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posted by
mattie_p
on Thursday February 27 2014, @10:31AM
from the I-bet-that's-all-of-them-now dept.
from the I-bet-that's-all-of-them-now dept.
kef writes:
"NASA's Kepler mission has doubled the number of known planets outside of our solar system. In what can only be described as a "bonanza", 715 new planets have been reported thanks to the Kepler space telescope's planet-hunting mission. Using a new method for verifying potential planets led to the volume of new discoveries from Kepler, which aims to help humans search for other worlds that may be like Earth."
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NASA Kepler Telescope Discovers 715 New Planets
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I'm not a robot like you. I don't like having disks crammed into me... unless they're Oreos, and then only in the mouth.
-- Fry
(Score: 5, Informative) by isostatic on Thursday February 27 2014, @12:31PM
OK, so there's an exoplanet around Alpha Centauri, but unlikely to harbour life as we know it. The Tau Ceti system seems a better target at 12 light years.
At Voyager 1 speed, we could fire something out of the solar system at 17km/second. That will take about 200,000 years to get there. Obviously we can't build a probe that can last 200,000 years.
Lets assume we want to get a probe there in 200 years, which might still be working when we get there. We'd have to fling it from our solar system at over 10,000 miles per second. 36 million miles per hour.
The fastest manmade object ever was the Helios 1 space probe, using the Sun's gravity to accelerate it. That reached 150,000 mph. We'd have to build something that went 240 times faster than that. And somehow send it in the opposite direction.