Name's Jason Thibeault. I'm an IT guy, skeptic, feminist, gamer and atheist, and love OSS, science of all stripes (especially space-related stuff), and debating on-line and off. I enjoy a good bit of whargarbl now and again, and will occasionally even seek it out. I am also apparently responsible for the death of common sense on the internet. My bad.

First Earth-sized exoplanets found!

Size comparison nicked from Bad Astronomy. An artist’s impression of the relative size differences of the two planets and ours. Note that Kepler was actually able to detect a planet smaller than Venus. That’s something!

From NASA:

The Kepler-20 system includes three other planets that are larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune. Kepler-20b, the closest planet, Kepler-20c, the third planet, and Kepler-20d, the fifth planet, orbit their star every 3.7, 10.9 and 77.6 days. All five planets have orbits lying roughly within Mercury’s orbit in our solar system. The host star belongs to the same G-type class as our sun, although it is slightly smaller and cooler.

The system has an unexpected arrangement. In our solar system, small, rocky worlds orbit close to the sun and large, gaseous worlds orbit farther out. In comparison, the planets of Kepler-20 are organized in alternating size: large, small, large, small and large.

This throws a bunch of things we thought we understood about planetary formation on their ear. Either our idea that rocky worlds tend to be inner planets with the gas giants further out is wrong, or we’ve found an outlier. More data needed!

This comes hot on the heels of Kepler’s last landmark find: a super-Earth in a star’s habitable zone.

My objection to the fine tuning argument is the argument assumes the Earth is fine tuned to support humans, rather than humans being fine tuned to live on Earth.

I’ve never liked either anthropic principle. The weak anthropic principle is a tautology, basically saying if things were different then things would be different. The strong anthropic principle should be renamed the strong egotistical principle: “The universe exists solely to produce me.”