The mission of NASA’s Kepler telescope is to lift the scales from our eyes and reveal to us just how typical our home world is. Kepler operates by measuring the dimming of stars as planets pass (‘transit’) in front of them. It has found thousands of previously unknown worlds.
When friendship disappears then there is a space left open to that awful loneliness of the outside world which is like the cold space between the planets. It is an air in which men perish utterly.
Accordingly, since nothing prevents the earth from moving, I suggest that we should now consider also whether several motions suit it, so that it can be regarded as one of the planets. For, it is not the center of all the revolutions.
Lyrically, ‘Planets’ is the precursor to ‘Acid Rain’; it’s about a meteoric, intergalactic war that results in an apocalypse and the human species aligning together to go fight something much better than us, our individual trials and tribulations.
The discovery and investigation of life on other planets is likely to change many of our ideas about how life arose on the Earth and even what is life and its natural development.
Kepler’s blown the lid off everything we know about extra-solar planets.
I got interested in astronomy at the age of 8 because I was looking at an atlas of the planets in my parents’ apartment in Arlington, where I grew up. I got a telescope at age 10, which is pretty normal, and by the time I was in eighth grade, I had already seen a lot of cheesy sci-fi films.
Venus and Mars are our next of kin: they are the two most Earth-like planets that we know about. They’re the only two other very Earth-like planets in our solar system, meaning they orbit close to the sun; they have rocky surfaces and thin atmospheres.
One of the problems with science fiction, which is probably one of the reasons why I haven’t done one for many, many years, is the fact that everything is used up. Every type of spacesuit is used up, every type of spacecraft is vaguely familiar, the corridors are similar, and the planets are similar.
Two nations between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets. The rich and the poor.
The stars look the same from night to night. Nebulae and galaxies are dully immutable, maintaining the same overall appearance for thousands or millions of years. Indeed, only the sun, moon and planets – together with the occasional comet, asteroid or meteor – seem dynamic.
The universe has told us the most common types of planets are small planets, and our study shows these are exactly the ones that are most likely to be orbiting Alpha Centauri A and B.
Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wavelength of ours all they hear is a continuous scream.
When I was a young man in school, I used to read science fiction and really liked it. And as I became a young artist, I was filling up my portfolio with alien planets and spacecraft and things like that.
Before 1995, the only planets we knew about were the planets in our solar system.
Maybe the search for life shouldn’t restrict attention to planets like Earth. Science fiction writers have other ideas: balloon-like creatures floating in the dense atmospheres of planets such as Jupiter, swarms of intelligent insects, nano-scale robots and more.
Diamond planets truly are the most precious.
There is a project that’s underway called the interplanetary Internet. It’s in operation between Earth and Mars. It’s operating on the International Space Station. It’s part of the spacecraft that’s in orbit around the Sun that’s rendezvoused with two planets.
This plucky NASA telescope is able to find planets en masse. If you compare planet hunting to prospecting for gold, then Kepler is equivalent to trading in your trusty pan for a diesel-powered sluice box.
Every type of ring behavior we have seen around Jupiter, Uranus, or Neptune can be found in orbit around Saturn. And Saturn’s ring system offers the greatest promise of understanding processes in operation within all disk systems, not just those found around planets.
Planets move in ellipses with the Sun at one focus.
There may be hundreds of small seed planets – or planetesimals – which grow in the disk of matter around a star.
I grew up on ‘Battle of the Planets.’
We can allow satellites, planets, suns, universe, nay whole systems of universes, to be governed by laws, but the smallest insect, we wish to be created at once by special act.
There are two or three performances in your life that are absolutely on, where all the planets are lined up for you and you feel you’re invincible.
Orbs are little bundles of positive energy and they think they can move between 500 and 1,000 miles per hour. They look like little round planets, but they come in all shapes and sizes. Conventional photography can’t pick them up, but digital cameras can.
To an observer situated on the moon or on one of the planets, the most noticeable feature on the surface of our globe would no doubt be the large areas covered by oceanic water. The sunlit face of the earth would appear to shine by the light diffused back into space from the land and water-covered areas.
Science fiction, to me, has not only things that wouldn’t happen, but other planets.
The smaller the planets are, they are, other things being equal, of so much the greater density; for so the powers of gravity on their several surfaces come nearer to equality. They are likewise, other things being equal, of the greater density, as they are nearer to the sun.
If we do discover more than one type of life on Earth, we can be fairly certain that the universe is teeming with it, for it would be inconceivable that life started twice here but never on all the other earth-like planets.
I like science fiction and physics, things like that. Planets being sucked into black holes, and the various vortexes that create possibility, and what happens on the other side of the black hole. To me it’s the microcosmic study of the macrocosmic universe in man, and that’s why I’m attracted to it.
It can be very hard to know the history of a particular star, but once in a while, we get lucky and find stars with chemical compositions that likely came from in-falling planets.
Good men are the stars, the planets of the ages wherein they live, and illustrate the times.
There’s something cool about being involved in new missions to other planets.
The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do.
The gas-giant planets in our solar system all have large moons.
Theoretically, there are planets with an environment that can support life. As yet there is no evidence that there indeed is life on other planets. It’s only a matter of time before we get to know.
Scientists – who prefer explanations subject to laboratory tests – figure that everything we see today was as inevitable as wrinkles, once the Big Bang established physics. Stars and planets were cooked up as huge clouds of matter collapsed and coalesced.
If you see a whole thing – it seems that it’s always beautiful. Planets, lives… But up close a world’s all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life’s a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern.
Many different planets are many different distances from their host star; we find ourselves at this distance because if we were closer or farther away, the temperature would be hotter or colder, eliminating liquid water, an essential ingredient for our survival.
Yesterday, we sought telescopes good enough to see all the planets. Today, we seek vehicles good enough to reach them.
Every field of astrophysics – whether it’s our local neighborhood of planets, nearby stars and their attendant planets, galaxies, clusters of galaxies, out to the edge of the universe – every field has questions that are awaiting the power of Hubble.
I see musicians like Bonnie Raitt and Emmylou Harris as more than just musical icons: they are planets, with a gravitational pull – from how they flip their hair just-so when they bow, right down to their hearty backstage banter. It takes decades to learn the innuendos of being gracious and genuine all at once.
I think the Earth and everything around it is connected – the sky and the planets and the stars and everything else we see as a mystery.
Ultimately, what we’re looking for in the long run is to find other Earth-like planets.
Astronomy teaches the correct use of the sun and the planets.
Earth is going to lose its oceans in the future, just as Venus did in the past. How long planets retain their oceans is a function of distance from the sun, all other things being equal.
I just felt from personal observation that there is nothing more dislocated or alienated than a lifelong military person trying to cope in civilian life. It’s like two completely separate planets.
I confess, I do have to remind myself almost daily that there are people on this earth capable of reading, writing, eating and dressing themselves who believe their lives are ruled from billions of miles away, by the stars – and, of course, the planets.
Diminutive worlds are more likely to be rocky, and lapped by oceans and atmospheres. In the vernacular of ‘Star Trek,’ these would be M-class planets: life-friendly oases where biology could begin and bumpy-faced Klingons might exist.
