Astronomers Announce 5-Planet System 145
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.'"
more planets to come! (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Curb your enthusiasm (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
SETI, and contact them? (Score:5, Interesting)
How far has our reach extended? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Curb your enthusiasm (Score:3, Interesting)
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 forget that the next important and exciting steps are to find a planet where conditions for life as we know it is there and then to detect biological activity on a planet, and at this stage we're most likely talking about bacterial forms of life and such.
But you people don't care, you'd rather push your imagination to its limits to the point you'd find it disappointing if we found an alien civilisation but that they wouldn't communicate with us in a satisfactory manner. It's like people only care about what would the alien Britney Spears be like, what would aliens think about us, or what their technology must be like, that kind of stuff.
Re:more planets to come! (Score:5, Interesting)
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:more planets to come! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:MORE cuts!?!? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:MORE cuts!?!? (Score:2, Interesting)