NASA launches satellite ‘TESS’ in hunt for exoplanets LAUNCH ACCOMPLISHED

Reblogged from Coel’s blog, where I commented: My own best bet for intelligent life elsewhere would be aroud a red dwarf. More of them, and far longer lifetimes. Our own Sun was nearly half way through its useful lifetime before earth had multicellular organisms. More also, at PhysOrg’s Are we alone? NASA’s new planet hunder aims to find out.

Update, launch delayed

Launch successful

coelsblog

With the launch of NASA’s TESS satellite due this very day, this is a popular-level account of TESS and exoplanet hunting that I wrote for The Conversation. Actually this is my version, prior to their editing.

at the stars in the night sky and wondered whether they are also orbited by planets; our generation is the first to find out the answer. We now know that nearly all stars have planets around them, and as our technology improves we keep finding more. NASA’s newest satellite, TESS (the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite), scheduled for launch on Monday, will extend the hunt for small, rocky planets around nearby, bright stars.

NASA’s TESS planet hunter (artist’s impression)

We want to know how big such planets are, what orbits they are in, and how they formed and evolved. Do they have atmospheres, are they clear or cloudy, and what are they made…

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The Little Puddlian Philosophical Society and the Fine Tuning Argument

Puddle theory, according to Wikipedia, is “a term coined by Douglas Adams to satirize arguments that the universe is made for man. As stated in Adams’s book The Salmon of Doubt:

“imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, ‘This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact, it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!’ This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it’s still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything’s going to be all right, because this World was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.”

I yield to no one in my admiration for Douglas Adams, and admire here in particular his reminder that our place in the Universe may really be rather precarious. However, on this occasion he had been anticipated.