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."
Nature paper (Score:5, Interesting)
So if the orbit is decaying, we'll be able to measure it in 10 years, otherwise there will be useful data to refine theories about tidal forces in the surfaces of stars.
Maybe it was a "normal" planet... (Score:5, Interesting)
...formed one billion years ago, but originally much more distant from the star. But its orbit was not stable, approaching quickly (in astronomical time) to the star; and we're just lucky to have found it in the final stage of the death spiral. If this is the case, it may even be possible to watch the final spectacle in a timeframe reasonable for human scale (a few thousand years, perhaps centuries, or even less).
Wild speculation of course... but just to be safe, I'm immediately canceling all my plans of space vacations near the Wasp18 system. I never liked wasps anyway.
alternatively (Score:5, Interesting)
we're actually watching the planet in the process of being consumed
which would be highly unlikely, to get that timing right, as there's a window of only a couple thousand years in which we could see that happen, but maybe that's what we're really seeing
in which case, rather than revise orbital dynamics, this planet could contribute to our understanding of astrophysics/ michael bay style thermodynamics by allowing us to watch a jupiter sized planet ripped to smithereens in real time
Re:Maybe the measurements are wrong or incomplete (Score:3, Interesting)
What do you mean "presumptuous"? This is how science works: based on past observations, you construct a theory of how things should work. Then you make new observations that contradict your theory, and you revise it. That's what we're seeing here.
I'm impressed by the speed at which the WASP team makes these "impossible" discoveries, though. A few days ago there was news about WASP-17b that orbited around its sun in the wrong direction, and now WASP-18b orbits too close to its sun. Cool stuff.
Re:Quick Call the Doctor (Score:2, Interesting)
It goes hand in hand with conspiracy theory (Score:3, Interesting)
Which is driven by the desire for validation through possession of "secret knowledge."
Therefore, NASA faked the moon landing, auto makers have suppressed the 200mpg carburetor, and scientists are all glory seeker publishing dubious results that they make up as they go along. /. has a large tin foil hat contingency, so this should come as no great shock.
"Orbital dynamics" never in doubt; poor article (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually the orbital dynamics discovered(?) by Johannes Kepler (or Newton) was never in doubt regardless of what the article says. That's because what they're really talking about here is the rate of drag caused by the star the planet is orbiting; this needless to say was never conceived of let alone formulated 400 years ago. Without these stellar winds coming from the star, the planet would keep orbiting just fine forever (unless the star was a really dense object in which case general relativity would come to play but I digress).
The astronomers think that some (relatively new) theories regarding the amount of stellar wind from the parent star could be wrong, otherwise the planet is due to fall into the star in ~1 million years, a time too short on the scale of the lifetime of the system to be chalked up to coincidence. Doesn't have the same sound bite as claiming that 400 years of science could be wrong though.
I'm skeptical (Score:3, Interesting)
I once managed a junior programmer who would insist that the compiler had a bug in it when she couldn't get her program to work.
We eventually fired her.
Why do I mention this? Because, as a programmer, when I get results I don't expect, I tend to assume that I have made a mistake somewhere. I don't assume that the underlying theory of how computers work is in error.
Are they even sure that they're looking at a planet? My first assumption would be that they are not seeing what they think they were seeing, rather than there is a flaw in the theory of orbital dynamics.
I'm not being accusatory here, just skeptical.
Re:Maybe the measurements are wrong or incomplete (Score:3, Interesting)
True, but the other question, the one not often asked, how many similarly unlikely occurrences could we see, that we haven't? It may be likely that we see one similarly unlikely event every few dozen planets.
Re:Maybe the measurements are wrong or incomplete (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe what they are seeing is the Fleet of Worlds. Instead of one planet, there are eight of them, which means that they are actually orbiting on an 8 day schedule instead of 1. That would place them much farther out from the sun.
Or else it is protected by a simple warp field.
Re:Maybe the measurements are wrong or incomplete (Score:5, Interesting)
Note to Slashdot admins: A DROPDOWN BOX IS A VERY VERY STUPID MECHANISM FOR MODERATION. That is all.
Yea! Why isn't it command-line based like other good user interfaces?
Re:Maybe the measurements are wrong or incomplete (Score:3, Interesting)
A planet "spiralling into the sun" would be remarkably rare to begin with - it would require a close pass between start systems or somehting equally energetic. This planet has been around at least a billion years, but would die in a million (by current theory), for each case of this remarkable rare event that has happened in the past billion years, 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. Rare events are possible, but handwaving away anomalous data as "just unlikely" is really bad science.
Meanwhile, Venus is still sitting right next door and stubbornly not rotating. Something is off with our models, for sure.
Re:Quick Call the Doctor (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Okay, I'll bite. What's the difference between a black hole and any other star, from a reasonable distance? A black hole's just a mass, that within a certain distance of the black hole (the Schwarzschild radius) acts very oddly indeed, but outside that distance, acts like any other large mass. A black hole could have the same mass as the Earth (but be the size of a golf ball) and the moon would still orbit it just fine, wouldn't it? It seems to me the main problem the planet would have is that a black hole would be, well, black, so the planet would be as cold as Pluto.
Age Estimates Incorrect??? (Score:1, Interesting)
"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"
Could it be possible that the age estimates are grossly over-exaggerated? Could it be possible that the creationist scientists were right all along? This fits their model much better than the evolutionary model scientists. Surprisingly, even Scientific America has claimed that the "big-bang" theory isn't plausible (March 2003).
Doctor Who (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Quick Call the Doctor (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Wow, a crappy slashdot title (Score:3, Interesting)
On the other hand, we should be surprised if we catch a one-in-a-billion event after a mere 370 observations.
Does no one take statistics and survey sampling anymore? I'm not a statistician, but even I understand why that is wrong. We should not be surprised when we detect a one-in-a-billion event after only 370 observations. We should be surprised if, on average, we have detected a one-in-a-billion event far more frequently than expected (that is, we conducted one trillion observations and detected significantly more than 100 such occurrences), assuming our sample technique doesn't skew the probability of detecting the one-in-a-billion event.
...) we should be surprised. But it is not statistically meaningful that the 370th planet we found was that one in a billion; our sample size is not yet large enough to say such a thing.
If the odds of finding a Wasp-18b type planet is one-in-a-billion, what are the odds that the first planet we detect is a Wasp-18b type planet? One in a billion. What about the 370th planet? One in a billion, again. What about the one billionth planet? Yep, one in a billion. We don't have to detect one billion planets -- or even a statistically significant portion of one billion planets -- before we can expect to find such a planet. It could be the first, the 10th, the 1000th or the one billionth. But on average, for every billion planets we examine, we should only detect one Wasp-18b type planet. If we consistently start finding one in a million (or one in a thousand, or
Furthermore, if our sampling (detecting) technique skews the odds in favor of finding Wasp-18b type planets, then maybe the odds of us detecting such a planet is only 1 in 1000 although the odds of such planets forming are only 1 in a billion.