Comments on: Scientists studying moon reflected light have discovered life on Earth

By: AVT

AVT — Sat, 26 Jan 2013 18:25:00 +0000

This is quite hard for me to understand, make it easier for kids.

By: Exo

Exo — Sat, 03 Mar 2012 04:30:00 +0000

no ‘visual’ telescope yet to directly view exo-planets

By: Drgeorgetm

Drgeorgetm — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 09:35:00 +0000

This article has to be incorrect. I am sure there is no life on Earth!!

By: Dumbfuhk

Dumbfuhk — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 21:07:00 +0000

that’s deep man, but this is gonna blow your mind.. what if… the moon is actually putting lunaforming units on earth? the only way our propulsion metal thingy technologicals are going to catch is if we can learn live like the moon men, in like 250 years

By: ThomasYerkie

ThomasYerkie — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 19:41:00 +0000

It will probably be another 100-200 years before we have the capacity to go deep space. By then computers will be far more advanced and programing easier too. What we’re doing now in space is largely pointless and a waste of money. If we’re not going to set up terraforming units on the moon or mars(which we should be doing!) then we should just exit the scene until metals and propulsion technology catches up to our desires for exploration.

By: Helterskelter9

Helterskelter9 — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 16:52:00 +0000

The headline should have been: all your base are belong to us

By: Eponymous Rob

Eponymous Rob — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 16:42:00 +0000

Useless? Someone has to program that unmanned probe. And to do that, someone has to know what to tell it to look for.

By: ducane dude

ducane dude — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 16:41:00 +0000

Something is a miss. To my knowledge we are detecting exo-planets by anomalies/wobbles in the light received from stars due to the gravitational pull of planets or interference from planets. So we don’t really have a way to see the light which is being reflected by planets. I doubt if this technology is going to be feasible enough.

By: yahoo-3UAE267QLMBNFONR2PVEHAXURY

yahoo-3UAE267QLMBNFONR2PVEHAXURY — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 16:37:00 +0000

sunlight leaves the sun as it travels through all its gasses, goes through space, goes through the earth’s atmosphere, bounces off earth, goes back through the earth’s atmosphere, bounces off the moon, goes back through earth’s atmosphere, and enters the tool used to analyze the light. Wow, to come up with a system or formula to seperate out the unique signiture of earth’s gasses is amazing.

By: dk

dk — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 16:28:00 +0000

may be the next steps is to have man made satellites capture more of this reflected light from earth and study that first. It might end up teaching us more about our own planet.

By: Tom Peppermint

Tom Peppermint — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 16:27:00 +0000

You’ve got to be kidding me. I’ve been further even more decided to use even go need to do look more as anyone can.

By: Noone

Noone — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 16:26:00 +0000

Of course it would be better to look at the earth’s emission directly, but I’m guessing that the research group ran into problems traveling all the way to the moon. They also might have used an earth facing orbiting telescope if that were available. I think people are missing the main point: in order to show that life can be detected spectroscopically, you need to start with a planet that you know has life. The moon is a nice (and inexpensive) mirror to allow anyone with a telescope to do this experiment

By: Aronymoos

Aronymoos — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 15:51:00 +0000

Has anyone been as far as decided to look more like?

By: Truckergirl

Truckergirl — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 15:48:00 +0000

Actually, you could say we’re house hunting in the neighborhood so we’ll know in which direction to send the colony ships when we finish trashing this planet.

By: unaimedarrow

unaimedarrow — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 15:43:00 +0000

The next step will be to develop tests on the reflected light so that in addition to determining that life exists on Earth they’ll be able to tell if the life is intelligent.

By: jim hall

jim hall — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 15:30:00 +0000

Good article, bizarre headline.

By: Editor

Editor — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 15:27:00 +0000

The headline should be “Scientists studying moon reflected light have discovered life on Earth” OR “Scientists studying moon relfected light discover life on Earth”.

By: Editor

Editor — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 15:27:00 +0000

The headline should be “Scientists studying moon reflected light have discovered life on Earth” OR “Scientists studying moon relfected light discover life on Earth”.

By: Editor

Editor — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 15:27:00 +0000

The headline should be “Scientists studying moon reflected light have discovered life on Earth” OR “Scientists studying moon relfected light discover life on Earth”.

By: Adam

Adam — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 15:01:00 +0000

In looking at other planets, they will be looking directly at the planet they are studying. The scientists are just using the moon like a giant mirror so they can look the light from Earth, with their telescope on Earth. Kinda like using a mirror to look at your face, with the eyes in your face.

By: Adam

Adam — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 15:01:00 +0000

By: RH

RH — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 14:51:00 +0000

The idea is that we would look directly at the remote planet, but what are we looking for? What the scientists are doing here is saying that they’ve proven they know what to look for in light from a planet by looking at light from our own. Of course, looking at our own planet is terribly easy, so they needed to handicap themselves to prove it could be done to exo-planets also. When imaging exo-planets, the entire planet may be 1 pixel on the focal plane of their telescope; they’re REALLY far away. The moon, reflecting light in all directions at once, has the effect of aggregating all of the light from our planet, so that any 1 pixel of the moon reflecting earthshine would have the same quality of light as 1 pixel of an exo-planet shining at us directly.

Thus, now we know that these hills and valleys in the spectrum of reflected light that we kept claiming we should see on life-bearing exo-planets actually do show up on the reflected light from the planet.

By: RH

RH — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 14:51:00 +0000

By: Zocolo Fishing

Zocolo Fishing — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 14:41:00 +0000

Everybody is quite confused. Here is the real point: It is to further the concept of the study the ‘alien religion’. To spend unimaginable sums of money to look for little green men. All in an effort to prove that people either spontaneously generated here or out there.

By: Zocolo Fishing

Zocolo Fishing — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 14:41:00 +0000

By: Joe

Joe — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 14:33:00 +0000

I think they mean that by looking at the light reflected by the moon, they can treat the light as if it’s coming directly from another planet. They can’t look directly at the earth only because they’re on it.

By: ThomasYerkie

ThomasYerkie — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 14:32:00 +0000

We have to infer a lot in space based on other celestial bodies because interference blocks our view of a planet or moon. This opens up the possibility of viewing a planet behind a sun based on a satellite, or many other possibilities.
Granted, it’s all useless, as we’ll be able to send a shuttle to outer space in a few hundred years with a computer that can do things far better. But people have to have jobs, right?

By: Tyle Stelzig

Tyle Stelzig — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 14:29:00 +0000

It didn’t say so explicitly, but yes, I would assume the idea is to look at light directly from the planet. Looking at Earthlight bouncing off the moon is just a way to work on the technique.

By: Arnold

Arnold — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 13:12:00 +0000

Perhaps I’m missing something. Assuming we have a strong enough telescope to view a planets moon to study for life. Why not just look at the planet itself?
I suppose that we might not be able to see through cloud cover, but wouldn’t that keep us from seeing a good reflection of life too?