Astrophysicists Find "Impossible" Planet 436
SpuriousLogic writes "Scientists have discovered a planet that shouldn't exist. The finding, they say, could alter our understanding of orbital dynamics, a field considered pretty well settled since the time of astronomer Johannes Kepler 400 years ago.
The planet is known as a 'hot Jupiter,' a gas giant orbiting the star Wasp-18, about 330 light years from Earth. The planet, Wasp-18b, is so close to the star that it completes a full orbit (its "year") in less than an Earth day, according to the research, which was published in the journal Nature.
Of the more than 370 exoplanets — planets orbiting stars other than our sun — discovered so far, this is just the second with such a close orbit.
The problem is that a planet that close should be consumed by its parent star in less than a million years, say the authors at Keele University in England. The star Wasp-18 is believed to be about a billion years old, and since stars and the planets around them are thought to form at the same time, Wasp-18b should have been reduced to cinders ages ago."
Re:Maybe the measurements are wrong or incomplete (Score:5, Insightful)
This study does demonstrate that either the measurements are wrong or our understanding of orbital dynamics is wrong. Knowing the former is important because it tells us we have to alter how we make the measurements and knowing the latter is important because it tells us we have to alter our understanding of physics. So it's the very antithesis of hubris.
If it exists, it isn't impossible (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps it was thrown from a different solar system and captured by its star.
Re:Maybe the measurements are wrong or incomplete (Score:5, Insightful)
Not necessarily. Maybe something knocked it out of its regular orbit and it's spiraling into the star. Maybe we're just witnessing its death.
This just in (Score:1, Insightful)
Science doesn't already know everything, learns something new today it thought was impossible yesterday, news at 11.
Maybe it is in a decaying orbit (Score:2, Insightful)
And it started out a billion years ago much further away...
Re:Maybe the measurements are wrong or incomplete (Score:5, Insightful)
or (Score:5, Insightful)
perhaps it's spiraling to its demise after billions of years in a decaying orbit.
Wow, a crappy slashdot title (Score:5, Insightful)
Interesting how in the article, they never use the word "impossible". Infact, they actually put forward a handful of possible (although unlikely)ways that this may have occurred.
There's bazillions of things that are unlikely to happen, but the universe is a big place. While we can't predict which particular weird thing we might observe next time, we shouldn't be all that surprised that weirdness is out there.
Re:Maybe the measurements are wrong or incomplete (Score:5, Insightful)
That would fall under "our understanding of orbital dynamics is wrong".
Re:Maybe the measurements are wrong or incomplete (Score:4, Insightful)
Hot Jupiter (Score:5, Insightful)
I Broke The Laws of Physics!!!! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Maybe the measurements are wrong or incomplete (Score:4, Insightful)
"The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not Eureka! (I found it!) but rather, 'hmm... that's funny...'" - Isaac Asimov
Re:Maybe the measurements are wrong or incomplete (Score:3, Insightful)
Or the third option - the orbit it has now isn't the original orbit. Plenty possibilities here.
Re:Maybe it is in a decaying orbit (Score:3, Insightful)
And we just happened to look at it during that 0.1% of its lifespan...
Which is possible of course, and more likely than that percentage since our observation methods find close to the star planets more easily selecting for that case.
Re:Maybe the measurements are wrong or incomplete (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Maybe the measurements are wrong or incomplete (Score:2, Insightful)
Why is it that every "scientists find something new and try to understand it" article on Slashdot prompts comments that get modded up (why is the parent +4 insightful?!) for complaining that arrogant scientists are making stuff up and leaping to conclusions?
Probably because the average slashdotter doesn't know anything about science. Scientific facts, maybe, but procedure? No. See any global warming thread for further details.
Re:Maybe the measurements are wrong or incomplete (Score:1, Insightful)
""However, that does not solve the problem," Hellier said, because the planet's lifetime should still be very short and it would be very unlikely for his team to find it where it did."
Unlikely != impossible. And I'd even question the unlikely bit. With many researchers looking for interesting objects, don't be surprised when you find...an interesting object.
Re:Maybe the measurements are wrong or incomplete (Score:5, Insightful)
What probably happened is something more like this:
An astrophysicist and a journalist sit at a bar after a long day's work looking through telescopes/making shit up.
Journalist: Anything interesting happen today?
Astrophysicist: Actually, yes. We discovered a planet orbiting around another star.
Journalist: Another one? I said interesting, not yet another stupid gas-ball orbiting around another star...that's page H12 at best.
Astrophysicist: Well, the funny thing is, this star is orbiting closer to its star than it ought to be able to...so it's kind of weird.
Journalist: (rolling eyes) So what?
Astrophysicist: The orbit its in should be unstable...it should eventually fall into the star and burn up.
Journalist: Okay, so we have some planet that might be about to burn up...okay, we're probably page 5C with that one.
Astrophysicist: Sure, that's probably what will happen. Of course, if the orbit its in is somehow stable, which is impossible, that would mean 400 years of understanding in orbital dynamics is wrong...(chuckles)...but of course that's ridiculous.
Journalist: 400 years of physics wrong? Impossible planet? I smell a Pulitzer! To the presses!
Astrophysicist: Hey, wait! Come back! That's not what I said...Oh well, at least I can use his article in my next grant application.
Aaaaaand...scene!
Re:Maybe the measurements are wrong or incomplete (Score:5, Insightful)
Absolutely. However, scientists get nervous when they see something this unlikely, especially with such a small sample of similar systems to date. Often, such weirdness means something else is going on that we didn't consider, so the nervousness is justifiable in the general case.
Re:Aliens (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, except we use slightly different terms. Only the non-scientists need to calm down, though. Finding things you didn't expect is par for the course.
Re:Quick Call the Doctor (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, I thought about your point when the show aired. In fact, it is impossible for that planet to exist. You can't form a long-term stable orbit around a black hole. From a two-body, Newtonian point-mass analysis, yes the planet can exist. However, a planet that close to a black hole will be affected by Einstein's General Relativity, which predicts a collapsing orbit. Additionally, the planet would be experiencing severe gravitational stresses and magnetic stresses, causing it to break up or its orbit to decay. The other matter collapsing into the black hole would disrupt the "stable" orbit, also causing the planet's orbit to decay or it to break up. In short, I don't think that it is possible to have a long-term stable orbit around an black hole when it is consuming matter.
If you want a bigger plot "hole", think about where the magic gravity beam came from. Why would it come from a black hole? If it came from the planet, then why was it pointed in space? If the evil creature could create a gravity beam big enough to save a planet, then why couldn't he make a slightly bigger one and take over the universe? Maybe, we need to accept that any Sci-Fi plot will have its weak points, and suspend our disbelief.
The Satan Pit / Impossible Pit were really great Doctor Who episodes. Maybe we should appreciate them for that, instead of taking apart the physics?
Re:Maybe the measurements are wrong or incomplete (Score:3, Insightful)
mmm ... planet. Tasty.
Re:Maybe the measurements are wrong or incomplete (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, one in a million chances do crop up nine times out of ten.
What are the odds? (Score:3, Insightful)
Perhaps we've stumbled across this planet during the last million years of its billion year life-cycle. Sounds like a one in a thousand chance that we'd do that. But the summary says that over 370 exo-planets[1] have been found ... so (waves hands as if doing actual math) its about a 1 in 3 chance that one of the planets we've found so far will be in some one in a thousand situation.
Wait until Kepler starts kicking in a few thousand more exo-planets to the database. Then we'll see even more "impossible" situations.
[1] http://exoplanets.org/ [exoplanets.org] says the current tally is just 358
Re:Maybe the measurements are wrong or incomplete (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Maybe the measurements are wrong or incomplete (Score:3, Insightful)
Not exactly.
The quote I was responding too suggested the event was so unlikely that it makes our current model suspect.
However, if there are 100,000 different things that are likely to be observed in 1 planet in a million, that, if observed significantly more frequently, would damage the model, then we can expect to observe one of these things in about 1 planet in 10.
Suddenly, observing one in the first 10 planets doesn't seem like such a model killer.
I'm not saying that they shouldn't study/analyze it and try to find flaws, I'm just saying it isn't necessarily going to break the theories because it's unlikely. It seemed to me a couple comments simply jumped the gun.
The explanation is obvious (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Maybe the measurements are wrong or incomplete (Score:5, Insightful)
...there's only a 1 in 1000 chance it would be observable now. We've found less than 1000 exoplanets, so the math doesn't work.
That's not how it works. Suppose I pick a number between 1 and 1000 at random. Then, suppose I roll a 1000 sided die. Odds are 1 in 1000 that those numbers will match, but that doesn't mean I can't roll the die and match those two numbers with less than 1000 throws. I might match the numbers on the very first throw! It just means I probably shouldn't bet my retirement on matching those numbers on any given throw.
Similarly, if the odds of discovering a planet such as Wasp18b are 1 in 1000, that doesn't mean that, "we've found less than 1000 planets, so we couldn't possibly have found such a planet yet." It just means that if I observe 1000 planets, most likely only one of them will be like Wasp18b. It could be the first one I observe, the 99th, the 1000th or any one in between.
Re:Maybe the measurements are wrong or incomplete (Score:3, Insightful)
Which solar system is this Venus in? The one I know is odd, but it still rotates. It just takes longer to rotate on its axis than it does to orbit the sun.
Re:Maybe the measurements are wrong or incomplete (Score:4, Insightful)
Or all the planets 1 through 1000.
The point is that the odds of the next being the "one in a thousand" aren't affected by the results of the previous one.
Re:Maybe the measurements are wrong or incomplete (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Maybe the measurements are wrong or incomplete (Score:2, Insightful)
Ummmm, no. Presumably, we are sighting essentially random plants from some larger population of planets. This is not at all like dealing a succession of highly unlikely hands in bridge because we've seen a single instance of this phenomenon, just like the hand you've been dealt in bridge is a single instance of that seemingly unlikely hand. It's the exact same circumstance.
It's like a genetic disorder with odds of 1 in 10000 live births. If I happen to be visiting the hospital this afternoon and it just so happens that the only child born at that hospital has that disorder, what does that tell me about how rare the event is? Answer: nothing at all. The probability of a single event is not revealed or influenced by whether or not I witness it.
If I see a rare thing happen, all that says is that I randomly was present when it happened. It doesn't mean I should run out and buy a lottery ticket nor does it mean that I should re-examine the models of probability that reveal the likelihood of an event's occurence.
As another poster stated elsewhere in this thread, it may be highly unlikely that any specific individual should win the lottery tonight but, nonetheless, it will happen that someone wins it. The probability of the event is 100%. The probability of it striking a specific individual is small.
And so it is with this planet. The probability of seeing such an event can be small but that does not imply, in any way, that seeing the event means that the probability calculation is wrong and that we need to re-examine our models. I would admit that , if we saw some succession of these events we might be able to say something about the model but a single observation says nothing at all about it -- other than the trivial fact that the probability of occurrence must be non-zero.
Re:Maybe the measurements are wrong or incomplete (Score:3, Insightful)
Your statistics are better than your reading comprehension.
The chance of seeing this exceedingly rare event are further reduced 1000 times by its short duration. 370 exoplanets is off by many orders of magnitude from being resonable.
Re:Maybe the measurements are wrong or incomplete (Score:3, Insightful)
"We may have just witnessed an exceedingly rare event" is not science. The Copernican Principle [wikipedia.org] is extremely important to science. You have to assume that we are not in a special place, we are not in a special time. Otherwise every crackpot idea is on an equal footing with solid theory.
Maybe their calculations are wrong...! (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe the way they think to calculate the orbit, size, or even longevity of a planet might be wrong, lending to the assumption that this SHOULD NOT BE. But it is...here is a plain fact...many variables in the universe have yet to be figured out...and many still have room for change. The fact remains, this should not be, so it isn't either they saw wrong or calculated wrong, but which ever it is, we are FAR
from being close to having a good science to judge what is "OUT THERE"!
ps- How about we develop the capability to travel out into space without costing billions each time, and then maybe we can start looking at getting a clue how to calculate distances of planets belonging to another solar system 400 light years away...eyh?
Re:Maybe the measurements are wrong or incomplete (Score:3, Insightful)
It really depends on how small is small. If you happen to find a 1 in 10,000 birth defect, that's one thing. If you happen to find a baby born with telekinesis, that is something else. So rare it's never been seen, and it's not understood.
I haven't RTFA sorry to say, but if all they're saying is this would be a rare event, then blah. You would expect to find one of those now and then. But it sounds like the scientists are saying they don't even understand how this event is possible. Which is what I was trying to get at with my freaky bridge hand example.