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Space Science

Extra-Solar Planet Is Probably Just A Star 43

Posted by Hemos from the but-i-always-wanted-to-be-a-star dept.
ussphoenix writes: "NASA has issued a press release stating the the object Hubble photographed in 1997 is probably just a star. Originally, astronomers believed it was a proto-planet several times the mass of our own Jupiter. Oh well, there are other extra-solar planets."
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Extra-Solar Planet Is Probably Just A Star More

Extra-Solar Planet Is Probably Just A Star

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  • Hah! Serves them right! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It's really fairly funny. Elementary physics dictates that one mass is going to exert a force on another mass, proportional to the size of the masses and inversely proportional to the disance of the masses. If such a mass did exist outside of Uranus/Pluto (at this time, it would be Urnaus), then it would clearly exert a force on the two outmost known planets -- thus shifting their orbits.

    With the Hubble not being able to tell the difference between a star and a planet, it really makes you wonder about some of the other information NASA has retrieved and released from the Hubble. I seriously can't believe that the Hubble is capable of finding the "edge of the universe", if it can't even tell such a simple difference between planet and star. What NASA should do is send up a specially trained team of Ninjas and coat the Hubble's lenses with Pancake mix. Thus, when NASA reports that all universe looks simply like Ninjas and Pancakes stuck together on a gigantic lens, we'll know they're actually telling the truth.

  • That's the nice thing about Science... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ...scientists will admit when they're wrong.

    Can you imagine a good ol' boy Southern Baptist fundie admitting that they pootched part of their dogma?

    "Uhhh, yeah, well, that Christ guy? We, uhh, figured out he stayed dead. Just forget all that resurrection stuff, OK?"

  • Planet X - it's real (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    They already found planet #10, remember? http://news2.thls.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/ne wsid%5F467000/467572.stm

  • Re:anyone remember planet X? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Didn't they try to invade us during the 50's?
  • wasn't that about the planet 180 degrees out of phase with us, but in the same orbit, so that we'd never know of it's existence, using ground-based observation?

    nick
  • uhhh, I didn't say it was real, buddy! I just said that it was rumored to be true, at some point in the dark ages of the 19th century! :)

  • I agree with you on every count. Everytime I pick up a newspaper or watch the tv news, I spot obvious errors that anyone applying a little critical thinking to would spot a mile away.

    What I don't understand is why this is the case. I always thought that applying a few checks on a story (verifying the credentials of an unknown source) or asking a few questions to try and get a feel for the reliability of the facts involved were things that would be stressed in schools of journalism, but that just doesn't seem to be the case. What I'm even more curious to know is, if these things aren't stressed in journalism courses, just exactly what is?

    Actually, maybe I should qualify the above slightly. I've found that the New York Times tends to do a pretty good job. The error rate there tends to be much lower than in other publications. That's not to say that they're perfect, but I've found them to be better about it than all the local rags in Phoenix. Both the newspaper reporters and broadcasters in Phoenix all seem to be total idiots.

  • Yeah, this is a problem. And to make matters worse, the "press" people in the press release often foul up the content of the release making it out to be something it isn't, either by overstating or understating the significance of the discovery.

    I think we are sorely in need of better trained science journalists. It strikes me as very odd that the one profession (journalism) that (arguably) needs to use critical thinking skills more than anywhere else (for the good of public) rarely uses these skills adequately. But then again, critical thinking skills doesn't sell newspapers, but making a controversy out of insignificant minutia can sell millions.

  • I seem to recall that Pluto is such a small rock that some astronomers wouldn't bother calling it a planet at all if they found it these days, and that it's more like just a large body in the Kuiper Belt (sp?).

    Mind you, it makes me wonder how tempted they were to call Charon "Mickey" instead...

  • When I said "this", I meant the post I was replying to (the one full of nothing and a lot of it), not my own.
  • we have a need for better educated and trained journalists in general. From what I've seen, mega-dummies work at newspapers.


    *LOL*, all the smart people are working in the tech industry or posting on Slashdot! No one with any brains is left for journalism! :p

    - // Zarf //
  • They are hiding the Krull homeworld...
    Last I heard the Krull empire has returnned home once they discovered ESRs secret starship strike force.
    Originally they belived it was owned by Bill Gates but when they found instead of MicroSofties it was "manned" by Tux clones.
    At that sight they turnned around and ran away. ESRs attack force took out 50 ships in retreat. The Krull will not be back any time soon.
    We need to keep the home world secret.
  • Does this mean that there aren't any execptions to the number of planets in a solar system? If there was a planet really found it would mean that this theory is false, and scientists would have to revamp it to fit the evidence that's found.

    --
    Vote for mind21_98 this November! What, there isn't a fill-in candiate spot on your ballot?
  • If you take a look at the links he gives, it is something of a dead giveaway...
  • Well, as the person to whom you're replaying to(my original post was titled something like "If this false reading started it all"), I'd like to thank you for the information. It is true, that I had only considered people searching in optical wavelengths, and I had completely missed the good souls who were using the star's "wobble" as a measue. :) Thanks :)

    Dave

  • I don't think many astronomers at all were convinced by the data when it first came out, and many (including the serious planet hunters I know) were convinced that it was not a planet.

    It was, I think, far to early for a press release to have been made, and I think the press too readily accepts the judgement of only one or two scientists. Even when they do include the opinions of skeptics in their articles, they are often strongly biased in favor of the "new discovery."

    I think it would be interesting to have a web site that is a combination of the e-print [lanl.gov] server and slashdot. Not only would this help discussion within the comminuty, a lurking press might get an insight into the state of different ideas.

  • (P.S. I'm only posting as AC because I can't remember my password and the email account I use is at work and I'm at home... *ugh*)

    You couldn't remember your password?! Your slashdot purity must be like 1%! :P

    Mike Roberto (roberto@soul.apk.net [mailto]) - AOL IM: MicroBerto

  • Oh well, there are other extra-solar planets.

    Well I think the reason this was importent, is we could "see" it. So far as I know (not very far, just from reading SciAm etc.) the others have been found only by detecting the effects they have on their systems.
  • There are actually no confirmed reports of extra-solar planets.

    True, but a genuinely "confirmed" report of an extra-solar planet would require nothing less than a flyby or a photograph as evidence. It's the same thing with black holes. There is definitely compelling evidence that they exist, but there's no way to photograph one.

    We can detect extra-solar planets through a bunch of different methods -- gravitational interference with the star, varying Doppler-shift of the star, or more conventionally, looking for points of light orbiting the star, but this is much more difficult.

    So while we really can't "see" them, we can still know they're there.

  • a parigigm is something of popular belief
    .sig:
  • for a while, back a few years ago, the general paradigm was that a planet existed between mars and earth. anyone remember this? how could this happen?
    .sig:
  • Notice in the text of the report it keeps saying "might". It "might" be a star. The only explanation given is that it is to hot to be a planet. What the heck, they don't even give us any readings, just a bunch of dumbed-down bull.

    Whats the real deal NASA?

    If you go flying back through time, and you see somebody else flying forward into the future, it's probably best to avoid eye contact.

  • It depends on the journalism course.

    While I can't really speak for anything other than my own small niche, the University of Oklahoma has a hard nosed professor who teaches the required second year intro course, and he said the kind of things that should be taught in every course.

    He always tried to keep the focus on well researched, fair stories. I assume that there's probably at least one or two good professors in every school, and then as one gets higher and higher in the ranks one learns that the standards that seem so sensible aren't really enforced out in the news world. It's the problem that crops up in every job in history, standards slowly relax, and people slowly grow accustomed to relaxed standards. Sad... but true.

    -MadDreamer
  • Whats the real deal NASA?

    That's what I'm wondering. If I can remember correctly, NASA made the announcement of the planet at a time when it was being heavily criticized for failed missions among other incidents. Now it seems like the announcement was made as a publicity stunt, considering that they made the announcement before allowing the scientific community to study their claim.

    I'm not one for conspiracies, but this one smells fishy. Maybe NASA never believed they had discovered an extra-solar planet.

  • There are actually no confirmed reports of extra-solar planets.

    Just to clarify, I meant no extra-solar planets have been observed directly. Also, no wandering planets without corresponding stars have been found/inferred.

    something like 38 solar planets

    Looks like I forgot the word extra here. Sorry about that.

  • I think they're covering something up....
  • What are you talking about? These are EXTRASOLAR planets they're talking about.

    --
  • Of course we would have!
    After all, we've been searching very small portions of the bandwidth in very small portions of the sky for a very, very, very (very, very) small amount of time.

    Yes, lets give it to the No Such Agency to build a big factorization computer.

    --
  • Listen, I believe many of us ordinary mortals, i.e. the majority of people, are spoon-fed the opinions/PR of organisations, like NASA, through the media and never hear the other side of the story.
    I, like many here, believe in and hope for the exsistence of extra-solar planets. But the only way we can ever be sure is by sending probes/humans to these planets. It occurs to me that, currently, we, the public, are being told this-and-this is the case about interpreted readings gained from equipment studing the stars - it may be the most likely scenario, but it is still not coberrated(sp-?) data. It is extrapolations...maths etc..Nothing more!
    But I also have a question, prompted by some of the other comments posted here. With all the debris, asteroids etc... within our own solar-system what is the proposed(or proven) mechanics that would allow spacecraft not to collide? Are we still relying upon the idea there isn't enough debris etc... to be worried about?
  • I believe that should be "We can't directly see it, but we THINK it is there", not "KNOW it is there." Remember "Planet X" was inferred also, and where is it now?
  • As one of the people named on the original NASA press release, I've enjoyed reading the wild speculations posted to /. on this one.

    At Caltech, I was the software developer working for Susan Terebey's husband and collaborator (himself formerly an astrophysicist, now a researcher at GE). We built software that performed volumetric ray-tracing using rules from particle physics to simulate radiative transfer (diffusion, recombination, etc.). We could simulate the output from Hubble's NICMOS camera in about 20 minutes on a mid-range Macintosh (of all things).

    Dr. Terebey used this software, together with models of stellar evolution that she's been developing throughout her scientific career, and found that the simulated images matched actual observations amazingly closely. She obtained some more time on Hubble to study protostellar evolution. TMR-1 (Taurus Molecular Region 1) was one of the many things she observed, looking for insights into how stars form.

    I'm a software developer who knows almost nothing of astronomy, but my understanding is that the Terebey-Shu-Cassen model of protostellar evolution is considered to be a defining work in the field. I.e., she's a respected and accomplished scientist.

    Over dinner one August night, they showed these images to me and my wife. We oohed and aahed over this particular one (do so yourself at http://www.extrasolar.com/ [extrasolar.com]) but at the time everyone assumed it was just a star. It was only six months later, that Dr. Terebey determined this object was scientifically unusual. TMR-1C appeared to be ejected from the cluster -- which was interesting in its own right (to a scientist studying stellar evolution). But then it also appeared to be too cold and small to be a star.

    Dr. Terebey and her husband considered a variety of possibile explanations (including that it was a background star, which they estimated at about a 2% chance). Like all good scientists, they considered all the possibilities, one of which was that the object might be a planet.

    They were always very careful to point out that further study was needed (especially spectroscopic analysis to rule out the possibility of a background star) -- that being a planet was only one of many possible explanations -- and in fact it was Dr. Terebey herself who continued to study this object and eventually determined that it is most likely not a planet.

    As with any NASA-funded study, NASA is automatically informed of the results, and NASA scientists inevitably also participate in the peer-review. Generally speaking, and in this particular case, it's not the scientist who calls the press conference, but the funding institute.

    NASA jumped on the results like they did with the "microfossils" in the Mars rock. The press jumped on it like they did with that story and the one about Dolly, the cloned sheep.

    You, gentle reader, probably found out about it through the fisheye lens of the media. I suppose that lends a certain sensationalism to it, but in reality it was just ordinary science.

    Observations were made by an expert in the field, hypotheses considered and published in a peer-reviewed journal with those observations. Additional observations were performed, hypotheses rejected, published again. Pretty dull, actually, but apparently it can make good copy.

    Not unlike a few recent software technologies.

    Call me a disgruntled former employee if you will, but I think it's interesting how NASA never mentions the difficulties Dr. Terebey, a woman operating through her own self-owned small business, had to overcome to obtain funding through their bureaucracy. Science is increasingly a boys club for tenured university faculty.

    Or how NASA exposes scientists to the media spotlight, without regard to what that exposure might do to their careers.

    (And don't even get me started about how software development is done at NASA. If you ever wondered how they could ship an interface that was using metric on one end and British on the other, I could tell you enough stories that you'd stop wondering that, and start wondering how they ship anything that works at all!)

  • I don't really want this to be a flame, but I guess it's going to be one. Not of you, but of journalists.

    You say that we need better trained science journalists. That may be true, but let me point out a flaw in that line of thinking. As someone who is knowledgable about science, I usually spot huge errors in every single article I see. It's once a month maybe that I see an article that's basically OK.

    What makes me believe that it's just science news that these idiots are screwing up? Nothing. I imagine that the police cringe every time they read an article about a crime investigation, because they can spot the obvious errors. I imagine that the sports guys do the same. And that goes for every section of the newspaper.

    I want to correct you statement to declare that we have a need for better educated and trained journalists in general. From what I've seen, mega-dummies work at newspapers.

    Sorry Cmdr. Taco. I guess your excuse is that you don't actually write the news, you just post it. :-)


  • Nope. If the earth was in a circular orbit there could theoretically be a planet on the other side of the sun that existed and wouldn't be observable from earth. But the Earth's orbit isn't circular, it's eliptical. (It's really close to circular, but not quite.)

    Some would then say, "well, it's just directly opposite on the ellipse. But that doesn't happen either because the planet spends a lot more time on the far side from the sun than it does in the part of the orbit closer to the sun.

    For a better explination check out <a href="http://zebu.uoregon.edu/textbook/planets.htm "> this.</a>

    provolt
  • As another poster has already stated, most astronomers doubted the claim that this object was actually a planet. The evidence was skimpy:
    1. it was close to a close binary star
    2. it was dimmer than the stars
    3. some claimed to see a "filament" joining the object to the binary

    Astronomers have had a number of bad experiences based on "filaments" which appear to connect two objects -- which are actually at very different distances from us. There was a heavily publicized case a few years back, in which Halton Arp claimed that such a "filament" joined a quasar and a nearby galaxy, thereby "proving" that the quasar was much closer than its redshift would indicate. Sigh.


    Anyway, back to TMR-1C. I remember talking to other astronomers at the summer meeting of the American Astronomical Society in 1997, in San Diego, and most of them agreed with me that this was just a chance superposition of a background star with the binary. We thought that the discoverers should have waited for some additional evidence:

    1. did the "planet" share a common motion in space with the binary star (we call this "proper motion"); it would take a few years to confirm this, since one has to wait for the stars to move a perceptable amount
    2. did the "planet" have the proper colors? A planet in this system would have a particular ratio of visible to near-infrared to far-infrared radiation, whereas a background star would have very different ratios. Again, this would take time to confirm, since one would need to apply for telescope time at observatories with the proper equipment.


    My guess is that when the researchers (who work for NASA) started talking about their work with their colleagues, word reached the upper echelons of administrators, who probably ordered the press releases. I am speculating that it might have been hard for one of the astronomers on the team, if he or she had serious doubts about the claim;
    it's not easy to tell your boss to shut up.


    But a scientist is supposed to do this ...


    Oh, and the poster who claims that astronomers have not detected ANY extra-solar planets is dead wrong. The radial velocity measurements he interprets as "changes in stellar shape" are really due to the motions of stars in orbits around their center of mass with bona-fide planets. Check out


    http://cannon.sfsu.ed u/~gmarcy/planetsearch/planetsearch.html [sfsu.edu]


    and


    [obspm.fr]
    http://www.obspm.fr/encycl/encycl.html

  • There's not a huge amount of difference sizewise between a planet several times the size of Jupiter and a small brown dwarf star. The differentiation is that the star is massive enough for fusion to begin in its core...but EM radiation is emitted long before that point due to compression and friction. (Jupiter itself is large enough that it emits more heat than it receives from the sun.)
  • Actually, surprisingly enough the very first extrasolar planets were detected after a false alarm. These are not the relatively nearby planrts of Marcy and Butler, but the rather bizarre pulsar planets [psu.edu] found by Alexander Wolszczan [psu.edu], of which two have been confirmed since 1994. In 1992, Matthew Bailes [swin.edu.au], then a PhD student at Jodrell Bank (I think - later he was a post-doc in the astro group [unimelb.edu.au] I was in) "discovered" a pulsar planet with a period of 6 months - had a paper published in Nature and all. Then had to retract the claim a few months later when they realised it was a calibration error. But others were already looking for other pulsar planets and found some real ones!

    I can tell you, he is NOT in the least bit proud to have sent others looking in the right direction by his mistake!!

    An excellent reference on extra-solar planets in general is the Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia [obspm.fr].

  • Oh well, there are other extra-solar planets.

    I read about this recently. There are actually no confirmed reports of extra-solar planets. When NASA first issued their claim, many scientists were skeptical and criticized NASA for issuing a press release before their claim of an extra-solar planet was reviewed by the scientific community. The chances of a discovery of an extra-solar planet is very slim since planets, unlike stars, reflect light rather than emit light. Extra-solar planets, if they exist (they probably do), would be too hard to see even with the most powerful telescopes.

    While there are no observed extra-solar planets, something like 38 solar planets have been inferred by discovering abnormalities in a star's shape because of the gravitational pull of the planet.

  • Re:If this false reading started it all ... (Score:3)

    by JetJaguar ( 1539 ) on Saturday April 08, 2000 @06:17PM (#1143562)

    No, Geoff Marcy [sfsu.edu] and his group had been searching for (and perhaps discovering planets) long before this was announced. What made this "discovery" significant was that it was the first time anyone had directly detected a planet optically (or at least thought they did).

    All the extrasolar planets discovered to date have been spectroscopic, meaning that the astronomers used the Doppler effect to measure changes in the velocity of the parent star and detect the presence of an unseen body (a planet), by it's influence on the velocity of the star.

  • And elsewhere in our solar system.. (Score:3)

    by toofast ( 20646 ) on Saturday April 08, 2000 @05:32PM (#1143563)
    What researchers once thought was the 4th planet of our solar system happens to be a dead beetle on the telescope lens. Still no news on how the germful meteorite struck earth, but NASA is currently invesigating in a new product called Windex...

  • If this false reading started it all ... (Score:3)

    by dbarclay10 ( 70443 ) on Saturday April 08, 2000 @05:23PM (#1143564)
    Hey, if this false reading is what started all the planet-hunters, then it's one false reading I'd be proud of.

    Dave

  • Great photos (Score:3)

    by rjamestaylor ( 117847 ) <rjamestaylor@gmail.com> on Saturday April 08, 2000 @05:26PM (#1143565) Journal
    Be sure to follow the reference link [stsci.edu] at the end of the article to find nice pictures of the celestial object, formerly known as Protoplanet in Taurus.

    Who says space isn't cool?

  • Saw this coming from a mile away... (Score:4)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 08, 2000 @06:00PM (#1143566)
    I remember the day that this "extra-solar planet" was announced. I was working for a major British telescope in Hawaii, and the only people who believed that this thing was actually a planet was us students. None of the astronomers thought it was a planet. I distinctly remember someone saying, "In a couple of years they'll figure out that it's a white dwarf or something. It's no planet."

    This story seems to be an indication of the sorry state of astronomy these days. There's not enough money going into it, and so astronomers have to release whiz-bang discoveries in an attempt to gain public support and thus more money. Witness also the announcement that the Mars meteorite had fossilized life.

    (P.S. I'm only posting as AC because I can't remember my password and the email account I use is at work and I'm at home... *ugh*)

  • Re:anyone remember planet X? (Score:4)

    by DHartung ( 13689 ) on Saturday April 08, 2000 @07:33PM (#1143567) Homepage
    A reminder that the news from NASA is about a planet outside our solar system.

    There have been several hypothetical planets [seds.org] that did not turn out to be real, but none specifically between Earth and Mars. The term Planet X was used by Percival Lowell around a hundred years ago to refer to a specific mass beyond the orbit of Neptune that seemed to be causing its orbital inconsistencies. The search for Planet X took decades (really beginning in 1841), finally ending with the discovery of Pluto in 1930. To some extent, this search continues, with the discovery in the last decade of hundreds of so-called "Transneptunian" asteroids, representative of a great cloud of small rocks. While it's not impossible that there is still a large planet-sized body far out there, it's unlikely. There have been numerous non-scientific books and articles that have used terms like "Planet X" or "Planet Ten" to refer to other imagined planets, but these works aren't scientifically supported.
    ----

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