Strange Mini Solar System Found 373
starexplorer writes "In 1990, Penn State's Alex Wolszczan found the first exoplanets. But he never got much credit from mainstream researchers, because his planets (3
of them, roughly Earth-sized) orbit pulsars and hold no chance for harboring life. Now he's found a 4th object on the outskirts of the system, SPACE.com is reporting. Call it a planet, call it an asteroid, Wolszczan says, but call the setup a dark, eerie twin of the inner half of our solar system. Also in the same story, news of a brown dwarf just 15 times the mass of Jupiter that has a planet-making disk of stuff around it. Together, more problems for astronomers, who still don't have a basic
definition for the word planet or a firm idea of what separates planets from stars."
Re:TMBG (Score:3, Insightful)
A gigantic nuclear furnace
Where hydrogen is built into helium
At a temperature of millions of degrees
Yo ho, it's hot, the sun is not
A place where we could live
But here on earth there'd be no life
Without the light it gives
We need it's light
We need it's heat
We need it's energy
Without the sun, without a doubt
There'd be no you and me
The sun is a mass of incandescent gas
A gigantic nuclear furnace
Where hydrogen is built into helium
At a temperature of millions of degrees
The sun is hot
It is so hot that everything on it is a gas: iron, copper, aluminum, and many others.
The sun is large
If the sun were hollow, a million earths could fit inside. and yet, the sun is only a middle-sized star.
The sun is far away
About 93 million miles away, and that's why it looks so small.
And even when it's out of sight
The sun shines night and day
The sun gives heat
The sun gives light
The sunlight that we see
The sunlight comes from our own sun's
Atomic energy
Scientists have found that the sun is a huge atom-smashing machine. the heat and light of the sun come from the nuclear reactions of hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, and helium.
The sun is a mass of incandescent gas
A gigantic nuclear furnace
Where hydrogen is built into helium
At a temperature of millions of degrees
Mini solar system (Score:5, Insightful)
He's on the faculty at Penn State! Sounds like he must have ticked off the wrong people at some point in his career. Maybe he needs to hire a PR person.
I would say that finding a planet orbiting any star would be significant news, regardless of whether said planet might harbor life.
The definitive definition (Score:5, Insightful)
-is a non-fusor
-has sufficient mass to be roughly spherical due to gravity
-orbits a fusor
-isn't already referred to as any other type of object by convention
-isn't associated through orbital composition or other general characteristics with another general group of non-planet objects (i.e. Vesta, though spherical, is associated with other objects known as asteroids, which are not massive enough to be spherical, and are therefore not planets. Vesta also is not a planet, because of the previous rule. It is by convention known as an asteroid, therefore it's not a planet.)
My source for this definition is myself, and I deem it sufficient for sparking a major discussion, and possibly for other things as well.
Re:The definitive definition (Score:3, Insightful)
Not sure if that would work. I could imagine a binary star system with a planet in between them as such with an erratic orbit that causes it to be stretched in an extremely egg shaped way.
It might need to be a more than binary star system to keep balance. IANAA.
Re:Superman (Score:3, Insightful)
Together, more problems for astronomers, who still don't have a basic definition for the word planet
I'm sure the astronomers simply don't care. It's not a problem; definitions don't change anything.
Then again, the earth is not like the sun... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Planets from stars? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:The definitive definition (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Hubble!? (Score:1, Insightful)
And hubble was a money pit to begin with. For what it cost to build, launch it in the shuttle, then go back up and replace the main mirror (in the shuttle). They could have built close to a dozen telscopes identical to the hubble and launched them with a conventional delivery method (strap it to a rocket). And right now we would have 100% coverage, and plenty of access for anyone who wanted it. Plus if one dies, who cares, just build another one, and send it up as a replacement, with all the newest tech of course.
Hmm... What makes a planet? (Score:3, Insightful)
A star: Generates energy by sustained, large-scale fusion reactions.
A brown dwarf: A 'failed' star with less than the minimum mass necessary for sustained large-scale fusion, but enough to generate either minimal fusion reactions or to glow by the energy of it's slow gravitational contraction. To be honest, I can't think of any non-arbitrary distinction between a brown dwarf and a large gas giant, just as there is a continuous spectrum between a centrally-planned and free-market economy.
A planet: Is massive enough to form itself into a sphere or ellipsoid and orbits a star in a stable orbit uniquely it's own (ie is not shared with other orbiting bodies, and is circular or some semblance thereof).
A moon: A natural satellite that orbits a planet in an orbit uniquely it's own (re: is not a ring particle).
An asteroid: An object, not any of the above, that orbits a star and does not contain significant deposits of volatile compounds.
A comet: An asteroid that does contain significant amounts of volatile compounds.
By my system, Ceres is an asteroid, because it does not have it's orbit to itself. Pluto is a planet because it can pull itself into a sphere, and possesses it's own (admittedly rather elliptical) orbit. The KBOs are all asteroids or dormant comets, because they either lack the mass to shape themselves or share orbits with other KBOs.
Re:Mini solar system (Score:1, Insightful)
You're probably right. At Penn State, as with other places I imagine, a lot of the best professors and instructors get marginalized, whereas the ones that know how to be good politicians and kiss @$$ stay in good esteem. The ones who are merely brilliant and understand things like physics really well wind up having to find full professorships elsewhere, if at all. Humans are so friggin' petty and stupid!
Screw the human race! Pathetic bunch of wankers!
Re:Star vs Planet (Score:3, Insightful)
Let me start by saying that our star's light (electromagnetic radiation) peaks in the visible region of the spectrum (which is why we evolved to be able to see it). This energy comes from nuclear fusion (usually Hydrogen/Deuterium/Tritium -> Helium; it's complicated and you can look it up if you want).
So why doesn't this definition work? Because planets emit their own light too; and I don't mean reflection or reemission. Take Jupiter for example. It's big right? If you dropped a ton of stuff into it all of that potential energy gets converted into kinetic energy as it falls and then thermal energy when it hits. Now if you think about it, at one time or another all of the mass present in Jupiter had to fall into it, converting potential energy to thermal energy which got stored up in the core. Now, 4.5 billion years later (if you chose to believe that) it is still radiating away all of this energy in the form of infrared electromagnetic radiation (light). It emits more light than it absorbs! But it isn't a star.
Re:ok? (Score:3, Insightful)
That sounds more like the creationists' consensus. Scientists are less obsessed with being God's special little unique creation, and are more likely to adopt the view "we haven't seen any but we're sure they must exist".
Re:Hmm... What makes a planet? (Score:3, Insightful)
Strictly the speaking, Earth and the Moon are pretty much dual planets (their common center of gravity lies in between them, for instance). When you plot their orbits around the sun, they're very similar, just wobbling around each other twelve or so times per orbit - that's not so much.
Which would make them asteroids in your system, I think.
Over Building their Definition (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Don't feel sorry for the astonomers (Score:3, Insightful)
Shakespeare described their plight best
Or, as Robert B. Laughlin, professor of physics at Stanford University and a 1998 Nobel laureate in physics, said [chronicle.com] recently:
"Brutal objectivity" is what limits most people, even the smartest. It is easy to become comfortable in our view of the universe and forget the uncomfortable process that brought us to this view in the first place.
In fact, a comfortable view is almost a warning. When things fit together too well, there must be something wrong.
Re:No chance of life? (Score:3, Insightful)
a) People hate alien dolls, they're expensive and look fake. CG like Gollum look considerably better, but is too expensive for a TV show.
b) That leaves about two sexes to be the actors, and alien females that look like males would simply seem "not right" due to X million years of biological programming.
I don't think it is lack of creativity that is the problem. The problem is in bringing them to the screen in a realistic fashion.
Kjella
Re:Superman (Score:2, Insightful)
The definition is just a convention. (Score:2, Insightful)
"What is the largest island?"
To which I always want to reply "either Eurasia or Eurasia/Africa depending on if you think they are sufficiently connected".
The question they are really trying to ask would be more honestly asked as: "What is the arbitrary cutoff point geographers have defined for 'Island', well at least the geographers we most recently talked to?"
Conventions-through-grey-areas are great for assisting in information transmission and processing when you are clearly on one side of the grey area or the other. But in cases when you are right around the grey area, it actually hampers communication and effective thought when people forget that these words are just arbitrary defintions used to simplify things for our tiny primate brains.