Scientists Find Solar System Like Ours 173
mlimber writes "The NYTimes has up a story about the discovery of a solar system that is analogous to ours. Of the 250 or so exoplanets found thus far, 'few of them are in systems that even faintly resemble our own. In many cases, giant Jupiter-like planets are whizzing around inside the orbit of Mercury,' whereas in this new system, 'a planet about two-thirds of the mass of Jupiter and another about 90 percent of the mass of Saturn are orbiting a reddish star about half the mass of the Sun, at about half the distances that Jupiter and Saturn circle our own Sun.' The researchers used gravitational microlensing to detect the planets, and two of the lead authors of the paper to be published in Science are amateur astronomers, one of whom describes herself as 'an ordinary New Zealand mother.'"
Scale Model (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Scale Model (Score:5, Funny)
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How dare you speak the name of His Noodly Goodness in vain? And besides, He and Er are no longer an item. Er is so last week.
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Arrrr.
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Ah, but given a sun of half the size, and the fact that the system's two largest planets are orbiting at about half the distance of *our* system's two largest planets, it stands to reason that if that system has smaller planets, there's likely one that's orbiting at about half the distance Earth is from Sol -- and being closer to its sun would make up for the cooler nature of the sun itself, making it more likely for said currently-theoretical planet to be within that sun's liquid-water zone.
That's an interesting theory, but I wonder how much energy output and the like would be affected. I'd really love to find out if terrestrial style plants would be able to survive on one of these worlds, say on a hypothetical terran-like one that you suggested. I mean, assuming that there's water, the temperature is ok, the air isn't methane, etc etc, would there be enough sunlight?
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That explains my small
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The Mytbusters often start with scale experiments before moving on to the real thing. Why shouldn't God?
Hmmm... given that all of the extra-solar planets that we've found --even the rocky ones-- have been considerably larger than Earth-- what does that make us?
(and do all you pedants out there-- yes, I KNOW that's because the methods we use to detect exoplanets work much better on much larger planets, so of course that's what we're going to find. That's not the point here.)
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Re:Scale Model... That's Doctor EVIL'S (Score:2)
Can we name the system Krypton? (Score:5, Funny)
Oblig. (Score:4, Funny)
(/me gets a whisper in the ear...)
Umm, err, ahh, I gotta go now.
You got it all wrong: (Score:3, Funny)
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Word (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Word (Score:5, Informative)
Amateur astronomers contribute a great deal to the field. It's not necessary to have access to expensive research equipment to make useful observations of interest to the scientific community. Many comets have been discovered by amateurs, for example.
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You mean like Comet Hammner-Brown? [barnesandnoble.com]
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Like most things you graduate from amateur status when you start getting paid for your work.
Re:Word (Score:5, Funny)
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NYT Got Lensing Effect Wrong (Score:2, Informative)
No, it's like a scanner (Score:3, Informative)
Re:NYT Got Lensing Effect Wrong (Score:5, Informative)
The term 'lensing' is a bit of a misnomer, as that implies that you're looking at the source star; which is essentially a giant flashlight that allows us to probe the lens for information about it's planets.
The lens star acts to bend the light from the source, creating multiple and distorted images of it (which are too close together to resolve). Observing the sky from earth, these multiple images have the effect of increasing the net flux measured (in laymans terms, the star gets brighter).
When the lens star has planets (especially, as in this case, one close to what as known as the 'einstein ring') it causes large perturbations to the (otherwise fairly simple) lightcurve. With appropriate mathematical models and massive amounts of computing power, the parameters that give the best fitting theoretical lightcurve can be found.
Combining this with external information and a good dose of physical and statistical insight, it is possible to say to a reasonable degree of confidence (usually never 100%) that you have found such and such a system.
In reality, the astronomers who measure the data are only a very small part of the overall picture, but the media find a much better story in "amateur astronomer finds extrasolar planets" than "scientists use computer grid to minimize 10 dimensional chi^2 hypersurface" so they get all the attention.
Re:NYT Got Lensing Effect Wrong (Score:5, Informative)
Nice try. (Score:4, Informative)
From said article: Emphasis added.
In other words, the "lensing effect" of the nearer star doesn't behave, as you clearly imagine, like a cosmic telescope lens to make the distant star system more clearly visible to viewers on earth. Rather, its presence (and the presence of its attendant planets) is betrayed by the distortions they gravity introduces in the transmitted light as they pass between us and the more distant star.
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"Like Ours" (Score:1)
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Mothers (Score:5, Funny)
We've all known that mothers can see things no else has managed to prove.
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Most of the mothers in our country are quantum phsyicists.
Sounds like... (Score:2)
technique even more important (Score:2)
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And that's what makes it important.
but once the lensing event is over you have no chance of being able to study any particular system further.
"No chance" is a bit strong. There are plenty of background sources.
Skilled amateurs (Score:5, Insightful)
Thank goodness for areas of science where "amateurs" can still make significant contributions. The other ones that springs to mind are biology and Comp. Sci. Physics, chemistry etc are out of the league of most people (myself included) where the best we can do is learn what others have already done. To be published in Science is a wonderful achievement. Kudos to them.
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Glassware (Score:2)
life as we know it (Score:2)
Funny, that's what Jovian scientists say about Terra. Well, except for the giant planet part.
ANOTHER Solar System?!? (Score:5, Interesting)
For those who care, the "SOLar System" is named because of the system of stars around... (wait for it) Sol (the name of our Sun).
To find another Solar System would indicate that they've found that our Sun occipies two points in space and time and has another seperate group of stars associated with it.
What they've found is another "Star System" like ours.
I'm not posting to be petty, just for those that are interested.
Re:ANOTHER Solar System?!? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:ANOTHER Solar System?!? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:ANOTHER Solar System?!? (Score:5, Insightful)
However, keep in mind that our sun was named Sol in Latin, and that name was assigned long before anyone knew that the sun was just a special case of a star (namely, it's the closest star). Back when people started using Sol to refer to the Sun, it was considered a separate entity from the stars, just as the Moon (Luna) was separate from the sun.
However, now that we have hundreds of years of astronomical data proving that our sun is really not different than many other suns, I don't see a problem with calling an external star system a "solar system" just like I would have no trouble calling Phobos and Deimos a "lunar system". Sun and Moon, the English equivalents of Sol and Luna, have become genericized as we found out that our sun and moon were not special; they are just examples of common objects in the universe.
You will also note that the British seem to have no trouble confusing the word "continent" with the specific place "The Continent". This is exactly the same issue as "solar system" vs. "The Solar System", and exactly as pointless to argue about, since it doesn't hinder communication at all.
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Well, that's because they use the name "Europe" or "The European Continent", when there's any ambiguity. What are we going to call Our Solar System, when "The Solar System" means the one people have colonised and live on
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I'd be fine with solar panels.
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Not just a non-story (Score:2)
Current techniques & data are only able to detect exo-Jupiters and exo-Saturns. If an exo-Earth is out there, we don't have the ability to see it yet. We do know there probably isn't room for one in a system where the exo-Jupiter is right next to the star -- which is the kind of system we've been able to detect so far.
The system in question is unusual in that its structure matches ours: the gas giants a
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Current techniques & data
Sorry, current available finances prevent detection of exo-earths.
The technology needed to build space mirror telescopes as large as the earth itself (through mirror lenses) exists already and has been proven on Earth itself.
However the money is not available to do so, since it is being funneled by the shovelful to Blackwater, KBR, Halliburton, Exxon (as tax refunds), etc.
Once the money is available (aka plucked from the cold dead hands of these corporates) we can build, deploy and detect Earths in orbit a
This is big news (Score:5, Interesting)
It excites me greatly to know that before I die, rocky inner planets similar to ours will most likely be discovered!
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Extrapolation from this basic idea leads to a couple of conjecutres. One: even the elemental composition and structure (rocky, gaseous, etc.) of the planets themselves could be due to this. Two: Th
Time-Delayed Discoveries (Score:3)
Re:Time-Delayed Discoveries (Score:4, Insightful)
Hmmmm
You'd have to look at a lot of sky a lot of times to be able to spot most things. It's not like the first time you look at something it coughs up its secrets. I'm not even remotely surprised at the sheer scale of this.
You're looking at an enormous number of enormous things, whose timelines span an enormous amount of time. And, then you have to be able to spot differences that are barely perceptible -- like, what, way less than angstroms, right?
I'm sometimes amazed we find anything. Imagine, how many times you'd have to look at the same star to be able to know when it's going to get illuminated by a star a few thousand light years behind it, and then measure the planets around it.
It really does make my head spin at times. It really does reinforce that the universe is way bigger than we can really and truly wrap our heads around.
Cheers
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Astronomy isn't the only amateur friendly science (Score:3, Insightful)
And it continues. Amateur radio operators continue to innovate and their work many times gets picked up by universities and corporations.
Re:Astronomy isn't the only amateur friendly scien (Score:3, Insightful)
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That was when only Bell Labs, IBM and Xerox had computers. You know, pre -1980's?
As for idiot - fuck yourself.
meh (Score:2, Interesting)
I studied at Auckland university physics dept and the HOD said that all that G.M'ers found where errors in the data that they ASSUMED were planets. The amount of microlensing attributable to a planet is indistinguishable from noise in the data...most of the blips we saw in the data were smaller than the error bars.
Re:meh (Score:5, Insightful)
Confirming my impression of Dolts Who Say "meh" (Score:5, Interesting)
Perhaps it didn't occur to you that in some cases you can pull signal out of noisy data by looking for regular repeating patterns? Or with maybe some other techniques you hadn't thought of? Maybe some technique described in the research paper, or its references?
Here's the thing. Getting signal from noise is hard, but often possible. As a species, we get better at it as time goes on. If signal could never be pulled from noise, radio, television, cell phones, and the internet wouldn't work. Heck, even without any fancy schmancy scientific instruments, we're pretty darn good at it. A big chuck of most brains (including yours) is devoted to the task. In fact, you couldn't use spoken words to communicate with somebody else in a bar where everybody else was talking, too. Seismographs couldn't detect earthquakes from the other side of the planet, because there are too many people having raucaus sex and too much truck traffic at any given time.
Take this signal, for examle, the pattern of posts dismissing something with a wave of the interjection "meh [slate.com]" when they clearly have no concept, amidst the general noise of Slashdot posts. If I see it once, I think it's just a random person, spouting off, maybe pre-caffeinated, maybe late at night, maybe not thinking it through, whatever it is. When I see "meh" many times, and every time it's from somebody who is seriously and totally lacking clue, then I wonder. Is this "meh" some sort of signal for someone who doesn't realize the limits of their own knowledge? Is there something about the "meh" meme which causes it to preferentially survive in a cesspool of incompletely formed thought, and die out amidst the frenzy of competition in a curious mind? Is "meh" a signal which indicates intellectual laziness? Perhaps it's related to the phenomenon of the unskilled being unable to correctly assess their skill? (This applies to all of us, in domains of our in-expertise. I'm not insulting you, merely pointing out that we all need to become more aware of the areas of our in-expertise, in order to avoid looking like idiots.)
Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments [apa.org]
(Also available in this HTML version [geocities.com] if you prefer.)
Overconfidence [behaviouralfinance.net]
Your geek card is hereby suspended for the weekend, which you should devote to reading about signal processing and astronomy. You are also prohibited from using "meh" for one year.
The Fundamentals of Signal Analysis [agilent.com]
Extrasolar Planets [wikipedia.org]
They've discovered the Vilani Imperium! (Score:2)
Earth aka Terra is in the Solomani Sphere, when we discovered the Imperium we attacked them and they counter attacked and then took over Terra and the Sol system and drove us further south on that map.
Anyone know about Traveller [wikipedia.org]?
Shame on them! (Score:2)
Despicable. I don't know how they can sleep at night.
ONLY one Solar System in this Galaxy!!! (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Misleading headlines suck (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Misleading headlines suck (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Misleading headlines suck (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, the mass/luminosity relationship is (roughly) L~M^3.5. They never mention the exact size of the star, but if we assume it's half as massive as the sun it's luminosity is right around 9% of solar (I'm rounding a bit). Take into account you've got a factor of 4 increase in insolation by moving it to half the distance and you can see the inner planet gets something like 36% of the insolation of Jupiter. Granted, I completely made up the mass of the star, but it gives you an idea of what's going on.
And for the record I was an astronomer.
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Re:Misleading headlines suck (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Misleading headlines suck (Score:5, Insightful)
The same applies here. We're seeing a sun that's roughly half the size of our Sun with at least two planets roughly the size of some our gas giants that are orbiting it at half the distance. Since previously we've only seen stuff that would be impossible in our solar system, this is the closest we've come to it.
Now, no one is saying it's identical. The two large planets could be the only things in the system, or there could be some small rocky worlds closer in that we can't see yet. The fact that two planets that we can detect are similar in scale to two of ours could infer that there are other planets similar in scale to our own in orbits similar to our own.
There could be a Mars-size planet in orbit more like that of Venus, but because the sun is smaller and cooler it might actually be temperate like Earth. Out of what we've seen so far, this is the best hope for finding Earth-like life, or a possible colonization opportunity for humans.
Re:Misleading headlines suck (Score:4, Funny)
A PC and a watch aren't very similar, but a PC and a laptop are, even if they're different scales. One could also assume, from knowing that they're somewhat similar, that the laptop might contain some of the same components such as an HDD, RAM and a modem/ethernet/wifi device.
The same applies here.
Re:Misleading headlines suck (Score:5, Funny)
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Layne
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At 5000 ly, I'd say "don't hold your breath for the latter".
I would bet my money that we're able to do useful planet-scale terraforming long, long before we can send anything, let alone a colony ship, to a star system 5000 ly away.
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As you said though, it's also possible that there's nothing because the gas giants disrupted planetary formation. Even if that's
Re:Misleading headlines suck (Score:4, Funny)
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"It's actually very similar to ours, except the planets are all out of order and all the people there have, for some unknown reason, goatees."
At this point I'd point out they're malevolent via some sort of "goatee considered harmful" joke.
WTB new memes (Score:2)
Re:Misleading headlines suck (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Misleading headlines suck (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Umm, misleading? (Score:4, Insightful)
Astronomers are struggling with models of solar system formation which could explain the formation of our solar system. AFIK all extrasolar systems to date are so extreme that the models don't even start to work. This is the first system where the planetary distribution is comparable to ours. Remember the rocky dwarfs in our solar system represent an infinitesimal component of the mass. Don't attach too much significance to the rocks just because we happen to live on one.
The science is understanding the formation of planetary systems in which this one is very much like ours.
The science (fantasy/fiction) is discovering earth like planets themselves. I would also bet that when we get to finding earth like planets the gas giant distribution should be sol like.
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Most star systems discovered so far: Large gas planets close in to the star with no room for small rocky planets in the habitable zone.
This system: Large gas planets farther out, with enough room that there could be rocky planets close to the star.
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No, our telescope technology has become so advanced that we can now see ourselves from here, because everyone knows instinctively that if you look far enough - you'll end up seeing the back of your head.
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That's ok, I wouldn't worry about it. Color, chroma, dominants are all wrong, and the Eddorians suck at esprit' de corps.