Comments on: How we found hundreds of Earth-like planets

By: Antoni Jaume

Antoni Jaume — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 18:50:29 +0000

“Now we only need to identify oxygen and water vapor in their atmospheres and we’ll know it’s fairly likely that it’s a planet with life on it.”

Water vapor is rather common even in non biotic ambients, I think that what would be telling is oxygen and methane, since they’re reactive they can be together only is there is a source for one of them, and life is a strong candidate.

By: Daggerstab

Daggerstab — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 08:32:48 +0000

There’s a bit of a controversy about this talk on astronomy blogs & forums. An example (a bit on the extreme end) is the coverage at NASAWatch.

The important thing to remember is that the planets found by Kepler so far are “Earth-sized”, outside the habitable zone (their transit time is too short – and that’s why Kepler found them for such a short time).

See the follow-up on Kepler’s blog:
http://blogs.nasa.gov/cm/blog/kepler/posts/post_1280268721769.html

By: MadScientist

MadScientist — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 06:39:28 +0000

Now we only need to identify oxygen and water vapor in their atmospheres and we’ll know it’s fairly likely that it’s a planet with life on it. There’s the humdinger.