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Tatooine-like Planet Discovered 403
ATP writes "CNN is reporting that a planet has been discovered in a solar system with 3 suns. The observation brings into doubt the theory stating that planets form from the dust orbiting around a single sun. The discovery also resulted in a new method of searching for extrasolar planets-- until now most searching focused only on single-sun systems."
First Post Mind Trick (Score:5, Funny)
This is not the planet we're looking for.
Move along.
Move along.
Facts about Tatooine (Score:3, Funny)
* You'll never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.
* The womp rats are about 2 meters in length.
* The sand is coarse and rough and irritating, and gets everywhere.
Re:Facts about Tatooine (Score:3, Funny)
Personally, I think it's a shame that people have to slander everyone from Tatooine just because they've gotten a bad impression from the people in Mos Eisley.
Re:First Post Mind Trick (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Wonderful, egalitarian, homogenous universe (Score:3, Funny)
So to summarize, there are habitable planets out there, but none of them are close to us or close to each other.
More changes for next release of star wars... (Score:5, Funny)
"Really, I had always wanted it to be 3 suns, and now we have the technology to produce my original vision"
Re:More changes for next release of star wars... (Score:2)
Re:More changes for next release of star wars... (Score:3, Informative)
No 3rd sun in that system, according to that source.
Re:More changes for next release of star wars... (Score:5, Funny)
I could have sworn that the third one was called Hervé.
Re:More changes for next release of star wars... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:More changes for next release of star wars... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:More changes for next release of star wars... (Score:4, Funny)
My concern is that in the next release Alderaan is going to shoot first.
-Peter
Tatooine has 2 suns... (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.google.com/search?q=tatooine+suns [google.com]
Re:Tatooine has 2 suns... (Score:2)
Re:Tatooine has 2 suns... (Score:2)
A long time ago... (Score:4, Funny)
Not really Tatooine-like... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Not really Tatooine-like... (Score:5, Funny)
Dude, I've trouble getting to the bathroom which at this moment seems far, far away.
I'd say a 149 kajillion light years is definitely far, far away.
Re:Not really Tatooine-like... (Score:3, Funny)
Pitch Black (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Pitch Black (Score:2)
But in any case, I think by "Tatooine like" he means any planet with 2 or more suns, so Tatooine is just fine. Even tho the first example actually found has three.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Pitch Black (Score:2)
Re:Pitch Black (Score:2)
Daniel
Re:Pitch Black (Score:2)
Sinister of the artist to draw in a hypothetical moon. We all know how dangerous solar eclipses can be.
The effects of 3 suns (Score:5, Insightful)
Would agriculture ever start? Would dwellings all be subterranean? Would concepts of work and play be utterly different? Religions would evolve differently. Would gender roles be affected?
Does anyone know of a work of science fiction that delves into this, in the way that The Left Hand of Darkness [wikipedia.org] explored gender issues?
Yes (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Yes (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Yes (Score:2)
The year's best Science Fiction published it once, but i forget which volume of it had it... that's where i read it, also there is an anthology of stories http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/038 5 081049/ref=pd_sxp_f/103-3158123-6214245?v=glance&s =books [amazon.com]
so, yeah you can still get the short story, 'used' or at a library
Re:Yes (Score:2)
Nightfall, the movie (late 1980's) (Score:3, Informative)
Ahhh...the awfulness (Score:2)
Re:The effects of 3 suns (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The effects of 3 suns (Score:2)
Creating a world would be fun (Score:2)
Excellent points, of course. This all makes me think of an exercise that my Physical Anthropology prof in college used to run each year. He'd invite anthropologists, artists, psychologists, writers, paleontologists, historians, engineers, of all stripes together for the creation of a mock species.
The group would start out with a skull, created by one or two of the participants. Then everyone would ex
Re:The effects of 3 suns (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The effects of 3 suns (Score:2)
I was with you up to this line...
Come on, womens period and and lenghts of months alright, but do you REALLY think thats more important as day/night cycle? Would the concept of "sleep" have evolved?, ect,ect
Re:The effects of 3 suns (Score:3, Informative)
Our earth-moon system is v
The Great Conjunction! (Score:2)
Imagine if such a planet were habitable (that is, a planet with three suns). Think about how much of our human existence is dictated by the cycles of our single sun. I wonder how different things would be with three suns.
Yeah, imagine if the three suns lined up every thousand years. A Gelfling might have to find the shard and heal the Dark Crystal.
The big question.. (Score:2)
Many questions to ask about this multiple sun stuff.
More importantly... (Score:2)
Re:The effects of 3 suns (Score:2)
It is a great short story that inspired two terrible movies and a somewhat good book.
Cheers,
Adolfo
Re:The effects of 3 suns (Score:3, Interesting)
Appearances aside, not much.
If the planet's environment is life-friendly, then it's only a matter of time before life evolves on it. Lifeforms will then thrive on the resources until a resource limit is met and competition (i.e. "survival of the fitest") kicks in.
Because of the survival benifits that cooperation and intelligence have, some lifeforms will take an evolutionary path towards that... more complex behaviors will likely evolve, eventually
Re:The effects of 3 suns (Score:4, Interesting)
You seem to be making the argument that essentially a habitable planet is a habitable planet is a habitable planet. Don't you think, though, that if Earth had three suns, life might have evolved in a vastly different fashion?
I don't know the answer, but it does seem to me that many of the assumptions we take for granted about organic life and its development might not apply on a world with three suns. For example, on a "desert planet" like Tatooine, there may be no aquatic mammals. Assuming current speculation about the evolution of mammals on Earth is true, perhaps on a desert planet large-brained creatures might not ever evolve.
My ignorance in matters of biology outstrips my knowledge of the subject by a wide margin, so I am just poking around curiously to see what others think.
Re:The effects of 3 suns (Score:4, Funny)
And you base this one what? An empirical basis of exactly 1 instance? Pretty presumptious of you.
Not really. Since life evolved once, the probability of life evolving is greater than zero. Ergo, given arbitrarily sufficient time, the probability of life having evolved will approach 100%. Unfortunately, time required for life to evolve may exceed the lifespan of even the universe. The grandparent post is technically correct, but it's not a particularly useful form of correct.
Re:The effects of 3 suns (Score:2)
I can't remember if the subject comes up again in 2061 though, since a big part of that story takes place in space (again)...
Re:The effects of 3 suns (Score:2)
Re:The effects of 3 suns (Score:2)
Absolutely recommended, like all his other works.
Re:The effects of 3 suns (Score:2)
http://netserver.massmedia.com/~mikeb/jvm/marune/ [massmedia.com]
Re:The effects of 3 suns (Score:2)
While it undoubtedly has effects, whether or not our particular solar cycle is key to our particular existence is hard to say. Consider life did/does exist and evolve closer to the poles, as well, where days and nights last months (half the year, at the extreme), so a daily light/dark
Re:The effects of 3 suns (Score:3, Funny)
Re:The effects of 3 suns (Score:2)
Re:The effects of 3 suns (Score:3, Interesting)
Not necessarily "better", but certainly different.
Many fruit trees will not bloom or produce fruit without a certain number of hours each season below a certain temperature. If I were to dig up the peach tree in my front yard and transplant it to Florida, it would never produce another piece of fruit. (There are, of course, other varieties of peach trees that do just fine in warmer climates.)
So, with no darkness, and no winter, plants would certainly evolve differently, but it
Does it also contain.... (Score:5, Funny)
not like Tatooine... (Score:4, Informative)
The planet, a gas giant slightly larger than Jupiter, orbits the main star of a triple-star system known as HD 188753 in the constellation Cygnus.
Unless I missed something major when watching the movies, Tatooine isn't a gas giant...
Re:not like Tatooine... (Score:2)
Tatooine? (Score:5, Insightful)
No (Score:2, Interesting)
No, it doesn't. That's assuming the star system is as old as the planet. There's no way they can see how the four move relative to each other, so they're just guessing. The two most likely scenarios I can think of are that a star with a planet drifted into a binary system, or three stars and failed star (gas giant) managed--by chance--to drift together without crashing into each other. W
Re:No (Score:3, Interesting)
Then all of the non-intellectual/non-educated/non-critical thinking/non-analytical/etc. people start jumping on this poorly worded article about how all science is just guessing and doubt, blah blah blah, we don't know anything about our universe, blah blah blah, religion/fantasy/make-believe/folklore/etc. is an
Like Tatooine? (Score:5, Funny)
No love for Pitch Black [imdb.com]?
Besides, Vin Diesel can kick Chewbacca's ass. He can do anything [4q.cc].
Re:Like Tatooine? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Like Tatooine? (Score:4, Informative)
More info here [security-forums.com].
From reading that, I'm guessing the page just has a really long perl filename accessed from, perhaps, the ad script or similar.
Re:Like Tatooine? (Score:2)
False Advertising (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, but wait... It's actually a story about a planet that was discovered in a solar system with three stars. What in the hell does that have to do with making the planet "Tatooine-like"? That's like calling every other planet in our system "Earth-like".
*sigh*
Since when was Tatooine a gas giant? (Score:2)
Jumping to conclusions? (Score:2)
That's no planet (Score:2, Funny)
Sure (Score:2)
And now for something completely different... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:And now for something completely different... (Score:2)
Drake equation (Score:3, Interesting)
Complaint summary -- concise! (Score:2)
Earth is pretty Tatooine-like... (Score:2, Interesting)
More information from Nasa (Score:3, Informative)
Re:More information from Nasa (Score:2)
I don't see how existing theories are in doubt (Score:2)
Re:I don't see how existing theories are in doubt (Score:3, Interesting)
With 3 bodies, you have no guarantee that there'll ever be a stable node in the field, let alone that enough matter will land there to bunch together.
Pretty neat fluke if it did, mind.
Rogue planets (Score:2, Insightful)
The observation doesn't necessarily call into question this theory - there has long been a theory that rogue planets (i.e. planets that have either been knocked from their own solar system or where their star has exploded) can be taken into the gravity of star(s) that it wasn't formed around.
What does call the theory into question is the paucity of information on extra solar planetary formati
Scientists Comment (Score:2)
Fictional? (Score:3, Funny)
I'm just waiting for the first DS9 like wormhole to the delta quadrant to be discovered. Hell I'd settle for the most nasal starship captain that doesn't have a clue.
If you stood on the planet's surface... (Score:2)
Why do we have to sensationalize everything? It'd be a good science story if they just prsented the facts. Is this CNN or the freaking E chanel?
Morans.
Re:Name that star... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Name that star... (Score:2)
Re:Name that star... (Score:2)
Or Meshach, Shadrach and Abednego.
Or Caspar, Melchoir and Balthasar.
Or Athos, Porthos and D'Artagnan.
Or Carreras, Domingo and Pavarotti.
Or Lee, Lifeson, and Peart.
Re:Name that star... (Score:2)
OT... Re:My vote's for Lee, Lifeson and Peart. (Score:2)
Re:Name that star... (Score:2)
Re:Name that star... (Score:2)
Re:Name that star... (Score:2)
Simpsons? (Score:2)
Re:Too convenient (Score:3, Interesting)
Solid Science (Score:2, Insightful)
For instance, detecting planets within our own solar system is far different than detecting one many lightyears away. In our solar system, all you really need is a good earth based telescope and a little luck. To detect extrasolar planets, one must observe things like star wobble. IANAA, but considering that we've not even photographed the entire sky using orbit based long range cameras (s
Uh, no. (Score:5, Informative)
With the exception of the one rock planet observed, ALL are gas giants and virtually all many times larger than all the Gas Giants in our own solar system combined. We are NOT talking something the size of Venus, here, we are talking something closer in size to our own sun. This does make a bit of a difference.
To directly observe a planet the size of Earth at a resolution of 1 pixel at a distance of 100 light-years would require a radio telescope with a 1 Km diameter. The proposed Km radio telescope array would do this. Nobody has such a telescope (yet) so nobody is making this sort of claim (yet). But it could be done, it has been designed and (last I heard) it was being built. Once it is finished, planetary discoveries will be made much more rapidly and much more reliably.
It is unlikely to happen in my lifetime, but such an array, in space, would be able to scan a lot of absorbtion frequencies, allowing you to not only detect such a planet, but know the composition of the atmosphere as well. A 1 mile diameter array in space would give you 6.25 pixels-worth of data - certainly enough to detect the existance of weather patterns and possibly enough to detect large moons (provided they are radio objects).
Re:Uhh... (Score:5, Informative)
As for the system being thrown together after forming seperately, that's highly unlikely. First of all, space is mostly... well, space. The chances against two star systems colliding at all, nevermind doing so in a way that forms a stable three-star system are, no pun intended, astronomical. Even if a stable three-star configuration formed, it's even more likely that the sudden change in orbital dynamics would promptly eject the planet from the system (not hard to do--actually, if memory serves me, Mercury is in the process of being very slowly ejected from our own solar system. The sun will probably die first, though).
So, yes, lots of things could have happened... most of them probably even more fantastically implausible than the system forming as-is.
Re:Uhh... (Score:2)
Re:Uhh... (Score:2)
This is not about the probability of the explanation, though, it is about the probability of collision resulting in a 3-star planet. If the probability of such collision for a given star is 1/x, and we observe x stars and see exactly one occurrence, then a competing explanation with greater probability of occurrence than chanc
Re:Tatooine? (Score:2)
Re:Tatooine? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Oh, wait. I don't have a basement. Fuck.
Re:Big cloud of noxious gas (Score:2)