Study Concludes "Planet" Was Just Stellar Spots 132
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?"
Re:What tipped them off? (Score:5, Informative)
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]".
Re:It's Science! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:"but refutations are science, too, right?" (Score:2, Informative)
Amusingly, Ludwig von Mises' younger brother Richard [wikipedia.org] was a real scientist with significant contributions in engineering and probability/statistics.
Re:It's Science! (Score:3, Informative)
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 a shock front as it decelerates and heats up to a very high temperature (~10,000 K). So, yes sunspots are common around stars like TW Hya.
The active surface actually makes this type of measurement (radial velocity search for planets) very difficult for the exact reason they found in this paper. Older stars have weaker sunspots that wouldn't be confused with planets. Also the spectral lines used in the radial velocity measurements are not stable enough to get a very precise measurement.
This was a tough measurement and I don't think many astronomers were surprised that it turned out not to be a planet.
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
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.
Re:It's Science! (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.
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 explains that the other didn't.
What Galileo did... was a lot more like flaming. He took the Pope's words, distorted them, and put him in the mouth of a bumbling idiot of a character called, basically, The Stupid. That was the defender of the old model.
The pope didn't take lightly to public ridicule, and did a bit of an abuse of justice to show Galileo who's boss. He suddenly made the helliocentric model the official church position (where he had been very neutral before) just so he could prosecute Galileo and put the offending book on the index of forbidden books. But make no mistake, it wasn't about science vs religion, it was just a troll personally flaming an absolute monarch and getting smacked upside the head for it.
At any rate, Galileo got just a house arrest at his own mansion for his efforts. Hardly the worst possible fate. Other people routinely got executed for lesser offenses against secular monarchs.
2. I think the one you're talking about is Giordano Bruno. That one got burned at the stake all right. However, even there the waters are muddier.
For a start, Giordano Bruno had a _lot_ of accusations of heresy against him, with heliocentrism being by far the least important. Other stuff like preaching that Mary wasn't a virgin, or eastern-style reincarnation (including into animals), plus a few assorted things about Mass, Jesus and the Trinity. The Church couldn't care much less about heliocentrism, but when you start preaching that everything in the new testament is a lie, they started to care. A lot.
Furthermore, Giordano Bruno was a monk. The Church took policing its internal ranks very seriously. (And honestly, it had all the reasons to, since any excesses of one of its members got used as examples of what's wrong with the church as a whole.) Things you could have gotten away with as some lay person, became very serious offenses as a member of the clergy.
Not saying that it makes it "right". Just saying that there's more to it that "science vs religion." I don't think that Giordano's views on reincarnation qualified as "science", for example. Whatever "science" was in his position, seemed to have been more incidental than the fundament of it all. He was tried and executed for plain old heresy.
Again, I'm not saying that the power to try people for heresy is good or right. But let's treat it as the excess of totalitarian power that it was, rather than some grand science-vs-religion battle.