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Study Concludes "Planet" Was Just Stellar Spots
Posted by
timothy
on Sun Aug 24, 2008 10:01 PM
from the waste-of-missiles dept.
from the waste-of-missiles dept.
Kligat writes "Back in January, it was reported that the youngest planet ever to be discovered, about ten times the mass of Jupiter, was orbiting the eight- to ten-million-year-old star TW Hydrae. Now a Spanish research team has concluded that TW Hydrae b doesn't exist, and that cold spots on the star's surface actually produced the dip in brightness instead of a transiting planet. Not as cool as if a planet had actually been there, but refutations are science, too, right?"
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Damn! (Score:4, Funny)
The other "bubble". (Score:5, Funny)
Talk about a not-so-real estate bubble.
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Re:Damn! (Score:5, Funny)
I had just bought real estate there
You think that sucks; a friend of mine just left on a one way colony transport.
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Re:Damn! (Score:5, Funny)
My friend is a telephone sanitizer as well, care to share the name of the holiday agency?
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Re: (Score:2, Funny)
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At least Pluto has proof of existence.
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So regardless of the prior art and ownership of that line being yours, think of the clods, because they can be sensitive too.
It's Science! (Score:5, Insightful)
People are trying to figure out the unknown, and don't always get it right the first time.
The popular press may spin it differently for the layman, but this is how science works.
Re:It's Science! (Score:5, Interesting)
So, have extrasolar sunspots been observed before?
I assume sunspots are far better understood than planetary formation, and that they're less interesting, but still... TFA gives no hint as to whether this is a first.
If this is a first, that's quite cool in its own right, even if there isn't a planet.
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Re:It's Science! (Score:5, Insightful)
You beat me to this point.
It is very important to be able to see 'cool spots' on stars other than our sun. We don't even understand our solar cycle yet and seeing what goes on on other stars will help us understand our Sun and Earth.
If this is the first time that this has been observed there should be more hype on this subject. There are many, many people on earth that will take notice and attempt to repeat.
If this 'spot' is so huge that we can detect it - what would be the ramifications if our sun got the same sized spot?
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Re:It's Science! (Score:4, Interesting)
So, have extrasolar sunspots been observed before?
I assume sunspots are far better understood than planetary formation
Not necessarily so. The cause of sunspots is mostly understood, but this discovery is significant because it shows that starspots occur on stars with no known planets, thus providing the start of a refutation of the "Jupiter effect" in solar activity.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Too bad we can't detect if there are Jupiter like planets around this star.
We can only detect Jupiter sized planets very close to the star, or something much bigger that is further away, nothing actually similar to Jupiter.
So no, it doesn't start a refutation at all. And this technique only can find planets that are in the same plane as our line of sight to that star, which considering how far away we are is an almost insignificant percent of that solar system.
Re:It's Science! (Score:5, Informative)
If only there was a free online encyclopedia we could consult... we could go to the "sun spot" article and see if there is a section about "starspots on other stars [wikipedia.org]".
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Young stars are notorious for having star spots. They are much more active than the sun, having generally larger sunspots and flares. Stars younger than a few million years have large cold spots, similar to the sun but bigger, as well as hot spots. The hot spots come from material streaming in from the accretion disk that surrounds the star, gets trapped in the magnetic field lines of the star (like those of a dipole magnet) and fall onto the star. When this material hits the surface of this star it creates
Re:It's Science! (Score:5, Funny)
Science: it works, bitches.
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Transcript (Score:4, Funny)
Scientist 1: "OMG! There's a tear in the cosmic fabric of space-time! It's swallowing galaxies, heading right for us, and we're all going to DIE!"
Scientist 2: "Would you chill out? It was just a hair on the eyepiece. Look again."
Scientist 1: "Oh. Right. Well, that's enough science for this morning. I think I'm going to break for lunch, now..."
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They were wrong! (Score:2)
That's -LIFE-. People take their best shot at mastering the unknown, namely, the future, and if they get it right, they are heros, and if they get it wrong, they are goats. Baseball players, bankers, drillers, salesman, farmers, all either have to guess the future correctly, or, they pay the price... hell, we all have to, or we pay the price. Why should scientists be treated any differently?
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Exactly. Without debate and opposition, science is no better than religion.
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Yes, but a debate must include facts and observations, not just opinion.
Re:It's Science! (Score:4, Insightful)
The popular press may spin it differently for the layman, but this is how science works.
It's best to ignore the popular press.
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Yea! I spoke to someone from one of these previous civilizations and he warned me about the LHC. He spoke to me and said something like this:
"You'll be sooooweeeeee!"
That convinced me that the LHC is a bad idea. I don't know what sowee feels, like, but I sure as hell don't want to find out!
I don't RTFA (Score:3, Funny)
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But our planet is not disappearing, therefore either our planet is not a stellar spot, or there is no global warming.
Yeah, well... (Score:2)
WTF? (Score:5, Funny)
This is where I sit back and watch the establishment piss themselves to mod me down first.
Using up your mainstream interest (Score:2, Insightful)
The exo-planet scientists are bumbling [quantumg.net] their way into obscurity. The public does not understand science. They don't understand small discoveries. They don't understand "backwards" discoveries like this one. Currently there is some interest in inferring that planets may exist around other stars, but it is quickly becoming a passing interest and the media attention is quickly turning from awe to skepticism (and not the good kind of skepticism required for science). It's like the 60s when inference of pla
"... refutations are science, too?" (Score:2)
Inseparably so! You can't have science or Scientific Method without falsifiability; anything else would just be... a religion.
I know, I know... the question was just rhetorical preaching to the choir, but the answer bears repeating nonetheless. There's still a few billion humans who haven't grokked it yet. 8-/
Some corrections to the original submission (Score:5, Informative)
Also, for whatever it's worth, there have been rumors floating around since the original announcement that several groups have photometric data showing the variations in stellar flux due to these spots. The period of this variability was supposed to be consistent to the "planet's" period, a very strong argument that it was a rotation/spot effect.
Popper-esque (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes, they are. (Score:3, Insightful)
> but refutations are science, too, right?
Absolutely. And it is precisely that which distinguishes it from religion.
Under what circumstances can ID be refuted?
Re: (Score:2, Flamebait)
I had no idea those damn Democrats were so interested in propping up false extra-solar planets.
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Then it's not science.... ?
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Amusingly, Ludwig von Mises' younger brother Richard [wikipedia.org] was a real scientist with significant contributions in engineering and probability/statistics.
Others were discovered from wobble (Score:5, Insightful)
I doubt it, because most other measurements were based upon the apparent wobbling of the parent star, not direct observation. This one, AFAIK, was tied to an attempt to "see" the planet transition across the parent star. Actually, I was of the frame of mind to think this is almost as exciting (if not more so) than a planetary discovery. If we can detect "cold spots" on an alien star, there's all sorts of fascinating implications.
From the article:
Impressive! There's a lot we may be able to learn about our own sun by monitoring the daily happenings of other stars. Things like the frequency of solar maximums, sunspots, and so forth on other stars comparing them with our own would be one such course of study.
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Re:What tipped them off? (Score:5, Informative)
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Our Lord God, in all his wisdom, would never allow another planet, not in the 5,000 years since creation itself has He ever done anything so looney.
Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto. Oh, wait... not Pluto. :)
Re:Just this week's science failure. (Score:5, Informative)
Your post fundamentally disturbs me... and for a number of reasons.
I say this every time a science post like this is posted: modern science is a joke. What I hate the most is the very concept of theories.
Theories are pretty much entirely what science is about - so, if you have a problem with theories, you have a problem with ALL science, not just "modern science"
The idea that some half-assed guess gets passed around as an acceptable explanation until proven otherwise just strikes a nerve with me. I wish science would stick to black and white, "we know this" and "we don't know this".
Science has never been "black and white" and never will be. If you want that level of certainty, you'll find religion a few doors down the hall.
Theories are also not "half-assed guesses" - they're "best guesses" based on the results of experimentation (note that in some sciences direct experimentation isn't possible, so instead, precise modelling from the available evidence can also be used - this includes most of astronomy and historical things such as large timescale geology and evolution (both geology and evolution on short time scale, we've got experimental science already)).
If you walk in to the room, and I look at you, I can form a hypothesis, almost immediately, based on visual evidence, that you are human. If I then ran some tests based on my hypothesis and they agreed that with the hypothesis, then I'd have a working theory that you're human. I'd probably be right, however I can never know for sure - maybe you're an alien that just happens to be "human enough" that all of the tests I did would pass you as human. Now, I will work on the idea that you're human based on this theory. If however, a few weeks later, I get access to a new kind of DNA test, and for some reason decide to test you again, and find out you're NOT human, then the scientific method has NOT failed. I've determined you're not human, but I ALSO know with a lot more certainty how close to human you are (enough to pass all my initial tests).
That can relate back to the topic at hand by saying that we now know a lot more about HOW spots on a distant sun can LOOK like planets.
Stop this "we think this and that, have no real clue, but are going to pat ourselves on the back for pretending to know something we don't".
I wonder if perhaps you're just not familiar with what makes a theory compared to a hypothesis. Self-congratulations because of a hypothesis, would be bad, but self-congratulations because of a theory are definitely in order if it's interesting enough.
Science doesn't claim to know anything. Scientists will happily pat themselves on the back for a new theory, but anyone who then calls it "fact" is being intellectually dishonest (or perhaps just lazy, which is actually fine if they're not doing it in information that they're actively disseminating). Imagine, after my discovery that you're an alien, I throw a bit of a party because my theory now points to there being alien life on Earth. That party is pretty well justified I think, and some self-congratulation is definitely in order (if I'd thrown a party just after you walked in for looking at you and saying, "yep, that's probably a human" (or even, "yep, that's a probably an alien"), that'd be pretty stupid as I hadn't done any tests to try to confirm it). Then however, a few weeks after that, it turns out that some humans can have the strange DNA traits I found in you. I've gone from thinking you're human, to thinking you're an alien, to it turning out you're probably human after all. I'll say, "oops, looks like my theory was incomplete - sorry for the false alarm everyone!" and that should be fine. Even though I found out you're not an alien, I now know more about what I'm looking for next time, and also I've just learned something new about humans, so it's still a good thing. At this point, I assume you're human, even though I've changed my mi
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Re: (Score:2, Offtopic)
Because TECH is not SCIENCE. These appear to be somewhat intersecting sets at best.
Furthermore, Computer Science is in its pure state much more akin to a branch of mathematics than anything remotely resembling a Science.
It's not hard at all to understand how you would up in IT with an anti-scientific mind. It's also not terribly hard to understand why a bunch of IT folk shaved their heads and committed mass suicide to attempt to hitch a ride on a comet given there isn't sufficient science to suggest that
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i had that job for awhile, but I was on the night shift.
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Throwing a log on the fire, the Electric Universe people believe that "red-shift" in a galaxy is the result of one cluster being pushed out as a plasma ejection from a larger galaxy, one blue-shifts as it is pushed closer to us, and one red-shifts as it travels away, and that redshifting is not doppler-effect related [thunderbolts.info].
Gravity Universe people use red-shift as the basis of measuring the age of the universe, the Big Bang, tthe need for dark energy, etc etc. That, plus luminocity, is the basis of estimating the
Re:Makes me wonder... (Score:5, Insightful)
How many other 'facts' about things in the universe might merely be tainted observations?
Likely, several. But that doesn't lessen the value of the work at all. If something appears to work in a particular way, it probably does. If it turns out it doesn't, then the last body of evidence isn't just "thrown away" - it's just tweaked a little more - the previous assumptions, even if wrong, can still serve a useful purpose for explaining things.
Right now, we're pretty certain that there's a black hole at the centre of most (or maybe all) galaxies. We might be wrong. There might be a large, as yet unknown, type of gravity source there that is NOT a black hole. If that turns out to be the case though, it's not a bad thing for science - since every model so far works nicely with a black hole in that position, it will continue to work with a black hole in that position even if there isn't one. Just as Newtonian physics is wrong, but still serves as a very useful set of mathematics for most situations.
So many times I read the most fantastical things astronmers have discovered a billion light-years away, and I think, how do they really know that? When there's that much distance, couldn't there be something out there fooling with their observation?
Yes, there could - which is why we do lots of experiments regarding the kinds of things which may mess up observations as well. Could there be other things? Absolutely. Could that mean we're wrong about a lot of stuff we're observing? Yes, it could. Would that be catastrophic to science? Not at all - we'd have a lot of new things to study! We can build up a very accurate but completely incorrect model of the universe and as long as it's valid from our frame of reference, it can be useful for doing things.
Imagine if it turns out that MOND is probably correct - it doesn't automatically mean all the research in to dark matter has been wasted - a lot of that research could be used as "test cases" for MOND, to help "prove" it. If any of our information about dark matter gave results that could NOT be explained by MOND, we'd have to concede that either the observations are wrong (and then explain how), or that MOND is wrong. Either way, we enhance our understanding, which is good.
and I don't believe it is just the public mis-interpreting something that the scientists said was 'probable'. A lot of these guys pass off their discoveries as facts.
Anyone who does so is being dishonest - that's a problem of the people explaining the science, not of the science itself. That said though, if anyone ever tells me something is "fact", I take it to mean, "all current evidence points towards this being the case and we can't imagine any realistic way that this could not be the case". So, even if some scientists are being dishonest and saying something is fact, then it's STILL the public's misunderstanding of science that is at least partly to blame if they get all upset when new data points to a different answer. I myself am dishonest in this exact way whenever I tell someone that "gravity pulls you down towards the earth", or "We evolved from simpler life over a LONG period of time". I am presenting these theories as facts, because any alternative is completely inconceivable to me, and it's just quicker than explaining, "Given all the available evidence, it appears as if, from your reference frame, gravity will pull you towards the earth". For less well entrenched theories, I tend to avoid such strong statements, and prefer the "longer" explanation, but the meaning should be considered pretty much the same. If clarification is needed, then you should ask how strong the evidence is that points to this theory being correct.
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Re:Makes me wonder... (Score:4, Insightful)
What I want to know is this: At what point in the history of Slashdot did it become necessary to explain and defend the fundamental philosophies of science?
Seems this place has suffered along with digg when every 12 year old and their Wii were granted internet acess...?
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Well, as everyone knows there are no 'facts' in science unless it's an in-your-face thing like "water is wet" or "the temperature of the sun is xyz kelvin".
Hypothesis and Theory make up everything.
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How do we know there are such things as negative numbers? Cuz 5 - 8 has to equal something. Then we find a use for the newly invented "negatives", and find that it just works. What about imaginary numbers? The new negatives have to have a 'square root', and the square root of -1 has to equal something. And so on. Eventually, the preponderance of what works with 'negatives' and 'imaginaries' and all that other stuff leads to acceptance.
I don't believe it is just the publ
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Yea, how dare they downgrade something from "exists" to "doesn't exist".
I mean, seriously, I've a good mind to go there and tell them: I don't exist, you insensitive clods!
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Not if the subject is Anthropogenic Global Warming. But then again, that is more of a religion.
OT: No, Galileo lived happily ever after (Score:3, Informative)
1. Actually, no, Galileo only got house arrest, and not as much for "proving some overbearing theology wrong" as for flaming an absolute monarch. There had been closed minded popes and cardinals, but Pope Urban VIII was not one of them. Before becoming a pope, he had actually defended Galileo and opposed other church officials like Bellarmine. And as a pope he actually encouraged Galileo to write his book, and only asked that he presents both models, both his new and his old one, and shows what his model ex