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Space Science

11 New Extra-Solar Planets Announced 155

Posted by michael from the Great-were-the-Antha... dept.
Shooter6947 writes: "The European planet hunting team, including Mayor and Queloz who first found 51 Pegasus b in 1995, have just announced the discovery of 11 new extrasolar planets. The new list includes 2 multiple planet systems, one planet with an orbital eccentricity of .93, and another in a nearly circular orbit near its star's habitable zone. Kickass!"
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11 New Extra-Solar Planets Announced More

11 New Extra-Solar Planets Announced

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  • Re:ET (Score:1)

    by Phroggy ( 441 )
    Give it ten years, and we'll find extra-terrestrial life.

    This assumes that there's extra-terrestrial life to be found in the first place.

    --

  • This was kind of the philosophy that they talked about in "Rendezvous with Rama"... they had run out of all the Greek and Roman gods, and had moved onto Hindu gods at that point. Rama is Hindu, I guess, though I know very little about Hinduism, so I could be off by a religion or two.

    These days we seem to name things XP3850203. I think they now name planets after StarCraft CD Keys.
  • Which other forms of communication could there be, other than transmitting electromagnetic waves?

    Freaky quantum stuff. I think using coupled ("verschränkt", the English term escapes me at the moment) particle pairs are discussed on theoretic levels for communications or teleportation.

    But, as others have pointed out, even radio communication does not have to be detectable. I think even ours gets less and less detectable outside Saturn's orbit. We are moving from high power broadcast to localized, low energy communications. This comes with the move to high bandwidth, digital communications. There are plans to switch terrestrial TV broadcast entirely from analog to digital in Germany by 2007 or so, for example.

    If a civilization does not intentionally set up radio beacons the waves could probably only be detected in the short period (~100 years?) between emergence of radio waves as forms of communications and advancements of technology making them move to digital high bandwidth communications.

  • Re:... (Score:1)

    by andyf ( 15400 )
    bugger all intelligent life on Earth

    Was that a Monty Python's The Meaning of Life reference, or just a coincidence?

  • People should be saying "These are all huge planets we could never live there." Who's to say nothing else can?

  • Re:... (Score:1)

    by Azog ( 20907 )
    That's a disappointment.

    It obviously isn't intelligent life...


    Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
  • Dude, don't use the endurium, you're killing millions of innocent little creatures! (or something, my memory is fuzzy :-) ).

    Goddamn what a great game.
  • life as we know it is very slim indeed

    Well this is true only assuming there are actually other lifeforms out there in the universe. If not, life as we know it pretty much covers the entire gambit.

    --
  • it's pretty funny watching any thread not related to linux, microsoft or linux-inspired hardware hacks decay into a litany of slashdot references, linux in-jokes and theonion.com-esque pieces.

    the additional insight supplied by the slashdot community on this story is non-existent, except as reinforcement of the last word in the story post; a collective exclamation of "kickass".


    --
  • ...so 11 planets were discovered ALL AT ONCE?

    Seriously, what's with the scientific community holding onto their discoveries until they're newsworthy? Makes me wonder how long ago the first of these 11 'newly discovered' planets were really found...

    Read some of the linked pages. These planets are found by making very high precision measurements of their stars' spectra over a period of years. Naturally, the astronomers parallelize the process as much as possible and observe loads of stars over those years.

    When they have enough observations to A) find a planet and B) pin down the planet's orbital parameters with enough accuracy to make their claim worth while, then C) they can announce. Since the observations are parallelized and batched, the announcements are batched.

    It's not a big deal.
    --

  • I don't think it as much as a troll but the fact they haven't taken High School History yet. Seriously though, I know so many children who believe this as it's simply common knowledge. It's almost as bad as wacko parents blaming Columbine soley on videogames.

    -AU
  • We've recently heard from the Cassini probe [cnn.com] about higher-than-expected radiation around Jupiter, and what was expected was already a very high level of radiation. These newly discovered planets are Jupiter-sized or even larger gas giants. Not to say life can't adapt in that environment, but I would expect moons around these planets to be bombarded with intense radiation even if they're an acceptable distance from their sun.
  • One other thing you forgot to mention there: SETI is using (IIRC) ground based radio telescopes for the data collection. If my memory is correct, the usable, receivable data in the radio frequencies in earth atmosphere is something less than 10% of the total radio spectrum. Which means that we're missing 90% of the possible data. Add in that any spacefaring race would have no need to worry about using that measly 10% (unless trying to communicate through an atmosphere like ours), and we are missing a huge section of the data.
  • How about one that is actually useful to linux people...

    www.blendedplanet.com

    kinda almost makes up for BlenderMania going down a few days ago...
  • why do they keep using Greek god names anyway? There are lots of other gods from other cultures / religions that are useful.

    Just don't name a planet Xenu, that's all...

  • ...Now all we need is a little Endurium and we'll be ready to start looking for inhabitable planets to colonize.



    "Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
  • Not just _towards_ extrasolar life - if they find an atmosphere with a significant amount of free O2, that is direct evidence of life. Without life, O2 tends to naturally combine with silicon, leaving the atmosphere with no free O2. Therefore, if we find a strong O2 signature in any spectra taken from an extrasolar planet, that planet has life.
  • I'll bet some crackpot with some half baked title of ownership is already drooling over the prospect of his solar system having habitable planets, and thus, commercial real estate.
  • Wow.
    'earth released its gravitiational lock'....'weird conception of orbital mechanics'

    Ummm...
    All masses attract all other masses, its only a question of the magnitude of the force produced by the masses involved.
  • From the article:
    This new planet is therefore located in the "habitable zone" where temperatures like those on the Earth are possible. Still, it is a giant, gaseous planet (with a minimum mass of 3.5 times that of Jupiter, or about 1000 times that of the Earth) and thus an unlikely place for the development of life. Nevertheless, it may be orbited by one or more moons on which a more bio-friendly environment has evolved.

    Maybe we'll find a man on the moon after all...


  • During the Apollo missions, we were lucky the Earth released its gravitational lock and allowed the rocket to leave Earth's orbit,

    *ahem*
    The Apollo missions never left Earth's orbit; or, do you think that the moon is not orbiting Earth?

  • Any chance they will name one Rupert?

    -----
  • You mean with that big tilted rock formation? You know which one I mean :-)
  • You're right, this is undeniably cool. I've heard people complain: "Well, these are all huge planets, nobody could live on them." Sure, but what about the moons? If Titan were in orbit around a planet in the habitable zone, it might be suitable.

    There are plenty of moons in our own solar system that, in the right orbit and the right chemical makeup, could be perfectly suitable for habitation. How cool would that be. "Hey, it's a full Saturn tonight. Isn't it beautiful?" Now that would be undeniably cool.

  • And sometimes they cross orbits.

  • two-planet system

    Is there some sort of 3D simulation of such a system available, I'm having a hard time imagining this...

  • Every time our "Advanced" culture interacts with a less developed one, it pretty much destroys the less developed culture.

    I think the only reason there isn't "Proof" that aliens exist is because it wouldn't be good for us--no matter how ready we think we are.

    I just wish we had really been "Advanced" enough to be able to view cultures without destroying them over the past few hundred years.

    I wonder how many world cultures at our level have been destroyed because they just "Gave up" after finding out that everything they've invented over the past 100 years--and everything they will invent over the next 2000--has already been invented and handed to them.

    Seriously, how do you catch up?
  • Nah..not go science. Benevolent conservatism will lock us in place. I remember when the movie 2001 came out. So many promises. Look where we are now
  • I wouldn't believe some guy named Jesus. I've read about him. Legend has it, he went around saying that non believers should be burned . . . blah blah rant rant
  • the planet in question here has a very elliptical orbit, which is not close at all to being circular.

    Of course, if you'd read the article, you would realize that these are two separate planets. One (HD80606) has an e=.93, which is very nearly an ellipse. The other one in question (HD28185) is in a nearly circular orbit in what scientists like to call the "habitable zone", which simply means they think water could exist in liquid form there on the surface of a body.

  • The doppler shift in the star's spectrum (which indicates a "wobble" because it's being pulled on by its companion planet) isn't the only way to detect a planet around a distant star. Recently there have been detections from measuring the change in the brightness of the star as well. When a planet crosses the disk of the star (from our point of view) it gets dimmed just a little, but enough to detect. This site [rl.ac.uk] has a list of other methods (current and future) for doing detection of extrasolar planets as well. Coronographs (making a false eclipse by blocking out the star physically, or with adaptive digital techniques) seems like the most promising for the near term.

    ---

  • How about # of seconds since 1970 (or some other importand date). Chop it up using the metric system (Megasecond, etc). chris@syrnix:~$ date +%s 986598778
  • Nasa has announced that they're going to launch a probe in an attempt to crash it into the planets surface. One spokesperson was quoted "If they're there this ought to wake them up!"

    Confucius say: Man who walk through airport turnstile sideways going to Bangkok.
  • I know most of these planets are Juipter sized. But what if life could live on them? Would the exrtreme gravity make life extremely small and resrict it to bacteria and fungus? Or just really tiny bi-pedal species?

    Something to think about.

    Cd
  • Nice singing, but the article was about ESO not NASA.
  • So we dont actually detect the planet directly, but only by it's effects on a large enough body (star) that can be detected by us? So we dont know 100% if these planets exist or of what form, is that correct, because we dont actually view them directly?

    Or is this the primary detection and there is a secondry verification? Apologies for the questions, but this is rather interesting and I'ld like to understand what's being done.
  • I'm not up with the latest techniques in planet detection, so can someone tell me how they find these things? Radio waves? Gravitational influences? Guessing? How many planets is this now scientists have found? General pondering - wonder if any species on the other planets (if any) are staring back at us, wondering if the planet in the habitable zone of Sol (or whatever they call it) has life? Given that there semms to have been no contact from intelligent life as yet, I think that may suggest there is no chance of contact in the end. I would personally think IF life exists on other planets and they are capable of interstellar fight, the following senarios would take place... 1) Life is so rare that other life form becomes extremely excited and greets us in a big way 2) Life is so common that alien creatures just go ho hum and announce their presence by landing in Times Square.
  • I think the point of the poster before was.... even that we may only have had a short period of time to broadcast... that may not have been the case for others. They may have been signalling for thousands of years and we dont seems to be actually looking instead of sending, which we all agree is highly unlikely to work.

    Wasn't that what SETI is for? To search for deliberate signals? We certainly have not found anything yet. That could mean that we are alone, or have not had enough time to recieve a signal... or something out there realised radio signals are a bad way to announce oneself and came up with some other form of messaging we have been missing entirely, cause we a) have not thought of it or b) just have not got the right technology.

    I once heard the best way to identify ourselves would be to send the DNA pattern. Deliberate and in a way, a great way to id ourselves. Why not the aliens do the same with their version of a DNA? Of course, the message medium we haven't worked out, it needs to be able to perserve over huge distances OR move faster than light.

    I guess the point in the end is that if there are aliens out there saying hi, we are looking in the wrong place.
  • Life has existed on this planet for several million years and I would think that the mechanics of what consists of a livable planet would be well known to aliens. I would say Mars and Earth would be sitters for advanced life forms to investigate for life - or even easily obtainable resoureces. Maybe we do need to be Coreward and a bit more along timewise to be detected, but does not say someone out there has not been looking, now does it? They may also have technology that can detect life and planets a damn sight easier than we can. Who said aliens rely on OUR signals, that would be highly unlikely to be recieved anyway?

    Yes, that's IF. It's also possible that we are the most advanced life form as well and that there is a ape in a tree somewhere, not knowing his ancestors could be getting the big hello form an odd bipeds in a few thousand years time
  • Actually, I saw an interview several years ago in which a cast member pointed out on the Enterprise schematics that there was only one real bathroom on the whole ship. Guess they didn't figure we needed to see space toilets in all the quarters...
  • I think you're confusing Jesus with some of the people who came after him. After all. the essential teaching of Jesus Christ (and it says this in the bible) is "Love thy neighbour as thyself". And there are no exception clauses to that.

    Which is why hatemongers who call themselves Christians really aren't...



    Hacker: A criminal who breaks into computer systems
  • I doubt it. Unless we find extra-terrestrial life in our solar system it will be impossible for us to get close enough to any place else to find life there within our lifetimes.
  • Guess this means I better dust off the ol' Klingon dictionary, eh?
  • It is a gas giant planet, it probably couldn't sustain life (as we know it), although life as we know it is very slim indeed. It is also very possible there are moons around this planet that are very similar to earth, and could be a very good place to look for the first extraterrestrial lifeforms. Jupiter has quite a few moons that we think might hold life, it stands to reason the newly discovered "habitable zone" planet may as well, especially it is nearer it's sun.


    Enigma
  • According to the article, they found a giant planet moving in an orbit around its Sun-like central star that is very similar to the one of the Earth and whose potential satellites (in theory, at least) might be "habitable".

    I wonder if this could be a candidate for our new home when our sun blows up in 5 billion years.
  • The article discusses two-planet systems. Just today, our physics teacher was describing how our "moon" is actually more of a planet, and we revolve around each other. Pluto and Charon are another set of double planets. Moons are more on the order of Phobos and Deimos, Mars' moons, which span about 22 miles laid end to end.
  • ...so 11 planets were discovered ALL AT ONCE?

    Seriously, what's with the scientific community holding onto their discoveries until they're newsworthy? Makes me wonder how long ago the first of these 11 'newly discovered' planets were really found...

  • Re:clarification - orbital eccentricity (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Let me try this again:

    We are currently studying orbits in my mechanics class. The break down is as follows:

    e = eccentricity:

    If e is greater than 1: Hyperbolic orbit
    If e is equal to 1: Parabolic orbit
    If e is between 0 and 1: Ellipictal orbit
    If e is equal to 0: Circular orbit

    * Note that e can not be less than 0 because it means that the energy of the orbiting body is less than the potential energy of the system (If this were the case it would mean the the kinetic energy is negative, which is not possible).

    Please mod this up, and mode the poorly written version down.

  • Re:clarification - orbital eccentricity (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Actually, the newly discovered planet orbiting in the star HD 28185's habitable zone has a fairly low eccentricity of 0.06. For reference, the eccentricity of Earth's and Mars' orbits are 0.0016 and 0.093, respectively. See this diagram and table [unige.ch] for more details.

    --Chris
    http://www.shatters.net/~claurel [shatters.net]
  • It seems that the star around which that "habitable zone" planet revolves (iota Hor) is 56 light years away.

    Think about that for a second - flat out at the speed of light, and it takes you 56 years to get there.

    It might as well be on the other side of the universe.

    Space travel sucks. Why couldn't Sol be in a nice, tightly packed, globular cluster?

  • Note that one of the preconditions to life is that there are various cycles.

    waves 0.1s
    waves 1s
    waves 10s
    tides ~ 0.5d
    day/night 1.0d
    moon 4w
    summer/winter 1 y
    Solar cycle ~ 11 y
    ice ages 10k y
    ???? 23M y

    All these cycles make sure that at least at one point in the cycle, the conditions are "good" to cause life to start. After that, the conditions are bound to be worse, and evolution is forced to adapt to the worsening conditions.

    I speculate that life can only get started/continue going when there are several cycles interfering with each other at different frequencies.....

    A nearly circular orbit, like earth, is bad for evolution. Some excentricity is good.

    Roger.

  • So why did we not receive any signals from other civilisations? That's what I'm bothering with. Is noone using radio waves to communicate outthere?

    Perhaps it's only during a short technological infancy that it makes sense to haphazardly broadcast RF in all directions. After a while, communication shifts to wire / fiber based connections, or the RF becomes much more focused and directional (and thus much more difficult, if not impossible to detect from a distance).

    Perhaps a great many stars to host intelligent civilizations, but many of them stopped broadcasting long before we started listening, and many haven't started broadcasting yet.

    Plus, we're not doing ANY form of listening on more technologically advanced communications methods that the most interesting civilizations would likely be using.
  • The current technology also is limited to close-in fast moving palnets. You usually have to observe two orbital cycles to verify the result.
    So slower orbits, on the order of a year or more haven't really been looked for yet due to the
    time and cost involved.

  • ... (Score:2)

    by toofast ( 20646 )
    And they intercepted the first extra-solar communication, in a language still unclear to humans:

    f1rs7 p05t!

    Scientists are struggling to figure it out.

  • Almost all extra-solar planets are detected by this indirect method. However, in the case of the planet around HD 209458, the detection was confirmed by measuring the drop in light as the planet passed between us and its star. More info at http://www.exoplanets.org/
  • An earth sized satellite, moving in orbit around the gas giant, would be perpetual darkness for half of the orbit around the planet, while in perpetual full daylight for the other half of its orbit around the giant

    The side of the satellite facing the planet (it would almost certainly be in a 1:1 tidal lock) would be eclipsed for part of the day (which would also be its orbital period around the giant -- probably in the range of a few Earth days). The exact fraction of the day depends on the radius of the planet relative to the orbit radius of the satellite, but it would be relatively small, because Roche's Limit sets a minimum ratio (about 2.5:1, IIRC) between the two radii.

    The side of the satellite away from the planet would have a normal day/night cycle.

    Lets not forget ejections from a possibily volatile gas-giant

    Ejections all the way to orbit against the gravity of a gas giant? Powered by what?

    the amount of space crap that would bombard a planet(and the moons, which we would be looking to inhabit)of that size

    This is a likely problem; a gas giant would tend to sweep in space junk.

    However, for professional aesthetes such as myself, it would be worth any risk--for the part of the satellite's orbit where the lighted side of the planet would be facing it--to watch planet-rise! But that's assuming that the satellite has a revolution as well as an orbit, and that might not be the case(look at OUR moon). As noted above, the satellite would almost certainly be tidally locked, so the planet would stay put in the sky.
    /.

  • 've no scientific background in this area, but if there as many other intelligent life forms outthere as people keep telling us, then we probably would have received many signals by now.

    So either intelligence is really rare in the universe, or noone beside us uses radio waves to communicate, or there is some yet unknown physical effect on radio waves which lets them degenerate faster than we thought...

    Go do a web search on The Fermi Paradox [google.com] for some interesting discussions on this. Essentially, given the age of the universe, and the rate at which technology advances, if there are other civiliazations in the universe, why haven't we seen any signs of any? Even a slow rate of technological advance (compared to us) would still result in a rather quick spread of that civilization around the universe in comparison to the time taken for evolution and the like.
    ---
  • Actually, it might not be that unlikely that the Earth was seeded from elsewhere. Perhaps it was part of some extra-terestrial contest. I can just picture some creator ignoring the contest quality guidelines, and cutting corners, just so he can be the one to say...

    FIRST LIFE!

    What scares me is the possibility that our planet will get moderated down shortly.
  • My excitement turns to depression; launch date: 2012. I hope SETI finds something before then, I just have a hard time thinking that all the big space projects are beyond the scope of a human life span. I wish I could remember his name, there was one guy who lived, he was at the Wright brother's first flight, and then something like 60 years later he was also at the launch of Apollo 11! Fun stuff, I just wish it happened more often.
  • True, in a system like this the effects of orbital mechanics would be more obvious. However, they would also be a lot harder to characterize. Consider our calendar system: months are easy, weeks are just quarter months. Now, in a moon of a gas giant, what would you use? Even if you pick the most obvious "moon", it's period as viewed from your world wouldn't be a constant.

    It would be very hard to develop mathematics in this world.

    If you've never read "Nightfall" by Isaac Asimov, I suggest you do so. The Good Doctor covers this item in great detail.
  • I'm not so sure that having a moon says anything about the potential for life, but there is a good argument that life is pretty unlikely to leave the seas without a moon to provide the tides that make the tidal zones that allow gradual evolution from sea animals to land animals.

    I see the debris argument, but don't think it's that strong for merely being inhabitable (I wouldn't want to live there, but an occasional 50 meter meteor isn't going to hurt the ecosystem). I don't see why a moon is needed to stabilize the axis -- Mars would be perfect for life, if it were twice the size and closer to the sun, and it doesn't have a large moon.
  • But who cares about responses? SETI isn't about responses, right?
    All you need is to observe a signal that seems to have an 'intelligent' source. I've started to believe that either we are in the lead as far as technology goes (which seems unlikely, considering the apparent size and age of the universe), or there's nobody else out there to talk to. That's when I'm not feeling optimistic. When I'm feeling optimistic, I tell myself that another intelligent 'entity' wouldn't necessarily pass through a technological stage where there communications signals get shot out into space like ours did, or that given the size and age of the universe, any other intelligent entity would be significantly advanced beyond us to prevent our detection of it until it wanted us to detect it.

    Then on other days I don't think about it at all.

    -beme

  • Because then there would be no planets to live on.

    Stars in globular clusters have metallicities (metals in astronomical sense is everything else apart from hydrogen and helum) a hundredth of the sun. That means that the total amount of materials for building solid planets (silicon, oxygen, iron etc.) would be so low that there probably would only exist a few small planetesimals (like the asteroids), and nowhere for life to exist.

    Of course, a young globular cluster, like the one forming in the Tarantula nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud, would have enough heavy elements. But there the UV radiation might be too harsh.

    /Dervak

  • >I'm not sure if they were numbering them from the center out, or the fringe in.

    The problem with either method is what you do when you discover a shy little planet that you hadn't noticed before? Renumber all the planets? That's why I suspect that it would be more realistic to number planets large to small, or in order of discovery (which would probably be the same order anyway).

    Of course planets usually have moons, so you've got to add decimals to your numbers, or append a letter.
    --

  • Well... there's always the StarTrek approach: Aldebaran-5, Ceti-alpha 6, etc. In other words, the name of the star followed by the number of the planet; although I'm not sure if they were numbering them from the center out, or the fringe in.

    Wouldn't it be something if one of the real planets turned out to be like one of the StarTrek planets?

  • How would you say "10"? You can't have kids saying "two times eight is ten". That's just wrong. Calling it "sixteen" doesn't seem right either since the name "sixteen" is based on the old decimal system.

    Also, learning the multiplication table would be as much as 2.56 times harder, assuming that teachers only teach a 10 by 10 table. When I was a kid they taught us a 12 by 12 table, which probably has roots in the English system (a foot is 12 inches).

  • I thought Einstein was the one who proved we weren't the center of the universe (and that in fact there was no center of the universe) by disproving the etheral field.

    Unless you're talking about the geometric center, or the center of gravity of the universe, in which case, we might be either one of those, or both.

  • Yes! (Score:2)

    by joto ( 134244 )

    That's not the case. True over time Oxygen will combine with other elements, but the existstance of large amounts of "free" Ozygen, is NOT a guarantee that the palanet has or hasn't life.

    It is a very strong indicator. The existence of oxygen in the earth atmosphere is so high that it cannot possibly be explained by anything other than life, or perhaps somebody actually producing the stuff industrially (but that would indicate life as well). It is of course a possibility that O2 could be produced randomly much like ozon is produced in the atmosphere, but the concentration of O2 in the atmosphere is so high, that this possibility is pretty much out of the question. We are talking about highly complex processes, in other words: life (or something planned by intelligent creatures, which also means life).

    First, we must assume that not all life needs pure oxygen to exist.

    Nope, quite the opposite. We assume that some alien life (such as ourselves) needs oxygen to exist. There are of course other possibilities that this method would not find (although we could look for large concentrations of other unstable compounds).

    Who's to say that extraterrestial life doesn't "breathe" though photosynthesis? Or are even carbon based lifeforms ?

    That's pretty much what we hope for, yes. If that was the case, then the atmosphere would be full of oxygen. As you might be aware of, the earth atmosphere's oxygen is a product of plants doing photosynthesis. So we pretty much hope that aliens '"breathe" though photosynthesis' like life on earth does!

    If we are looking for alien life that is not carbon based, we probably won't find it while looking for oxygen. That doesn't mean that the technique is useless. It simply means that we restrict our search to something we can hope to recognize. If we are looking for any kind of unthinkable life (like a Hooloovoo (from hhgttg: a superintelligent shade of blue)), we will never find anything. So in the name of practicality, we start looking for oxygen primarily, and other unstable compounds secundarily. Sounds pretty much like common sense to me.

    Second, if there's lot's of Oxygen, is that proof alone that life exists there ? Can You be certain that Oxygen is the ONLY basis of life ? What if the atmosphere is strongly radiated ?

    Well, the possibility of 20.9% oxygen being created by chance from radiation is zero. You need complex mechanisms such as photosynthesis to produce oxygen at this level. Just adding some sunlight to a batch of water and CO2 won't do it...

    Third, what if the planet is gaseous ? It might have lots of Oxygen, but no Carbon. This could proove to be a very inhospitable place for life to exist.

    Life survives surprisingly many places on earth. Bacteria seems to survive quite all right in our atmosphere, so I don't see why they couldn't survive in an all gaseous planet. The lack of carbon would be more troublesome. But tell me when you find a planet with 20% oxygen and no carbon... (I don't think you will!). Having relative masses of 12.01 (C) and 16.00 (O)these two elements will naturally tend to appear in the same places. And in a gaseous planet, most likely in the form of CO2.

  • How many planets is this now scientists have found?

    The exoplanet count is now at 63, according to this [cnn.com] article at cnn.com.

  • "Scientists find new home for Jon Katz and Bill Gates: Indian Government committed to launch schedule later this month" one month later, headlines read .. "OOPS. Indian rocket slams into Pakistani capital, The casualties in the millions. AOL stock rises on news"
  • Troll? How many scientific advances were held back by the Catholic church. Wasn't Copernicus afraid of persecution when he discovered that the Earth orbits the Sun rather than the other way around? How many lashes did the publisher of the first English-language bible get? How many old women were burned as witches?
    I'm not blaming religion anyway, peabrain - I'm blaming fundamentalism, which is where people believe they can do anything they like and use religion as a justification.
    Feudalism was also a part of this fundamentalism, given that the kings/queens believed they had been given absolute authority by God, rather than having ancestors more talented at intrigue than those around them.
    Religion is a good thing, but people are very adept at ruining it, and if you think fundamentalism is a good idea, I suggest you move to Afghanistan for a first-hand look at how overuse of God's Word is a bad idea.

  • The Dark Ages were a factor in this. Had we not been held back by religious fundamentalism for several hundred years we might very well be well into the galactic empire stage by now.

    What a clever troll. Let's forget about the black plague and feudalism and blame it all on religion.

  • Won't be long now before I'm dressed up as a Grey standing on a building with a sign that says "Welcome Friends". 'Course I was voted most likely to get Vaporized by my High School Class.
  • Commander Taco was greatly dissapointed when it was discovered that the 95% of the lifeforms found on the new planet were carriers of the Trollus FirstPostus gene. He has since removed Seti at Home from his computer.

  • The Dark Ages were a factor in this. Had we not been held back by religious fundamentalism for several hundred years we might very well be well into the galactic empire stage by now.

    The fact that they're part of a system within a system may also nullify this effect. When you're on a moon going around a gas giant with other moons, all going around a star, the observations you would get would make it much harder to convince yourself that you're the centre of the universe. Imagine how much faster our own cosmology might have progressed if Venus or Mars had easily detectable moons, giving mediaeval astronomers a much clearer demonstration of how the Solar System was really organized.

    Of course, fundamentalists can come up with an explanation for everything, so who knows. It would be interesting to see what the native fundamentalists of this new system would come up with. :)

  • 'Course I was voted most likely to get Vaporized by my High School Class.
    So tell me again, why was it that your High School Class wanted to vaporize you for?


    Tongue-tied and twisted, just an earth-bound misfit, I
  • Without a magnetic field, any moons of this planet will probably suffer intense radiation, both from the sun and the giant planet they orbit. There's a little more too it than water and distance from the sun.
  • The physical state and chemistry of the planet with the highly eccentric orbit would be fascinating. At furthest it is a little closer to its sun than the earth is to our sun. At closest it is about 17 lightseconds away from its sun. That must really kick up storms on the planet, if not outright distort it at times. The atmosphere gets really cooked then allowed to cool on a regular basis. You'd almost expect that the orbit would be unstable. Shades of Darkstar.
  • No, it looks like having a large moon may be essential to stabilize the orbit and climate of a planet - check out Not All Habitable Zones Are Created Equal [spacer.com] from SpaceDaily [spacedaily.com]

    Basically, in 1993 someone looked closer at mars's orbit, and found its axial tilt isn't constant, but varies from 0-60 deg, over a period of 157,000 years!

    Needless to say, an axial tilt of 60 degrees is going to royally screw up the climate. Turns out the moon is stabilizing earth's orbit, our axial tilt varies 2.5 degrees every 41,000 years. It has been calculated that without the moon, we would wobble between 0 and 85 deg tilt... lucky eh?
    According to the article, Earth is actually at the inner edge of the habitable zone, and the only reason mars is so cold is it is too small to hold an insulating atmosphere.
  • Just today, our physics teacher was describing how our "moon" is actually more of a planet, and we revolve around each other.

    I would disagree with this. Earth's Moon has no metallic core, as one would expect of a body its size which formed like a planet; and the most recent theories suggest that it was formed in a massive collision between two very large proto-Earth chunks in the final stages of Earth's formation. It was tossed out in a very near, fast orbit, and spiralled out to its current location through tidal effects.

    None of this suggests that the Moon is "more of a planet." Rather, it suggests that the Moon is very different from a planet and distinctly "Moony."

    Oh, and the center of gravity of the Earth-Moon system is inside the Earth, about 2/3 of the way from its center to the surface.

  • Planet Express

    Planet Badly, Fix It In Implementation

    LB 426 Is A Rock

    This IS Ceti Alpha Five!

    This Planet Intentionally Left Blank

    Source Of The Bug Scourge

    God Like Being Retirement Planet (Thank You For Not Talking About Alternative Universes)

    What Do You Mean We're Detecting An Energy Surge On The Planet's Surfa...

    We Made It! (Pending Legal Action With Larry Niven)

  • Well, I think when they say "bigger," they're referring to mass, not actual physical size. They can't measure the size of the planets because they can't see them. They can only measure the mass of the planets from their effect on the parent star's motion.
  • NASA, my friend, is an example of a government program that is doing this country a FAVOR on multiple levels. First and foremost, the science that NASA's programs have returned over the last thirty years have expanded our understanding of the world and universe around us more than you probably even realize. Since there is no equivalent private organization with launch and science research capabillities, we'd still be in the cosmological dark ages without a space program. To answer your socio-political attack of NASA: Yes, I agree that there are millions of people on this little world of ours who are starving. And yes, I realize that the obvious solution is to pull the plug on the space program and spend that money to feed the less fortunate. But think about this: NASA's programs create a LOT of jobs, that in turn create many other jobs! In addition, NASA projects tend to turn out new technologies that trickle down into public life. So the quesiton becomes this...do we: A) Take $14.5B/year and just give it away to the poor? -or- B) Run a space program that creates jobs (that in turn creates other jobs...more engineers means more managers, means more secretaries, means increased sales of raw materials and office supplies, means increased sales of of other products through trickle down from NASA to corporate to employee to salesperson that employee buys from), generates lots of useful products as a side effect of its existence, inspires schoolchildren to excel in math and science, AND expands our knowledge of the universe? I think the choice is obvious.
  • We are broadcasting less and less radio power into space as time passes. More and more data is being transmitted on narrow beams, or by wire or fibre or at high frequencies that don't escape the atmosphere much. Even without some "magical" replacement for radio, it is imaginable that higher tech civilizations would radiate relatively little radio energy omnidirectionally into space.

    Also, our present detection systems would not detect Earth's boradcast emmision at stellar distances. The SETI experiments hope instead to detect a deliberate beacon transmission aimed at us.

  • Re:What'll they name them? (Score:3)

    by PD ( 9577 ) <slashdotlinux@pdrap.org> on Friday April 06, 2001 @08:50AM (#311723) Homepage Journal
    So, we're a Sun-3.

  • Planet X? (Score:3)

    by peter303 ( 12292 ) on Friday April 06, 2001 @04:54AM (#311724)
    Neptune was the only planet to be found by mathematical prediction from anomalies in Jupiter and Saturn orbits. The first six planets were known from ancient times by eye. Uranus was accidently discovered with early telescopes. Mathematicians predicted another planet beyond Neptune. Pluto was found during a search for this planet, but it was too small and in the wrong place compared to mathematical predictions. A few die-hards hold out for another solar planet.

  • Re:Wow... how do they find these things? (Score:3)

    by ottffssent ( 18387 ) on Thursday April 05, 2001 @10:20PM (#311725)
    That's not entirely accurate, but it's close enough to get the point across. Another way is by observing the brightness of the star. A planet (of any size, though obviously this also works best with large planets) passing between the star and our telescope causes the star to dim. If this occurs periodically, and a few other things check out, it's very likely a planet.
  • It's pretty much accepted that we're all made of dead stars. What I hadn't realized is that mere supernovas don't readily explain the relative abundance of heavy metals we seem to have in the solar system.

    Yesterday on NPR they had a piece about a researcher who has apparently determined that the more abundant heavy metals come from a collision between neutron stars. The elemental distribution we enjoy in our solar system requires both previous supernovas and neutron star collisions in order to exist. At least according to this researcher.

    Makes you wonder about SETI. Also makes you wonder if the more abundant heavier elements are necessary for life, for advanced life, for intelligent life, or for technology-using (maybe intelligent too, unlike Earth) life.

  • Re:wild speculation (Score:3)

    by cyber-vandal ( 148830 ) on Thursday April 05, 2001 @11:02PM (#311727) Homepage
    The Dark Ages were a factor in this. Had we not been held back by religious fundamentalism for several hundred years we might very well be well into the galactic empire stage by now. Another civilisation may not have had these problems, nor had a space race that depended more on nationalism and value for tax money than scientific advancement and exploration. Only time will tell. I doubt that the Star Trek future is very likely for us, since learning from history is not a human trait.

  • clarification - orbital eccentricity (Score:3)

    by AntiNorm ( 155641 ) on Thursday April 05, 2001 @08:58PM (#311728)
    The new list includes 2 multiple planet systems, one planet with an orbital eccentricity of .93, and another in a nearly circular orbit near its star's habitable zone.

    For those of you who don't know what orbital eccentricity is, it is a measure of how much an orbit deviates from being a perfect circle. IOW, the planet in question here has a very elliptical orbit, which is not close at all to being circular. See http://www-astro.phast.umass.edu/courseware/java/p lanets/ecc.html [umass.edu] for more information on this.

    ---
    The AOL-Time Warner-Microsoft-Intel-CBS-ABC-NBC-Fox corporation:
  • Given that there semms to have been no contact from intelligent life as yet, I think that may suggest there is no chance of contact in the end

    Humans have been on the earth and been sentient a tiny fraction of the age of the earth, and the earth is a relatively young planet. We orbit a young star. We have only been seriously broadcasting radio waves for 50 years, which means only civilizations within 50 light years of us have any chance of knowing we exist. Only civilizations within 25 light years could have responded by now. This is a very small portion of just the Milky Way galaxy, there are countless other galaxies surrounding us. With the huge number of stars just by us around which life could originate, to think that if we haven't been contacted yet means "they ain't coming" is illogical.


    Enigma

  • Re:Wow... how do they find these things? (Score:3)

    by cthugha ( 185672 ) on Friday April 06, 2001 @01:40AM (#311730)

    There is a new technique, which relies on gravitational lensing, which should allow us to find smaller planets than we can using gravitationaly-induced wobbles in a star's motion.

    It works like this: If you get a reasonably sized dark object (say a rogue planetoid or any object hypothesized by the MACHOS theory of dark matter) between the Earth and a star, then gravitational lensing will cause a larger proportion of the light's star to be sent in Earth's direction, causing an effective amplification in the brightness of the star. Plot this amplification over time, and you get a characteristic curve, known as a Paczynski curve (I think I splet that right), which is basically just a bell-curve.

    If there are any planets in the system, chances are a similar lensing effect will occur as the focusing object passes them, creating another Paczynski curve. Superimpose that curve with the star's, and you get a curve with a spike to one side of the maximum or the other. Find this spike in your observation, and chances are you've got yourself a planet.

    Of course, you have to get lucky and have a suitable object pass between you and the star, but if the MACHOS theory is correct, there's plenty of such objects out in deep space.

  • I got it... (Score:3)

    by goodhell ( 227411 ) on Friday April 06, 2001 @09:57AM (#311731)
    ..why don't we start naming planets after the Christian gods???

    First Planet: God.

    Second Planet: ...

    Well, that exhausts those possibilities. So much for monotheism.

    Mod me Mad

  • Re:clarification - orbital eccentricity (Score:3)

    by ender's_shadow ( 302302 ) on Thursday April 05, 2001 @09:20PM (#311732) Homepage
    from the article: the one w/ the high eccentricity is "a planet with the most elongated orbit detected so far (HD 80606), moving between 5 and 127 million kilometers from the central star" needless to say this is the planet where we'll put our future ghettos.
  • We've only been listening for a short period of time. It's not as if you could expect to get alien TV broadcasts on your TV set. SETI hasn't been around long, and only listens to a very limited set of the potential data.

    Even if we say that we'll never find anything better than radiowaves in the spectrum SETI is searching to communicate with, SETI have still listened to a narrow time band of only a few decades for each star.

    It doesn't take much imagination to see how large the chances of civilizations occuring that had either not reached a radio sending age at the point where the signals SETI are now processing originated, or that had either found some other way of communicated by then, or been destroyed in some way by then.

    And that is assuming that life may exist or existed in places where SETI might have detected life in had it existed and been at a radio-sending stage at the right time.

    We've only looked at a microscopic part of the universe for an incredibly short time period. There's still a chance ;)

  • wild speculation (Score:4)

    by xeno ( 2667 ) on Thursday April 05, 2001 @10:14PM (#311734)
    Given the last item -- "a giant planet moving in an orbit around its Sun-like central star that is very similar to the one of the Earth and whose potential satellites (in theory, at least) might be "habitable"" -- I wonder not about how we humans might live there, but how life might evolve there.

    In particular, I wonder if advanced space travel might develop at a faster evolutionary rate given several habitable planet-sized moons in close proximity. After all, great advances in technology are usually composed of thousands of small steps and an occasional leap. Starting from Earth, there are no close-by habitable locations, so we focus on making one great leap after another. Our drive to explore overrides reasons to return to the same spots again and again. That's not very efficient or productive in terms of developing travel technology. If the Moon, Mars, and Venus were all habitable, the amount of repetitive space travel we'd be engaged in would result in rapid incremental improvement in travel technology.

    Racetrack demons start by going really fast around the block when they're little kids, and speeding up with every step. But here we are, stuck in a celestial backwater with nowhere to go nearby, so our first toddling steps involve building and driving the equivalent of a long-haul truck. I'd lay my money on us being visited far sooner than us finding/visiting another travel-capable race.

  • Re:Wow... how do they find these things? (Score:4)

    by thelovebus ( 264467 ) on Thursday April 05, 2001 @09:15PM (#311735)
    well, i can answer the first question. scientists find planets by studying an effect called "red shift" in a star's motion in our sky. by studying this, we can determine if there is a planet acting with gravitational force on the star. Basically a star with a large enough planet orbiting around it will make the star appear to wobble. Unfortunately, this techinique is only useful for finding planets the size of jupiter (at least), because smaller planets don't "pull" on the star enough to cause a noticable wobble.

  • What'll they name them? (Score:4)

    by screwballicus ( 313964 ) on Thursday April 05, 2001 @09:59PM (#311736)
    I don't know if there are many good names left, for the new planets out there. Planet Quake is taken. Planet Duke, Planet Unreal, Planet HalfLife and Planet Fortress have been done. I suppose it could always be Planet Pong.

    The naming planets after Greek Gods thing has been done to death. I say we adapt it to modern times and start naming planets after modern Gods. Planet Carmack, anyone?

  • Cool! (Score:4)

    by Spy Hunter ( 317220 ) on Thursday April 05, 2001 @09:02PM (#311737) Journal
    This is undeniably cool. However, all these planets are Jupiter-size or bigger(!). This is of course not because those are the only planets out there, it's due to the methods of detection used.

    I'm still waiting for the new, better detection methods [nasa.gov] that will allow us to actually find Earth-sized planets in their normal orbits. Not only that, but future missions will be able to tell the composition of the atmosphere around these planets - and if they find an atmosphere a lot like ours, that would be the first concrete evidence towards extrasolar life.

  • Re:Wow... how do they find these things? (Score:5)

    by mperrin ( 41687 ) on Thursday April 05, 2001 @09:30PM (#311738) Homepage
    These planets are detected indirectly, by noticing their effects on the stars they orbit. As the planet swings around the star, it makes the star move opposite it (to be precise, both the planet and star are moving around the center of mass of the system.) This stellar motion can be detected via extremely careful measurements of the Doppler shifting of the star's light.

    Take a look at Geoff Marcy's website at exoplanets.org [exoplanets.org]. Marcy is a professor here at Berkeley who leads one of the two teams which has done most of the planet finding thus far. This most recent announcement is by Michel Mayor, a Swiss astronomer who leads the other major extrasolar planet hunt. I think the two teams have a fairly friendly rivalry going on, and often both end up observing/discovering the same planets. One of Geoff's graduate students (who I think reads /.; Jason, you reading this?) told me that this latest batch was all discovered by using southern hemisphere telescopes, so none of these were discovered by Marcy et al's search, since that is conducted solely with Northern hemisphere telescopes.

    Right now, we're finding Jupiter-sized planets around roughly 5% of the stars we've looked at - 60-ish planets around about a thousand stars. It's expected that the actual numbers of stars with planets is much higher than that, potentially as much as 50% or so, but smaller planets or ones further from their parent star are much harder to detect, so we have not yet identified any.

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