Jupiter-Sized Alien Planet Is Darkest Ever (Barely) Seen 207
thebchuckster writes "The darkest alien world ever spotted by astronomers has been discovered in the outskirts of our galaxy. 'It's darker than the blackest lump of coal, than dark acrylic paint you might paint with. It's bizarre how this huge planet became so absorbent of all the light that hits it,' David Kipping, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics."
Aliens Develop Perfect Solar Power (Score:3, Insightful)
What's happened to /. titling?
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Do you reckon this planet is covered by monoliths? Maybe its going to explode.
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Prone to methane eruptions no doubt.
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Perhaps they finally found "the ass end of space" everyone keeps talking about.
It's not that kind of "chocolate star".
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How about #000000 (Score:1)
Is it darker than #000000?
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Is it darker than #000000?
Yep, its #FFFFFFFF!
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Is it blacker than a pot *and* a kettle? [youtube.com]
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Technically speaking, the question is meaningless, since...
1) The #xxxxxx system describes what colour an object displays under specific conditions (for example, lighting), not an object's innate light reflection ability (albedo).
2) The #xxxxxx system doesn't describe colour on an absolute scale; it only orders colours in an arbitrary space with an arbitrary metric. For example, there's no guarantee that #000002 is twice as bright as #000001, and there's no guarantee that #000000 is absolute black. Even whe
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Nope, they say it reflects "less than 1% of the light falling onto it". So it could be as light as #020202 (but not #030303).
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Re:How about #000000 (Score:4)
Nope, they say it reflects "less than 1% of the light falling onto it". So it could be as light as #020202 (but not #030303).
RGB hex values are gamma compressed—they represent perceived brightness and not actual light. #020202 actually represents about 0.06% the light of #FFF.
The correct value representing "less than 1%" (assuming #FFF is falling on it) is #191919.
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Now that's a classic Slashdot post!
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Agreed. Obscure and compelling, it's a thing of beauty!
It's got all the fatty, sugary, geeky goodness of the Slashdot Food Network.
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That would be #FFFFFF
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Here you go. This is the original negative image of course - they'll produce a reversed, colorized print to keep journalists happy but here on /. we understand that sort of thing.
(Sorry guys, you're just going to have to imagine a big chunk of whitespace here because the Slashdot lameness filter has no fecking sense of humor)
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Somehow, that statement made me think of Nathan Explosion going something along the lines of: "The blackest black..."
That thing from the Fifth Element? (Score:3)
Is it that big evil thing from the Fifth Element? Do we need four stones to make it fire a a giant Laser beam at it? Is it going to make evil people leak black tar?
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Ghetti Prime. Now, where's Arakkis?
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The original question I asked, "Where is Arrakis"; the bold answers that. And the word "Arrakis" is neither in my spell checker nor my dictionary, and I haven't read Dune in years, and I don't have the books with me now. It's not like Arrakis us real, even though its star is (and according to Wikipedia I doubt if it were there that it would be the least bit habitable).
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No - just the duct tape suit barely covering anything.
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Nobody is actually stopping you from wearing strange neon-colored rubber clothing, you know.
In fact, I'm sure a google search would turn up several purveyors of such things.
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public enemy (Score:1)
fear of a black planet!
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Now we just have to name that phobia.
All the evidence suggests is (Score:2)
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That's a space station! Painted all black!
Re:All the evidence suggests is (Score:5, Funny)
I see a Death star
And I want it painted black....
Re:All the evidence suggests is (Score:4, Funny)
I see a Death star
And I want it painted black....
Palpatine: absolutely not!
Anakin: That's SO not fair!!! You're NOT my father!!!
(Or do rebellious teenage super villains demand to paint their bedroom magnolia?)
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That's no moon.
I find your lack of originality disturbing.
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That's no moon.
I find your lack of originality disturbing.
Who's the greater fool, the fool or the fool who follows?
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That's no moon.
I find your lack of originality disturbing.
Who's the greater fool, the fool or the fool who follows?
Better a witty fool than a foolish wit.
I don't remember that line in Star Wars.
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Greedo said it to Hans which is why Hans opened fire, in the later edits the line was completely removed to allow Greedo to shoot first.
This is not the explanation you are looking for.
A plague on both your droids!
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It's about a deciparsec in.
artificial (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe it's a Dyson sphere [wikipedia.org].
Re:artificial (Score:5, Informative)
But in that case it would encapsulate the star - not circle it.
Re:artificial (Score:5, Funny)
But in that case it would encapsulate the star - not circle it.
Yeah, that's what the engineers told the management, too. But the management didn't believe it. So they built it around the planet instead.
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Haha, that's actually really funny. And sadly true.
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It didn't work, but look how much money management saved!
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Would it be possibly to build a Dyson Sphere around a single star in a binary system? :) Am thinking it would be an order of magnitude harder (gravitational shear being 1 possible impediment), but could be? Then covering it is something to absorb sunlight from the other star could make sense ....
Really, I'd like to know
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Would it be possibly to build a Dyson Sphere around a single star in a binary system?
Anything is possible with enough unobtanium, artificial gravity (unless you spin it up to ludicrous speed to make gravity - see Ringworld) and matter transmutation (if you believe the words of thousand-year-old ship's prostitutes).
Seriously, come back and ask that question when we know how to build a Dyson sphere around a single sun.
Anyway, I thought the original "Dyson sphere" concept was actually a cloud of satellites dense enough to capture all of the solar energy, rather than the rigid sci-fi version
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Orbital requirements. You'll need some satellites orbiting over the poles. If the satellites are attached to each other, the only satellites that are truly 'orbiting' are around the equator. The rest are moving too slow, and would fall into the sun without enough structural support to hold them aloft. Hence, unobtanium.
Re:artificial (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm sure there is a major flaw in the following hypothesis, but couldn't there be a "dyson sphere" around a planet for different reasons? Dyson Spheres are built around a star as a hypothetical optimal method of complete solar harvesting.
What if a species not quite that advanced built such a shell around their own world? One flaw is how to best simulate their sun for grass/animals. Holes in the sphere? A series of lights, or a few on a track, that go around the world as needed? It would work best if the species were nocturnal (either by natural or "artificial" evolution at this point). Considering this is "Jupiter sized" then this thing would have enough room for twenty-two Earths to go from one end to another at the equator. There could be a whole planet and moon system inside.
That much surface area and they might be able to easily simulate their sun on planet for wildlife and then some. According to Wikipedia Jupiter's surface area: 6.1419×1010 km2. Cut that in half since even if the sphere doesn't rotate half of it will be facing their sun, and you have the maximum usable space for solar cells or whatever they are using instead. How much energy would that produce? Unless this thing is a relic left behind, they might not need a full blown Dyson Sphere yet.
According to the article it is in that star's habital zone. So it is in the right spot if it were a converted habital world. Dyson Sphere may not be the correct term, but the concept itself completely off from what could be here.
Then again, it could be the universe's largest naturally formed piece of coal or we discovered the home hub of the all consuming nanite swarm.
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One flaw is how to best simulate their sun for grass/animals.
Let the light in and keep it there. No sun substitute required.
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>A series of lights, or a few on a track, that go around the world as needed?
That's how the Shell World 'Sursamen' in Ian M Banks' book 'Matter' operates. He called the suns Roll Stars.
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One flaw is how to best simulate their sun for grass/animals.
Maybe that is the problem that they were trying to solve: their sun may have evolved to produce more visible light than what they needed, but they still needed the thermal energy. So they paint the sphere black to absorb the heat but not the visible light.
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That's ridiculous! Anyone who knows anything knows that it is a massive computing devices connected to itself across quantum realities and powering itself from the entropy that exists at the end of the universe which it uses to generate random numbers for a interstellar casino.
Don't you know ANYTHING!!!
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There is a flaw in the Dyson Sphere concept too it's that to create a (solar) Dyson Sphere it would require more matter than in a given solar system. Which means (amusing you can't create matter from energy extremely efficiently) would need to transport matter from another solar system to complete it likely needing to destroy at least one other star in the process. So unless a Society has settled and depleted every solar system in the galaxy it's more efficient to move part of your society to another solar
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I'm not sure about that. A Dyson sphere has the inhabitable space of 500 millions earths. Are you sure that there are that many inhabitable planets in our galaxy?
I imagine that a Dyson Sphere would be constructed by mining one star of a close binary star system. I'll leave the details to the engineers.
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If you can build a Dyson sphere to live on, you sure as hell can terraform existing rocky planets or build your own.
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For that matter, as long as we're doing solar system scale engineering, split the difference between making Dyson spheres and planets and make lots of orbitals [wikipedia.org], which are mini Dyson rings. They can achieve the living area of a planet and simulate the gravity of one with a tiny fraction of the material. As for the sun, forget about collecting its energy, just kill it. Once we've stopped the wasteful runaway fusion going on inside the sun, we can mine it for hydrogen to power our fusion reactors and only prod
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There is a flaw in the Dyson Sphere concept too it's that to create a (solar) Dyson Sphere it would require more matter than in a given solar system.
Why would you need much matter? A cloud of solar panels, orbiting the Sun well within the orbit of Mercury (which would be providing the mass source for the satellites) would do the job.
At a sphere one million km in radius centered on the Sun (which as I understand is cool enough that some materials can stay solid indefinitely), Mercury would provide roughly 26 metric tons of mass per square meter of the sphere. Needless to say, you don't need that much mass per square meter and you have plenty of room e
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The "boonies"? Right now, today, if you've got an internet connection, how much does it matter where you live?
Extrapolate to a Dyson sphere capable civilisation.
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Maybe the occupants of the planet realize the planet's spin was slowing down and they were becoming tidally locked with their sun like our moon is with us.
Instead of baking one side of the planet and freezing the other they built a Dyson Sphere and created their own internal day/night cycle.
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What they could've done (and any advanced enough civilization is capable of this) is let their lives be simulated. First they started hooking up to the machines for fun and vacation, then they started getting addicted, then everybody got on it and this required more and more energy to simulate the world and to take the input of the connected individuals. Eventually the energy requirements required first a partial, then the war came for the resources that were left in the sunlight. Then they built a full Dys
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Sure it's possible, but why the hell would they ever do that?
Pre-Copernican theme park for religious literalists? Just paint stars on the inside.
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Well, given how close this thing is to it's parent star, perhaps as a defense mechanism?
Think of an ordinary roughly Earth-sized planet within the habitable zone of a main sequence yellow star much like our own Sun. Now imagine a large gravitational mass (such as a black hole or rogue Gas Giant) passes close enough to perturb the orbit of the planet, causing it to slow down and fall inwards towards it's sun.
If the inhabitants of such a planet were more advanced than us, but not yet advanced enough to have
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I admitted it wouldn't be a perfectly logical thing. The point I was trying to give is they wouldn't be utilizing energy from their world, but this would be a glorified solar panel. It would be a method of collector solar energy hitting their general solar system real estate.
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What if a species not quite that advanced built such a shell around their own world?
Sure it's possible, but why the hell would they ever do that? Planets don't give off energy that you want to harvest.
Jupiter gives off more energy than it receives. I think that Neptune might, too. Furthermore, the sphere would still absorb all the energy below the visible spectrum (IR, i.e. heat).
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https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Dyson_sphere#Dyson_shell [wikimedia.org]
You must be good at reading.
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The problem with that being that a Dyson sphere needs to be completely light absorbent on the *inside*, the outside really doesn't matter, although in this case it being light absorbent on the outside would also capture an insignificant amount of light from the primary.
Always assuming it's a binary system with one star being encapsulated.
In an SF context, that even makes some modicum of sense, in that you'd still have an actual sun and all...
its scorched black (Score:2)
Solar Power (Score:2)
Kardashev (Score:4, Interesting)
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Isn't this exactly what you would expect to see from a planet with a Kardashev level 1 civilisation?
I'd expect to see needy drama queens on a planet with a Kardashian [wikipedia.org] level 1 civilization.
Dead star's core. (Score:2)
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2001 (Score:2)
Maybe it's from 2001 "All the monoliths are black, extremely flat, non-reflective rectangular solids."
I remember Arthur C. Clarke's description of the blackness quite well, I'm thinking it was written slightly better than the summaries description of black.
Unfortunately I don't have the book with me.
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If you remember it quite well, surely you don't need the book?
Not discoverd by Kepler (Score:4, Informative)
TFA is wrong, the planet was discovered from a ground-based observatory back in 2006: http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0609335 [arxiv.org]
Planet Lucifer? (Score:2)
There was a manga years ago called 2001 Nights. It was a Sci-Fi anthology with a Kubrick/Clark 2001 influence.
In one of the stories a "10th Planet" is discovered in our solar system given the name Lucifer. It orbits our sun in a retrograde orbit (it goes the opposite direction of the other planets) and takes 666 years to complete an orbit. It's also the largest gas giant surpassing Jupiter. A mission to study the planet is launched and a number of tragic accidents befall the crew.
It was the first thing I
Or.. (Score:2)
Obvious answer... (Score:2)
Camouflage, possible cloaking device. When you exist in a big black background, and you don't want anyone to find your home world, as the song says, "Paint it Black".
Of course one has to ask what sort of species takes such drastic action to hide themselves.
Is this a case of puppeteers, or simply stealthy invaders?
darkest? (Score:4, Insightful)
what a future... (Score:2)
No wonder other planets refuse to respond to our SETI calls.
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before changing planet formation theories?
Don't think anything that grand has been mentioned anywhere in TFA. The question is more along the lines of what mixture of vaporised rocks would make an atmosphere with those oddball properties.
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Yeah, I mean, it was probably made in the vaporized rocks of Mount Doom or something like it
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No, it's just someone's soot dump from when they cleaned their fireplace.
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I was about to make the same point, but the OED gives several meaning for "circumvent", one of which is "To go round, make the circuit of." Still, it is not the way that most people use the word; I think we can conclude that TFA is not written by one of the web's better science journalists.
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Interesting choice of words - and since the star is some 750 light years away it seems unlikely that it would be orbiting.
Unless someone has invented the warp drive.
Re:How dark? (Score:5, Funny)
It is pitch black. Probably the home world of the grues.
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If Kipping has had to get his hands dirty with any of the apparatus-side aspects of doing very precise optical telescope work, he may well have encountered substantially blacker-than-ordinary surface coatings being used to scrub unwanted light-scatter in sensitive optical gear. In the spirit of accuracy, he might have been emph
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There are probably some chunks of fairly dark and very cold material floating virtually undetectable in the void, but if you've got a nearby star irradiating you, it's just a matter
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You're not, but you're anon, so you get zero points.
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That would be Earth, as it is the only non-alien planet. If you mean "Which is the darkest planet in our Solar System", that would be Mercury with an albedo of around 0.1.