William Atkins
Thursday, 05 February 2009 21:26
Science -
Space
Page 4 of 5
However, with the Kepler Space Telescope coming online in a few months, it might be time to think about becoming more serious with the naming of these creatures.
Our endeavors to explore Earth-like planets in solar systems beyond our Solar System, and the corresponding search for intelligent life outside of Earth is becoming much more sophisticated than it has in the past.
In the past we have been mostly limited to searching with such ground-based facilities as the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (
SETI), coordinated by the SETI Institute in Mountain View California, U.S.A.
SETI is a group of mostly privately funded programs on Earth that survey the sky over our planet for the possible detection of electromagnetic transmissions and other communications coming from an intelligent civilization on distant planets.
We call such distant planets in solar systems beyond our own Solar System by the generally accepted name of extrasolar planets, or exoplanets. These exoplanets are defined as planets beyond the Solar System that are orbiting stars (other than the Sun).
So far, these exoplanets have been detected through indirect methods such as radial velocity observations. And, most of these planets are massive gaseous bodies as large or larger than the planet Jupiter.
However, with the Kepler Space Telescope we will be able to directly observe smaller planets, those with sizes similar to Earth, or Earth-like planets.
Page five concludes with some possible names for these potentially non-Earth species.
