Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments
Search

News for nerds, stuff that matters

Slashdot Log In

Log In

Create Account  |  Retrieve Password

Astronomers Announce 5-Planet System

Posted by kdawson on Tue Nov 06, 2007 05:35 PM
from the looking-for-something-rockier dept.
Space Science
An anonymous reader writes "Astronomers have detected a record-breaking 5th planet orbiting the star 55 Cancri, 41 light years distant. This planet orbits within the 'habitable zone,' where water could presumably exist, but it's probably another gas giant like Saturn, so any liquid water would have to be on a moon. There's still a big gap between this planet and the outermost planet where no planets have been detected yet, so there could yet be a rocky planet in the system. The lead researcher said he's optimistic that 'continued observations will reveal a rocky planet within five years.'"
+ -
story

Related Stories

Submission: Astronomers Announce 5-planet System by Anonymous Coward
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

Astronomers Announce 5-Planet System 50 Comments More /

 Full
 Abbreviated
 Hidden
More
Loading... please wait.

  • MORE cuts!?!? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Nerdposeur (910128) on Tuesday November 06 2007, @05:37PM (#21260365) Journal
    When I first saw this headline, I gasped. They already eliminated Pluto - what ELSE could they disqualify!?

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      When I first saw this headline, I gasped. They already eliminated Pluto - what ELSE could they disqualify!?
      Well it turns out that Neptune was just a smudge on the lens, Mercury was just a big piece of garbage [tv.com] and Jupiter was just Rosie O'Donnell's long-lost sister.
    • Anything that can't support life is a rock, oceball or gas giant. Not worthy of the title 'planet'

          • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

            by Cecil (37810)
            I've read that article, it's good, but it is still "life not quite as we know it" rather than "life nothing like what we know". As a counterexample, what about an AI? An AI has basically no requirements as far as chemistry are concerned. While it's laughably implausible to imagine an electronic AI "evolving" out of nothingness the way biological organisms did it's still -- by my definition -- "life" and there's no reason we couldn't find it "living" on any planet on our solar system or indeed any we've disc
    • Look, I'm gonna be frank, Those fat ass outer planets haven't been pulling their own weight. Our solar budget just didn't live up to expectations and we're looking at trimming... We've brought in some outside consultants to help us identify where we can slim down. This is for the better.

      • Look, I'm gonna be frank, Those fat ass outer planets haven't been pulling their own weight.


        Haven't they, though? I'm no scientist (no, really) but doesn't their larger size have some kind of gravitational effect on other planets which helps keep them in proper orbit (or somesuch?)

        Someone help me out here?

        • probably have to keep uranus for all the dumb jokes


          Of course, all those jokes will finally be put to rest come 2620 when scientists agree to finally rename Uranus.

  • More news (Score:5, Funny)

    by Skiron (735617) on Tuesday November 06 2007, @05:42PM (#21260421) Homepage
    "The lead researcher said he's optimistic that 'continued observations will reveal a rocky planet within five years.'" Sylvester Stallone commented on this breaking news; "Eh?"

  • What record? (Score:3, Funny)

    by teh moges (875080) on Tuesday November 06 2007, @05:43PM (#21260431) Homepage
    Our solar system has more then that...

  • What Record? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Jarjarthejedi (996957) <.bookreader13. .at. .cox.net.> on Tuesday November 06 2007, @05:44PM (#21260435) Journal
    What Record did this break? The number of planets detected in a single (extrasolar) system record? That shouldn't be too hard considering we're probably missing over half of the extrasolar planets with our current detection threshold. I mean, this is certainly interesting, but by no means surprising. We should be detecting systems with more and more planets every year as we begin to detect smaller and smaller planets.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by evwah (954864)
      assuming systems with more than said number of planets are common, or even exist (other than ours). scientists take nothing for granted. well they aren't supposed to anyway. that makes this newsworthy.

    • Re:What Record? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by meringuoid (568297) on Tuesday November 06 2007, @06:38PM (#21260997)
      That shouldn't be too hard considering we're probably missing over half of the extrasolar planets with our current detection threshold.

      To a very, very close approximation, we're missing all the extrasolar planets. We've yet to discover a single one outside our own Galaxy :-)

  • more planets to come! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by wizardforce (1005805) on Tuesday November 06 2007, @05:47PM (#21260479) Journal

    55 Cancri has produced "a rat's nest of radial velocity data," Fischer said. "We probably still don't have all the planets. We are pulling out one thread at a time, disentangling all these orbits, and it has taken a lot more data and time than we predicted.


    by the sounds of it, the wobble on this thing is just a mess- probably a lot like what our solar system's wobble looks like from the outside.

    • by the sounds of it, the wobble on this thing is just a mess- probably a lot like what our solar system's wobble looks like from the outside.

      The problem, is that the wobble we measure is a lot more messy, as we have relatively poor signal/noise ratios. The wobble isn't even very messy when you look at it in the frequency domain (its spectra), as basically each planet orbiting it represents a single vertical line, provided that their orbit is not too eccentric.

      There was this java program I tried to analyse

    • by the sounds of it, the wobble on this thing is just a mess- probably a lot like what our solar system's wobble looks like from the outside.

      Probably worse than ours. The Solar System is dominated by two planets. An astronomer looking back at us from 55 Cancri with the same technology would detect Jupiter, and probably Saturn. If he's patient enough to watch for a couple of orbits, he might just spot Uranus and Neptune too.

      The other planets wouldn't be detectable to our technology. They'd see a system w

      • Re:more planets to come! (Score:5, Interesting)

        by cperciva (102828) on Tuesday November 06 2007, @06:59PM (#21261237) Homepage
        The gas giants are more massive, but also much further away. Saturn is 95x more massive than the Earth, but it's 9.5x further away from the Sun, so its tug on the Sun (mass/distance^2) is only marginally more than the Earth's -- and is less than that of Venus, which is 0.8 Earth masses but only 0.72 AU away from the Sun.

        An astronomer from 55 Cancri would probably detect Jupiter (mass/distance^2 = 11.7 Earths/AU^2), Venus (1.56 Earths/AU^2), Saturn (1.04), Earth (1.00), and possibly Mercury (0.367), while Mars (0.046), Uranus (0.039), and Neptune (0.019) would almost certainly go unnoticed.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by MtViewGuy (197597)
      I think we will find a lot rocky-crust planets orbiting other stars by 2025 thanks to the Terrestrial Planet Finder space telescope array that will probably be fully operational after 2016. They should concentrate on every star like our Sun within 100 light years of our Solar System in its search.

  • Curb your enthusiasm (Score:5, Interesting)

    by QuantumG (50515) <qg@biodome.org> on Tuesday November 06 2007, @05:48PM (#21260485) Homepage Journal
    Imagine astronomers found a whole lot of earth like planets.
    Imagine they even found one that seemed to have artificial satellites.
    After years of observing and improving our telescopes, imagine we managed to image the planet itself and saw a civilization much like our own.
    Glorious times we live in huh?

    Imagine after much observation we found lots of these civilized neighbors out there in the black.
    Imagine we tried to send them signals and waited the many years for a reply.
    What if none came?
    After hundreds of years of knowing we were not alone we came to the inescapable realization that just communicating with other intelligent beings in our galaxy is so hard and takes so long that it may never be achieved.

    Wormholes and warp drives and ark ships.. what if it is all an unattainable dream?

    Thankfully, I like to dream.

    • Think positively (Score:5, Funny)

      by imsabbel (611519) on Tuesday November 06 2007, @06:00PM (#21260597)
      At least after we send our greeting, it will take 2 or 3 generations for the extermination fleet to arrive....

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by 4D6963 (933028)

      Here's exactly the kind of comment I hate whenever we're talking about something dealing more or less with extraterrestrial life, it's how we go from very down-to-Earth claims such as "here's what we know about exoplanets" to "here's what we might find out a few years from now" to "teh extraterrians they wont care about us cause were so inferior omg!". I know extraterrestrial life is an exciting topic, but because they're so little to satisfy ourselves with people are so quick to wildly speculate that they

      • How about because we're generally of the belief that if we *can* detect extraterrestrial life from here on Earth then its likely to be a heck of a lot of life. If all you detect is an oxygen rich atmosphere then that is unlikely to be very conclusive is it?
    • You obviously don't get it. Who cares about talking to the aliens? The interesting thing is to find out if we are unique or not. Finding lots of earthlike planets but no signs of life would be just as interesting as finding an alien civilization.

  • Ewoks live on a moon (Score:3, Funny)

    by HTH NE1 (675604) on Tuesday November 06 2007, @05:51PM (#21260517)

    This planet orbits within the 'habitable zone,' where water could presumably exist, but it's probably another gas giant like Saturn, so any liquid water would have to be on a moon.
    Any chance they plan to name this planet Endor?
  • First we're told that there are nine planets in our system. Then we're told that there's ten. Then we're told that Pluto and the rest don't count. Then we're told that there's not even a scientific definition of a planet, so technically there's none in our system. Now we're told that some distant star has five planets. That's more than we have!

  • SETI, and contact them? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by newgalactic (840363) on Tuesday November 06 2007, @06:17PM (#21260757)
    I already assume SETI takes finds like these into account when listening. However, is there a program around who's not intent to just listen? What if we developed a database of systems most likely to contain life, and we started a program to send the top candidates high powered radio signals. Far fetched, but maybe it'll produce some results in 100 years.
    • Assuming that the inhabitants on the planet in the habitable zone are developing technology along the same timeline as us, it would be [date we first send or sent communications outside the solar system] + 41 years. Depending on how old you are, I doubt we'll know in our lifetimes.

    • Re:SETI, and contact them? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by gad_zuki! (70830) on Tuesday November 06 2007, @06:54PM (#21261165)
      Inherent self-preservation instinct of any successful race will dictate that no one will begin transmitting like crazy to suspect systems. Its too much of a risk. Only idealists with a lot of faith in both humanity and alienity would be willing to take such a risk. The problem here is idealists are usually poor and can't afford to the equipment and energy to do what you propose. Not to mention, I imagine that the people who would even attempt such a thing are pretty credulous to begin with and would just conclude that aliens are here already and point to fuzzy videotapes and tall-tales of area 51 as proof.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      "What if we developed a database of systems most likely to contain life, and we started a program to send the top candidates high powered radio signals. Far fetched, but maybe it'll produce some results in 100 years."

      I'll see your what if, and raise you one:

      What if 50 years from now we receive a tight-beam laser transmission inviting us to join the galactic survival club and, BTW, whatever you do, don't send out radio signals to random planets, the neighborhood has been littered with alarms by the berserker

  • from any one of those planets to ours... at the risk of offending the "human-colonisation-of-space" brigade, a great exercise is to try making some sort of scale representation. Like, if earth is as far from the sun as the size of a grain of sugar, how far away is this system? Hmmm, well, if we're 12 light-minutes from the sun (forgive me if I got that wrong, it's been a long time), and the parent star is 41 light years away, is that like... next door? next town? next country? Anyone?

    • and the parent star is 41 light years away, is that like... next door? next town? next country?

      Next town. ((41 light years) / (1 AU)) * 0.7 mm = 1.82 kilometers

      You could have found out on your own I'm sure ;-)

  • The discovery of an earth-like rocky planet is always five years off.

    However, at least we stand a good chance of being alive when the discovery is made. (Madly knocking wood)

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      The discovery of an earth-like rocky planet is always five years off.

      However, at least we stand a good chance of being alive when the discovery is made. (Madly knocking wood)

      Whoa. Only a true uber-geek could masturbate to astronomy news.

      - T
  • Does anyone know how far our strongest radio signals have gone in the galaxy? I'm thinking of the movie Contact, where they stated that the opening of the 1936 Olympics in Berlin produced the first signal with a strength capable of being detected at greater distances. Is this true? And if it is, how far has that signal gone so far?

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by newgalactic (840363)
      Here's a cool website that has some of the brightest stars within 50 Light years. Here's to getting a signal in 30 or so years. http://www.atlasoftheuniverse.com/50lys.html [atlasoftheuniverse.com]
    • The 1936 Olympics were 71 years ago, 60 when Contact came out.

      Television and radio signals are both part of the EM spectrum, all of which travel at C with varying levels of refraction depending on the medium it passes through.

      That gives us a range of 71 light years for a civilization to have received the signal at all, and 35.5 light years if we would expect to hear a response from a civilization tomorrow.
      • You're far too nice. When presented with such a stupid question as "the opening of the 1936 Olympics [...] how far has that signal gone so far?", the correct answer (in 2007) is "Well, I'm no astrophysicist, but I'm guessing... about 71 light-years". Or if you wanted to be really helpful, you'd convert the distance to football-fields.

    • Re:How far has our reach extended? (Score:5, Informative)

      by ChrisA90278 (905188) on Tuesday November 06 2007, @08:30PM (#21262033)
      Let's set, radio travels at the speed of light. In one year light travels (get's out calculator.) one light year. If there are any people there listening to Earth they are hearing what we heard in 1956.

      When did we first build powerful transmitters? Comercial radio started in the 1920's so almost 90 years ago. Higher frequency VHF got beg after the war in the lat 40's when TV got popular.

      Could they hear it? Only if they have invested in VERY sensitive receivers MUCH more sensitive then anything we have. Our current receivers could only hear a signal if it were from a very powerful beacon aimed right at us.

      We do not currently have a system then could detect our own signals if they were coming from another star.
  • A gas giant with habitable moons. Only 41 LY away, it can't be as remote as Dantooine.
    • We better jump on that before the real estate developers invade. otherwise, we'll be up to our asses in telemarketters...
  • Astronomers have discovered a record-breaking fifth planet around the nearby star 55 Cancri, making it the only star aside from the sun known to have five planets.

    Not to nitpick, but just so people don't go away thinking there are only 5 planets in our solar system, the sun in fact, has 8 planets currently.
    • no human being will ever leave our current solar system to visit a distant planet

      Perhaps not, but our descendants might. We don't have to stay human forever.

    • No human will set foot on Neptune either, does that make it's discovery meaningless? Thank god no scientist thinks like you.

      Come to think of it, I will never meet you in person, so I guess you're meaningless too.

All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest © 1997-2009 Geeknet, Inc.