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Space Science

Giant Planet Nine Times the Mass of Jupiter Found 73

cremeglace writes "In the late 1990s, astronomers noticed a distinct warp in the disk of dust and gas orbiting a young star some 60 light-years from Earth. Now, using new analytical tools, researchers have discovered a giant planet lurking within the dusty haze. About nine times as massive as Jupiter and composed mainly of gas, the planet is only a few million years old, proving that such enormous planetary bodies can form rapidly." What's amazing about this is that the images taken of the star clearly show the planet first on one side of the star, and then the other, several years later.
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Giant Planet Nine Times the Mass of Jupiter Found

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  • by DarthVain ( 724186 ) on Friday June 11, 2010 @04:27PM (#32541228)

    The universe is a pretty big place, or so I have been told. Undoubtedly if you look long enough you will find entities that challenge your preconceived label or definition of what something "IS". In a universal sense, everything is in flux, so all we are really doing is classification of temporal slices that we can deal with in our limited capacity. At exactly what point does a X become a Y? Considering the time frame being measured is so long, and our perspective so short, it becomes a point of debate, depending on what you call one thing in terms of the other.

The key elements in human thinking are not numbers but labels of fuzzy sets. -- L. Zadeh

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