I am very skeptical about any reports on the subject of deep space. Here they say they discovered some kind of another black hole. Here are beautiful pictures of some kind of nebula with thousands of planets. They even say that you can see it on the surface of every planet. But they say that it is almost possible to live on this planet - the truth is to fly to it "a million" years. All these are OPINIONS of scientists, based on some criteria that no one has tested. Well, no one flew to check how it was there - coincided or not. Continue to analyze the criteria in this way or you need to make adjustments.
We continue to analyze this way. Well, really - what's the difference? No one will fly there in the next tens, or even hundreds of generations. But even without visiting these distant galaxies and the planet, we can already talk about mistakes and skepticism.
Look …
Until recently, Fergal Mülley worked with a team of scientists using the Kepler telescope to search for exoplanets. To date, the data collected by the telescope has been interpreted as evidence of more than 2,600 planets orbiting distant stars.
Mülley is now leaving the Kepler team and will soon start working for a private company. As a parting gift to colleagues, He wrote an article that questions the results of years of observation. The data on the basis of which scientists have concluded that there are planets in the stars observed by Kepler may be erroneous, Mülley believes, and some other astrophysicists, having read his article, sadly agreed with his conclusions. Wired talks about Mulley's work.
The Kepler orbiting telescope observes selected areas of the sky and records data on the luminosity of stars. If a star suddenly becomes dimmer, and this drop in luminosity is repeated with strict periodicity, scientists conclude that this planet passed through the disk of the star and did not give the honor of its radiation to reach the solar system. Particularly intriguing for scientists are exoplanets, whose mass is not too different from that of the Earth, and the distance to the star is such that the planet is not too hot and not too cold for the existence of liquid water - the source of life.
To the great regret of Mulley and other participants in the Kepler mission, it is the data on such planets - approximately terrestrial in size and with an orbital period of more than 200 terrestrial days - that may turn out to be erroneous. The nature of the error lies, according to Mülley, in the architecture of Kepler. In the telescope's optics, Earth-like planets (including the Earth itself, whether the telescope is aimed at it from another planetary system) give a fuzzy signal that can be easily confused with noise, write Mülley and his colleagues. This does not mean that there are no two and a half thousand exoplanets; but their existence needs to be confirmed by observations of other astronomical instruments.
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Those. it is not at all a fact that they actually exist. And someone may have written out a medal or a prize for the discovery of 2600 planets:-)