Green Baron

Why don't you look on the ESO page ? :-)

http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1629/ Here it is. Now, while the girls squeal, let's analyze what they have. While having an evening beer :-) Edit: nothing against girls, gravity beware, just ... a, forget it. 2nd edit: Nature-Paper coming ... 3rd edit: "habitable zone" doesn't take radiation into account. The planet could be dry and without atmosphere because it's very close to the sun (X-ray, particles). I wait for the nature paper, the linked paper is not yet released.

Gibraltar 360° panoramic view (watch the flat earth proof on the left): La Palma, view over the Caldera de Taburiente to the south east. Basically a section through a volcano with dikes and sheets and things. Height difference in the caldera ~1500m. In the background to the left the Teide on Tenerife, La Gomera peeps through the mist on the right:

Thanks :-) OPM (Outer Planets Mod). Fantastic ! Just let Jool on the left hand side and head on :-) Kerbal Atomics in the name of dV ! KW-Rocketry. A very old one, tanks and engines look fine and have a slightly different balance than stock.

Good idea. I need motivation as well. Am talking too much here and playing too little. Old screenshots can motivate. Deeds of the past:

@jwenting You're right with the 30/50 comparison. Can't say much to binos, but for telescopes: the best (and most costly) amateur telescope objectives (air-spaced triplet lenses) come from Russia. LZOS near Moscow .... also the russian LOMO mirrors are among the world's best amateur telescopes mirrors when it comes to single-made one-off telescopes. Depending on your purse, for the mirrors you can of course choose the glass ... Schott, Ohara, they have them all, see the specifications ;-) I am dreaming of the LZOS 6" (152mm) refractor (got a used 4,5" f/7 and will never give it away) but sadly can't afford the german importer's prices :-/

Mass and orbital period (+calculated distance from the star) +speculation

Eratostenes :-)

I love these dicussions but they take sooo much time :-) The cryogenian glaciation is in discussion. Axial tilt, orbital "complications", these things ..... it might not have been global. http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v8/n9/full/ngeo2531.html There was a total glaciation in the palaeoproterozoic. And before someone asks, i don't know how but am thankfull that the earth found out of that because a total glaciation tends to be a very stable state ! All in all glaciation were relatively short periods and are indeed connected to changes in life on the planet. As to Fermi: the air get's ever thinner for advanced extraterrestrial life .... :-)

Since a few years i'm trying to renew my library on earth history, but each time i think "now i order" they announce new editions ... :-) Humans: africa and europe/asia are different. Even the terminology/chronology is different. Africa hasn't gone through ice-ages. The ice-age in europe is more appealing and better researched on. Many people in the nineteenth century, especially in france and germany, looked for bones from "the tribe of the flat headed" (newspaper article on the find of the neandertal neandertal 1856 ... journalists ! :-)), it was a sport. After the ice-age the neolithic(*) spread from the origin (the slopes of the mountains in southern turkey, syria, ...) towards the north, probably simply because environmental conditions allowed. Deserts to the south and east weren't that inviting. Surely some tried but weren't as successful as those who went north/west. So the "neolithic package" and subsequently copper, bronze, iron things didn't show up in africa first but were imported from outside. It's not only an artifact in this case, it's simply that there is more stuff to find in europe/asia than africa. Modern culture / politics plays a role as well: muslims aren't interested in what was before mohammed (sorry guys) and not everyone is allowed to enter the countries and do research. That limits possible finds in arabia / western asia. I can't say much about the americas, only that humans are assumed to have arrived there during the last glacial maximum. America doesn't play a role in the development of humankind (sorry guys and gals) :-) Cambrian: well, depends, "pre-cambrian explosion" if you like ? Yes, the blueprints have changed since then. Ediacara-fauna were rather jellylike, soft animals. And yes, we can only see the prosperous models in the records, the hecatombs and majority of short-lived genusses are gone. Climate: there have been ice-ages and greenhouse-times, even one or maybe two global icings, but on a large scale the earth always found back to these 15°C surface temp. Another one of these things why microbes mayhaps are not the big deal but the evolution over billions of years is. Let's hope that Apophis or one of his colleagues doesn't change his mind and course to leave a lasting impression .... (*) The relevant part for europe/western asia.

The Orbiter-game has a doc about a model to calculate gravitational forces between objects with uneven mass distribution. :-)

Just a few remarks/nitpicking, for completion: the cambrian explosion thing was probably an artifact and has overcome itself since the discovery of the ediacaran. "Explosions" or "Revolutions" in earth history or archeology (example: Vere Gordon Childe's "neolithic revolution") are very often artifacts, revolutions may even have a political taste from those who invent them :-). Anyway, things need their time to develop. The cloud out of which the solar system formed contained a lot of metals (anything else than H and He), since these are bread in stars and supernovae other stars must have formed before, exploded in supernovae, formed a protoplanetary disc, out of which solar systems evolved and so on. If these stars were larger than the sun than these processes were much faster. But the cloud wasn't just there waiting to condensate, it was other star(s) before. Andromeda / Milkyway will probably form a huge elliptical galaxy "afterwards", the mixing up is no cataclysmic thing, it's rather like two gases mixing. Others have been through that before :-) But Andromeda will be a fine sight in the far future (if there is someone to watch). The ocean (different chemistry than today) formed immediately after the crust solidified. Probably evaporated several times because of impacts / volcanism and rained out again. I see the first microbes a little older (not much) than you describe, formed before 4 billion years. The rest is browsing through the archives :-) But as you say, in order to tell whether microbes formed on other bodies in the solar system it would not suffice to turn a stone and there they are. We'd have to understand how the dynamics of these bodies work to be able to find the places were the beasties might have been / are. Imagine somebody 4.1 billion years ago, landing on earth in a quiet moment, looking for life. Would he(kirk)/she(janeway) have the idea to go to the bottom of the ocean and look around volcanic vents ? It might already be elsewhere as well, but they would probably not find it if they didn't have expectations were to look and what to look for. Earth is exceptionally complicated, nevertheless finding life(tm) means much more than sending a probe (if we don't step accidentally on it or if it somehow says "We're here !"). It might take 100 or 10.000 years ... since i'm more into the past than the future i can't tell. 10.000 is a long time and we might have beaten each other up struggling for resources, like we did so many times before ... or become victims of evolution because some nasty microbes are fitter ... hehe.

Ah, i see. So if these masses are just two perfect marble balls then my hypothesis is wrong .... :-)

Hypothesis: The gravity-induced force is actually uneven, point masses are just a simplification for game purposes. So the part with the engine of the car will pull harder at the pencil whose penball-tip is lighter than the button tip. That'll induce a turning moment in both parts, they'll start to swing back and forth like two pendulums while falling towards each other. Since the initial impulse then is not straight towards each other they start and end up in a highly elliptical/almost hyperbolical orbit, and if there is no other force then after one orbit they will end there again. Meanwhile the pencil will have had enough time to become tidally locked, facing it's heavier part towards the heavier part of the car. ------------- If the tidal locking takes energy out of the system then each pencil's PE (and AE) will be a little lower than the one before, leading to a final impact. There is a slight chance that the impact leaves my signature on the body of the car. But probably it'll just become disarmed cause the button end hits first. Cultural background: is the car a Ford Model T ? It might still work then ... :-)

Was ist schlecht am höhlenwohnen ? (*glatzekratz* war das jetzt korrektes germanisch ?) Und, äääh, hätte mir den Satz vielleicht einfach sparen sollen. :-) Edit: ich hab das jetzt mal durch den bing-Übersetzer geschickt. Was der ausspuckt muß ja für 'nen Engländer nach irgendeinem Geheimcode aussehen ...

I think i have already outed myself as a "rare earther", but only with respect to earth itself, nobody can say much about other planets. I hope we can answer the question whether microbiotical life could emerge elsewhere when we can bring samples from the other icy/whet/formerly whet bodies of the solar system to earth and/or send a very well equipped expedition out there. But really, i don't see that in the next 25 years, too many questions are still open. Before that happens i rather see that the question of what happened on earth between 0 and 1 o'clock will be answered and maybe the chemistry replicated. As for telescopes: interferometry , combination of small telescopes to form a larger one. Has been done for longer wavelengths (radio) and the latest telescopes are constructed with that in mind, ALMA and VLA probably the best examples. Thus huge stars have been imaged as discs (beteigeuze) and a protoplanetary disc 450ly away. But a lot of data must be shoveled around. If one could combine telescopes on opposite sides of the earth or between earth and the lagrange-points or even the earths orbit (2 au !) that'll be a fine and sharp view of the vicinity. Dreams of the future but not total fantasy ...

He, there are a few stargazers here :-) @Matuchkin, if you have an android device wth gps and acceleration tracking (shows you the sky as you hold and move the device) try google skymap (though i hate to advertize a google program ...). Nasa has a similar program but i don't remember how it's called. These two don't cost nothing and are reasonably up-to-date and accurate. There are more of these programs, "Red Shift" for the pc being probably one of the better, but they cost. In the end i fear you won't get happy without a good book on "practical astronomy".

Oh well, try it out. Camera on a tripod, wide-angle lens, standard asa-settings (100), aperture open, full manual control, no automatism. Start with 30sec. and double (60, 120, 240, not more). You'll see even after 30sec that the stars will be a little "long", not pointy. After 4min exposure you will already see circle-sections and that the rest of the sky will quickly be overexposed. Near a city that can already be the case after 60sec. .... Depending on the quality of your camera and the temperature you'll also see the noise of the chip. Just play :-)

1. You'll see a little (not much) more than with the bare eyes. 2. Stars. Star-Clusters, in a dark night on the northern hemisphere orion nebula, andromeda galaxy's core, anromeda's collegue probably not .... Moon's terminator could be worth it ! Try it: Scorpion should be high in the south in the evening now (it's already in the southwest here on the atlantic islands), there are too red spots: the brighter one is Mars (Ares), the other Antares (Anti-Mars :-)). Direct comparison .... O, Toronto, Scorpion is under the horizon or very low i fear ... 3. 8*magnification, 30mm front lens diameter. When viewing out of the hand no more than 15*magnification, it'll shake too much. Good marine binos have 7*50, from 10* on i'd use a tripod. The larger the opening of the front lens the more light can be collected. A good bino for star things would be in the range +/- 12*70 .... Hope that helped :-) @Shpaget already had all the info, sorry :-) Halos (spiral arms of andromeda galaxy) no way. Just barely with an 8" telescope, a contrast/skyglow/artificial light filter and under a *very* dark sky and high up and some imagination. Or by long-term exposure with a camera ...

Yep, locking viruses out is difficult. But i think the intendet main application is to keep artificial changes from spreading. Might that work ?

First thought of Edgar Alan Poe and scratched my head. But when i searched i found the name-giving Poe. Of course I know the effect but didn't know it has a name. :-)

I see it the same way, once the evolution get's going it can only be successfull in a sense that it brings forward organisms that are fit for the given circumstances .... ... with a limitation: IF there are stable conditions over a long time (4.5 billion years in our case). In common words: only earth managed to keep the temperature in the necessary boundaries, it offers sinks and valves for greenhouse and icehouse elements, a strong magnetic field as a radiation/particle shield, a moon for stabilisation of the axis, an ocean, plate tectonics for stabilistation of climate over very long periods. Jupiter keeps unwanted guests away. Our sun is a quiet star and earth could compensate for the change in radiation and heat output, there is no interference from other celestial bodies like multi-star-system. The galactic neighborhood was quiet. Evolution would not have been successfull (and of course still is successfull despite of human interference sorry couldn't resist :-)) on earth had conditions been more "spacey". Extinction events never touched all layers / niches, there were allways enough survivors (species) that evolution could continue with variations in the blueprints. Personal belief: I wouldn't go that far to say "unique in the universe", such apodictic words aren't very "sciencey", or are they :-) ? But similar condtions just around the corner are *very* unlikely. Edit: The search for planets can only measure guesstimate "distance from the sun" and "size", and even these with great uncertainties. Calling a distant planet a "second earth" is of less information value than calling mars or venus a second earth. They are not. 2nd Edit: it's too early to say "first steps to replicating RNA-strands are a total miracle". It's not totally clear how these first steps looked like but i'm sure the problem will be solved one day. And we're not running out of ideas yet and we surely don't need "wonders", science might suffice ;-) http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v459/n7244/pdf/nature08013.pdf http://www.nature.com/nchem/journal/v7/n4/full/nchem.2202.html http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/03/researchers-may-have-solved-origin-life-conundrum

RNA world hypothesis gets a little backup: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/08/newly-made-rna-strand-bolsters-ideas-about-how-life-earth-began

It's all about generating money. I bet many have bought the "Spiegel" just because of this and on Facebook millions of clicks where collected and with those customized ads transported to the clickers. And in the end nothing has been found or it is so unclear that speculation just continues, regardless whether or not there is a rocky planet in the assumaed zone where liquid water could eventually exist. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0094576515301247 The "media-maelstrom" .... :-)

"A big misfortune of the 20th century was that communism wasn't tried out on rats and mice beforehand" Stanislaw Lem