I don't THINK n00bs are restricted with regard to giving rep (it's the little red pill looking icon on a post), but regardless, you've got full privs now.

It would be awesome.

"That is one big pile of shit"?

So I was watching the video on another site and one of the comments with a fair amount of up votes declared that this is fake because "when they find stuff like this they never include photos". Someone in this thread earlier mentioned the system being 39-40 light years away.

So, I'm assuming we don't have pictures because either it's too far and we can't actually see the planets or they'd just look like little bright dots in a black back drop. Is that correct? Also, the woman in the video mentioned that she couldn't believe the find but that "the data was all there". So maybe we don't even actually see the planets but can tell they're there through other means, like gravity in the area perhaps?

We don't have telescopes anywhere near good enough to get a picture of one of these planets. See the recent flyby of Pluto to give you an idea of how grainy our Earth-bound telescopes even for a planet that's in our own neighborhood.

The way they find this stuff is by measuring the light that a star puts off and looking for periods when the light dims from that star (when a planet crosses in front of it). By measuring the magnitude of the dimming and the frequency at which the light dims in the same way, they can get a feel for how big the planet is that caused it and how long its orbit is.

Taking it a step further, different compounds cause the light to dim in different ways. That's where the JWST comes in. It should be able to give us an idea of what compounds are present in the atmosphere of these planets. Mostly, we're looking for oxygen. If we find oxygen, it's highly likely that there is at least SOME form of life there.

Breaking news: NASA has made contact with one of the planets and they're bitching something about not winning a Superbowl in like 50 years.

Edit, Nevermind. NASA had logged on to ChiefsPlanet. Dumbasses !

Yep. Crazy what they can tell from light curves. I studied the Kepler/K2 mission quite a bit in one of my aerospace courses.

Wouldn't it be weird if we discovered one of these life planets and found they were completely populated with ISIS terrorists.

We need to put a woman on the moon to be the first.. We need to do it, and we need to do it fast.

Why?

I'm all for dropping off Hilldog.

****ing Bingo !

#1 Politics. #2 why not?

If two of those planets happened to develop intelligent life at the same time, how would the discovery process have gone? Here on earth we developed telescopes a few hundred years before radio, but telescopes likely wouldn't have led to the discovery, right? Could you see signs of life on other planets?

And then once they figured out that the other world was happening, what happens? We invented radio not too long before flight and less than a century before space flight. So I presume they would've figured out how to communicate before they could get any kind of physical contact. I think that would've been a good thing.

And then presuming that one of them is a bit ahead of the other in space flight, would they share information and work together to meet? It seems like it's in the best interest of the more advanced one to not share the information and to get access to the other world. Or is that too selfish? Would you want free exchange of beings and good like it's NAFTA?

A bunch of new telescopes being unleashed soon are going to change a lot. There's a really exciting push for new telescopes over the next 30 years or so. It'll be like the jump in clarity of Hubble's initial images that wowed everyone. Who knows what they will discover.

If you want to check it out, take a look at the following links. These telescopes have huge potential...

James Webb Space Telescope: https://jwst.nasa.gov/

The Thirty Meter Telescope, aka "TMT! Dinomyte! I'm TMT!...": http://www.tmt.org/

The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite: https://tess.gsfc.nasa.gov/

The Giant Magellan Telescope: https://www.gmto.org/

The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope: https://www.lsst.org/

The Advanced Technology Large Aperture Space Telescope (ATLAST): http://www.stsci.edu/atlast