The tags show front views of man and woman and star charts to help distant finders (if any) locate us. Some of the probes also included things like samples of classical music, as I recall. The idea was that once the name-your-planet fly-by was completed, the now-disposable spacecraft would continue into deep space indefinitely, bearing the good news of our whereabouts and particulars to parts (and, apparently, presumed life-forms) unknown.

The questions for discussion are: What drives such passionate (and presumably costly) efforts? What makes us think that, if aliens exist, they would be benign, even friendly? Ultimately, then, is what we are doing wise? Assuming public money is involved with most of these projects, does Joe Voter have input? How and to what extent?

-- J (jsnider@hal-pc.org), September 07, 2004

Answers

I can understand the quest for knowledge of our universe, it has always fascinated man. You could argue that the money spent on space research would be better spent on social issues such as hospitals. But then where does the argument end. You could say the same about money spent on the arts and other things that enrich our lives. Getting the balance right is the hard part and unless it's an election issue Joe Voter doesn't have much (any) input, assuming things run the same over there as they do here.

I do however, have a problem with our scientists bringing matter back into earth's atmosphere and assuming it can be safely quarantined to be studied. It seems terribly presumptious and risky to me. If you know nothing about a material, how do you know what safe storage is?

Funny you should post this now J. I've spent the last couple of weeks reading up on and planning some night sky photo's. I can't wait for clear skies and a crescent moon.

-- Carol (c@oz.com), September 07, 2004.

SETI has been and continues to be a complete waste of time...listening for a radio signal on a very specific frequency in the entire spectrum that has some meaning to a small select group (dolphin order) of Earth scientists...duh

Take it from someone who knows. It's BS.

-- Rob Michaels (poopie@SETI.poop), September 07, 2004.

Likely First Photo of Planet Beyond the Solar System

By Robert Roy Britt

Senior Science Writer

SPACE.com

A group of European-led astronomers has made a photograph of what appears to be a planet orbiting another star. If so, it would be the first confirmed picture of a world beyond our solar system.

"Although it is surely much bigger than a terrestrial-size object [like Earth], it is a strange feeling that it may indeed be the first planetary system beyond our own ever imaged," said Christophe Dumas, an astronomer at the European Southern Observatory.

SPACE.com revealed a similar imaging effort of another planet candidate in May by a U.S.-led team that used the Hubble Space Telescope (news - web sites). That possible planet has not been confirmed and could be a dim star in the background of the picture.

Otherwise, all of the more than 120 known extrasolar planets have been detected indirectly, by noting the shadow of a planet crossing in front of a star or a planet's gravitational effect on a star. Because planets are so dim compared to stars, technology has not been able to spot them amid stellar glare.

That is, perhaps, until now.

Young planet

The new picture shows a dim, red point of light that Dumas and his colleagues think is a young, giant planet something like Jupiter. It orbits a failed star known as a brown dwarf, a very dim type of star -- its core does not support nuclear fusion -- that astronomers have for years hoped would make for good planet hunting.

The brown dwarf, catalogued as 2M1207 and just 8 million years old, is 42 times less massive than the Sun, or some 25 times heftier than Jupiter.

The setup is 230 light-years away.

The possible planet is about five times as massive as Jupiter, the observations show. An analysis of its emissions found it contains water, which suggests its mass is in the range of planets rather than stars, the researchers announced today.

The object is still contracting into its final form and so is very warm, some 1,830 degrees Fahrenheit (1,000 Celsius), according to the research team, which was led by ESO's Gael Chauvin.

The photograph was made at ESO's Paranal Observatory in Chile with an infrared camera, which records heat rather than visible light. A system of adaptive optics on the Very Large Telescope (it's 27 feet wide, or 8.2 meters) corrects for blurring effects of Earth's atmosphere, making detailed observations possible.

The discovery will be detailed in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

If it is a planet, the object orbits 55 times farther from the brown dwarf than Earth is from the Sun, or roughly twice the Earth-to- Neptune distance.

One remaining question, however, is whether the thing might instead be a star that's in the foreground or background and not gravitationally bound to the brown dwarf, a scenario the researchers say is "statistically very improbable."

Additional observations to monitor the movement of the two objects will reveal the answer within two years, the astronomers say.

How it formed

In separate work, Ray Jayawardhana of the University of Toronto has been studying the brown dwarf in question, 2M1207. He agrees that the newfound object is most likely in orbit around the brown dwarf. It could be a very dim brown dwarf in the foreground, he said, but that's doubtful.

The water found in the atmosphere, in the form of steam, "means it would have to be pretty cool and couldn't possibly be a star," Jayawardhana told SPACE.com.

Jayawardhana's team found that 2M1207, like a real star, has a surrounding disk of hydrogen gas, the leftovers of the brown dwarf's formation. But in contrast to how planets probably developed in our solar system, he does not think the planet was born out of the brown dwarf's disk. Instead, the planet and brown dwarf likely "formed together out of a clump of gas and dust," he said.

Another unsettled issue is whether an object of five Jovian masses is truly a planet. Some astronomers put the upper limit for planetary mass at 13 times what's in Jupiter. Others argue that a planet is must orbit a star and have formed out of its leftovers. There is no official definition for the term "planet."

Jayawardhana doesn't care what the new object is called, it is still very interesting from a physics perspective.

"This discovery opens up a whole new regime of objects for us to look at and learn about," he said.

Link

-- Gayla (privacy@please.com), September 10, 2004.

A few days ago, I read coverage in the same daily newspaper of A) a suspected case of Lassa Fever quarantining a freighter in Galveston (autopsy by bio-protected pathologists later indicated the sailor actually died of malaria and the ship went on its way)and of B) the crash into the Utah landscape of the NASA craft Genesis and cargo of particles collected on its journeys after its 'chutes failed to deploy properly (an engineer was shown bending over the supposed remains of the probe, protected by a windbreaker and baseball cap).

If we had a moon base instead of decades of pouring money down political holes (MIR space station, etc.), there would be a place to take such stuff for a look before bringing it to terra (apparently overly) firma. No way to know what else we'd have found out about extrarrestrial living conditions in the meantime.

The President's got the right idea. We need a frontier.

I coulda sworn I posted a long version of this complete with contentious side notes to foster discussion, but I guess it dissipated in the ether or was intercepted by aliens (fade to Twilight Zone logo, bring up theme). Hope this message makes it through. I wonder, would a bayou bottle (properly vented to prevent pressure problems, of course) drift on the solar wind?

-- J (jsnider@hal-pc.org), September 12, 2004.

I am a wee bit concerned that some threads seem to be missing? I don't mean the ones Lon asked me to delete, but many others?

-- helen (mule@is.alarmed), September 13, 2004.

Which threads seem to be missing, Helen?

-- Tricia the Canuck (jayles@telusplanet.net), September 29, 2004.