32 Exoplanets Discovered By Chilean Telescope 146
the4thdimension writes "An article on CNN notes that 32 exoplanets have been discovered using a new Chilean telescope. The telescope is capable of detecting movements of 2.1mph (comparable to a slow walking pace). These 32 new planets give the telescope a total of 75 planets it has discovered, out of the 400 discovered using all methods employed by astronomers. This places the HARPS system as the world's foremost exoplanet hunter."
39 days to Mars... (Score:1)
Um, just how long is the trip to the nearest habitable exoplanet again?
If it's less than my remaining life expectancy, get me a ticket.
Re:39 days to Mars... (Score:5, Funny)
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If davidwr is a telephone sanitizer, we don't necessarily have to wait that long...
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So far, we don't even have the capability to detect earth-mass planets. I think the closest we've come is maybe 2 or 3 earth-masses. It's really hard to detect planets this small; it's much easier to detect the ones that are 5 times the size of Jupiter. There could be tons of earth-mass planets out there that we just can't detect.
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Re:39 days to Mars... (Score:5, Informative)
While that's out of the question, an unmanned nuke-powered probe could possibly survey such a system in one life-time if sufficiently funded.
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The only reason to send an unmanned craft, is to scout out the habitable planets.
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Yes, you have hit on the best reason NOT to explore space. While normal people are spreading out, staking out claims, and making babies for the next generation - our troglodytes, neanderthals, predators, psychotics, and assorted other riffraff will be riding along on the very same spacecraft that normal people are using. And, you can't stop them, because they look just like normal people!
Life's a bitch, aint' it?
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Not a chance (Score:2)
Nope. To reach the nearest solar system within a lifetime (80 years) and brake to it, you would have to have an acceleration, deceleration and speed such as it make the 4 light year distance within 80 years. Let us imagine this is a 1 kg probe, accelerating at a reasonable 1g constantly, go toward the system, then decelerate at 1g constantly. To make those 4 LY in
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I do not think so (Score:2)
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1.5e7 m/s is 5% of speed of light
v = at so t = v/a
t = (1.5e7 m/s) / (10 m/s^2) = 1.5e6 sec
(1.5e6 sec) / (3600 sec/hour) ~ 417 hours ~ 17 days
Your error is that 1 g is not 1 m/s^2 but rather 10 m/s^2.
ooops yeah (Score:2)
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What's cool is that, due to relativity, if you put some humans on board this ship, they could make the journey in much less than a lifetime, and travel back too. Unfortunately, hundreds of years will have passed on Earth by the time they get back, aged only perhaps a decade, and all their friends and relatives will be dead.
I read a book a while ago that detailed this exact journey, to the Alpha Centauri system. The travelers used a hollowed-out asteroid with a mass driver for propulsion.
Re:39 days to Mars... (Score:5, Funny)
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It's pretty much the same feeling you get when you reply AC. Ooooh, I'm getting it now...
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uh-oh, was that detailed enough to raise suspicions?
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Off-topic garbage like this reminds me of another right-wing lunatic I know who managed to turn a conversation about stop signs into a foaming-at-the-mouth rant about the federal government.
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You've made a powerful enemy today, sign.
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To be fair stop signs don't seem like the most stimulating conversation.
Some friends were talking about how they'd gotten ticketed for running stop signs on their bikes because the cops were enforcing them. Sorry if it bores you what other people are talking about, but then they didn't really ask your opinion about how interesting the conversation seemed. Come to think of it, neither did I.
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*snore*
To borrow a phrase, on what planet do you spend most of your time?
It was big government that put a man on the moon.
It was big government that built the interstates. You're welcome.
It was big government that gave you the police department and firemen. You're welcome.
It's big government that puts men and women in uniform to go off and defend this country, but I don't hear Fox-News-watching sheep like yourself railing against the incompetence of government-run programs like the US Marine Corps or the so
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The last I saw it was about 50/50 in the polls if you factor in the electoral college. If it's populous bribery, it's not well-thought-out bribery. Plus, the backlash raised a lot of sour notes that will leave political scars no matter the final outcome. Ignoring whether I agree with healthcare or not, your premise is questionable unless the prez is looking at different polls and newspapers than the rest of us.
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Obama really isn't that different from Bush or any other politician. He's just as beholden to corporate interests as the rest, just to different extents and different industries. He certainly doesn't care much about the space program (I think Bush was arguably stronger here, FWIW; at least he pushed the Ares rockets), he's more interested in giving free healthcare to illegals and setting up a giant socialist nanny-state government, not to mention bailing out failing industries, rather than investing in th
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The point isn't to visit. The point is to find interesting planets and study them from afar, and possibly send probes eventually. Moving information is more fundamental than moving a particular flesh body around.
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Define 'lifetime'. If we can fix the largest impediment to human space travel: human bodies, we might be able to send you on the slow train to every planet in the galaxy, given a sufficiently advanced system suspend function on your quantum brain.
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If we can perfect AI, then the things we have created will BE us anyway. If you had a perfect robot brain, then you could treat it exactly like a human child, it would have the same emotions, impulses, thoughts
Great (Score:2, Funny)
That's all we need. More planets.
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if those planets knew what's good for them, they'd hide
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That's all we need. More planets.
Save the planets! Collect them all! Then strip-mine them!
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You're an astrologer? I feel sorry for you...
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"Dwarf astronauts" will really throw 'em off.
3.5km/h (Score:5, Insightful)
the instrument detects movements as small as 3.5 km/hr (2.1 mph), a slow walking pace
So let me get this straight: If this thing were observing a star system 50 light years away, that's 4.7x10^14 kilometres ... and this thing can detect relative movements as small as 3.5km/hr?
Consider me impressed.
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In other news, Chile has experienced a dust storm recently.
Re:3.5km/h (Score:5, Funny)
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You mean until we verify the jiggle first-hand (pun intended).
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I was reading the summary thinking "surely a telescope's sensitivity should be measured in arcseconds, and the minimum detectable speed should be in arcseconds-per-second rather than miles per hour." Of course they were talking about bodies moving toward and away from us, rather than across our field of vision, so it's a Doppler effect measurement rather than looking at a picture and saying, "hey! That bit moved!"
I've just had my big mug of coffee, but obviously it hasn't reached my brain yet :)
teeny weeny shift (Score:1)
It's amazing that such a small shift in spectrum line displacement can be detected. It doesn't make intuitive sense that a mere walking pace will produce a detectable shift. That's precision stuff. It's amazing what astronomy technology has been able to do with indirect information.
link to ESO Press Release (Score:5, Informative)
Well, the "new Chilenean telescope" the summary is referring to is actually the 3.6m telescope of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile, which started operation in 1976...
and here is the link to the ESO Press Release [eso.org]
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Well, the "new Chilenean telescope" the summary is referring to [...] started operation in 1976...
Which, compared to the age of the universe, is certainly new.
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HARPS (Score:2)
http://www.eso.org/sci/facilities/lasilla/instruments/harps/overview.html [eso.org]
The speed is the radial velocity, aka how fast it comes closer and goes further. And it's of the order of 1 m/s, which got converted to car speed. Analogy anyone?
Ridiculous claim (Score:2, Interesting)
I guess it could be possible to isolate certain frequencies in the oscillation to filter out solar storms and such which would easily affect its diameter at a rate faster than walking speed. But you'd have to watch it for centuries to gather enough data. At least. Geez, doing the trig (like 10^-22 radians per second) my intuition tells me you'd h
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Perhaps 2.1 mph is below the necessary precision to detect planets, and star storm effects are also below that. Thus, the displacement ranking may be something like:
planetWobble > starStorm > scopeThreshold
But that's merely speculation that could explain your puzzle. I don't have the real answer.
Also, star storm movement may be canceled out by throwing some of the star "back-ward". For example, when you spit out a spray of water, your body moves back slightly due to the motion conservat
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Oh, good point. You're probably right about the precision of the scope.
From the eso.org project site it looks like they're actually using radial velocity (doppler shift) to measure the wobble so the arc calculation doesn't mean anything. It seems like that would be almost more difficult though. Picking out planetary-year-long wobbles from other low-frequency phenomena like sunspot activity and solar cycles sounds impossible.
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I think the worry is that the sunspot or solar storm is going to produce a velocity of the gas that is greater than "walking speed". So it would shift the lines by that amount.
I think they must be averaging over a long enough period and for the entire star that this is not a worry, however it does seem like this noise would swamp any such observations.
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Spots -do- change line positions. The reason is that the star rotates, so half of the visible surface moves towards us, half of it recedes. Now imagine that part of either the receding or approaching surface is covered by a spot...
However, this also changes the shape of a spectral line, not just the position of the centre. This is why people do a 'bisector analysis' (basically, split line in half, compare right/left side to discover distortions).
Also, spot activity can be measured independently. With s
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Sunspots actually split emission lines because of the Zeeman effect [wikipedia.org]. That's how scientists know that sunspots are magnetic phenomena, in fact.
Re:Ridiculous claim (Score:5, Informative)
They're not measuring the side-to-side motion of the stars, that's impossible^H^H^H^Hvery difficult to measure, as your trig suggests.
They're measuring the Doppler shift of features in the star's optical spectrum, as it moves toward us and away. It's the world's most impressive police radar gun.
Walking pace... at what range? (Score:3, Interesting)
That "walking pace" stat could be very impressive if it were given with the proper qualification information.
For example, if it could detect an object moving at that pace over the course of a year at 1 light year away... I would probably not be as impressed if it could do it from 50 light years in a matter of minutes.
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I'd be astounded if you could build a device that could measure the velocity of a person walking across the room.
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That's easy... it's called a watch and a ruler. Now I'm no watch maker, nor can I create an accurate ruler without one to use for refrence, but if you'll let me give you velocity in strides per "one thousand" count... then I can measure velocity.
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Actually you couldn't... unless you calculated the acceleration and terminal velocity of the rolling ball and factored that into your time marks. If you spaced your marks equally, your clock would get faster and faster until the ball reached terminal velocity.
If I were on a deserted island, I would simply count time in my head and pace out the distance. So for example if I wanted to figure out how fast a river on my island is, I would pace out and mark two points along the shore... throw a stick in upstre
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ESO Press Release (Score:3, Informative)
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More details can be found in the Press Release [eso.org] of the European Southern Observatory. They have been using a new instrument called HARPS on the "old" ESO 3.6m telescope, which has ben around since 1976.
And HARPS [wikipedia.org] has been operational since 2003.
!Chilean (Score:5, Informative)
This is a telescope operating in Chile, it is only partially funded by the Chileans.
Funded by
ESO=European Southern Observatory (Score:2, Informative)
Not "Space Organization." It's not directly related to the European Space Agency.
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Does this mean they have to divy up the planets? "Four for you, three for you, three plus two moons for you; oh, and you small donors and magazine subscribers get the asteroids to split amongst yourselves..."
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Yea, the suckers are sufficiently stupid to fund our telescopes. We are getting some very nice hardware for nothing.
It was holding one of the the clearest and most unpolluted skies over their head that made them cry uncle and beg to built it, and they just keep on coming. Not our problem they f***ed up their environment to the point that no one in the northern hemisphere can see the stars anymore.
Just wait, in 50 years Chile is going repo those telescopes and charge by the star. It is all an elaborate plot
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I'm pretty sure that in 50 years those telescopes will be worthless, so uh yeah I guess they could steal them at that point. I doubt anybody would care.
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Chile Puede!!!!!!!!!!
OMG, there's lot of planets out there (Score:1, Troll)
Slow News Day.
Seriously, are any of these 32 new planets at all interesting? It was great that we've figured out how to detect the existence of these planets, but even the chilean team doesn't bother to single out any of them as being out of the ordinary.
Now that VASIMR [slashdot.org] technology seems to be coming of age, isn't it time to do a survey of everything within say, 20 light years to find stuff that may be potentially habitable?
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are any of these 32 new planets at all interesting?
Define interesting.
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Interesting: engaging or exciting and holding the attention or curiosity.
Sure. Some of these may be "interesting" to a limited set of people, but for the most part they are about the same as the other couple of hundred planets already discovered.
There's a lot of planets out there. They were expecting to find a bunch of them. This is not news.
I'm pretty sure if there were interesting planets in the 32 they are announcing, they would have pointed them out.
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The point is that they are discovering more planets all the time. The "couple of hundred" you speak of is actually over 400 to date, and the number increases every time we apply a new piece of technology towards looking. And they did point out the more interesting ones - 4 of the new planets discovered are less than +6 earth masses. As we create better technology with greater and greater resolution, we will find the ones that are interesting (or earth sized anyway, all new planets a
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This is interesting: planet inside habitable zone, perhaps with liquid water [eso.org]
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One day winter, one day spring, one day summer, ooh no time for autumn
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No, no — the line is "Oh my god, it's full of planets!"
In the background (Score:2)
Deep within the structure of the telescope, someone asked "does anyone know if this spider is poisonous?"
Also news from (Score:4, Informative)
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Extra Solar Planets [feeddistiller.com] Feed @ Feed Distiller [feeddistiller.com]
Enemy Planets (Score:2, Funny)
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Errata (Score:1, Informative)
"An article on CNN describes that 32 exoplanets have been discovered using a new Chilean telescope. The telescope is capable of detecting movement 2.1mph (comparable to a slow walking pace)."
PLUTO (Score:2)
32 new names (Score:2)
let the flamewars begin.
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Well, I'll be pissed if the second habitable planet isn't named "Earf".
Do they have stargates on them? (Score:2)
Do they have stargates on them?
tons??? (Score:1)
I want to know how many Jovian-mass-equivalents' worth they've got in their backlog.
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Its not going to happen. planets orbit stars, we don't have a single example of a start with a billion planets. The one system we have (almost) sufficiently mapped has 8 planets and a handful of smaller rocks of note. Some of the other systems we have identified could have more planets than that, but we don't have the ability to detect smaller/farther planets at the moment.
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we don't have a single example of a start with a billion planets
Just change the definition of the word "planet", and you're done!
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Clearly the parent poster was commenting that the ratio is currently stars/planets > 1 (more stars than planets) and he was wondering if the ratio would invert stars/planets 1 (more planets than stars). If we continue to find planets at some point we may find that 90% of the stars we CAN see well enough have more than 1 planet and it would be a safe bet at that point to say that there are more planets than stars.
I don't think he was suggesting that each star could ever have more than a billion planets.
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Neither trolling nor sarcastic. I tend to take things very very literally. Often to literally, as perhaps the case here.
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Its not going to happen. planets orbit stars
So what would you call a rocky body the size and shape of (say) Earth or Mars that doesn't orbit a star? The IAU's inane mal-definition aside[*], I suspect most people would call it a planet (possibly with the qualifier "rogue" tacked on). I don't think we have much idea how many such bodies exist, but it's not beyond the bounds of reason to think that there's are many, many times as many as there are stars.
[*] I don't really give a rats ass how they classify Pluto--it's clearly a different type of body,
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Cold?
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Re:Stars to Planet Ratio (Score:5, Informative)
Right now the ratio between stars to planets in the milky way is about 1 billion to 1.
That's a ridiculous statistic. By that measure, the ratio between Diet Coke drinkers and humans is 3.5 billion to 1, because my wife and I are the only people in my group of friends who drink the stuff, and there are 7 billion people on the planet.
And yet somehow the Coca Cola company keeps making it, just for us...
A better statistic is the ratio of the number of planets discovered and the NUMBER OF STARS SEARCHED FOR PLANETS. As of 2003, this fraction was at least 10%, and given observational limits may prove to be as high as 100% -- it could well be that ALL sunlike stars have planets.
http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0306524 [arxiv.org]
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it could well be that ALL sunlike stars have planets.
We are collecting data points like mad and its not looking good for extraterrestrial life. If ET life existed we would be seeing evidence of it along with the planets right now. Either oxygen spectra from atmosphere or evidence of engineering elsewhere in the galaxy. If life exists it may not use similar metabolic processes to us and it may not be intelligent.
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We are collecting data points like mad and its not looking good for extraterrestrial life.
This news is all about revising a term in the Drake Equation [wikipedia.org] upward. That can't make ET life less likely.
As for spectra, the vast majority of planetary IDs give no information about the planets apart from their orbits and masses. And as far as I know, the few spectra we have are for Jupiters, not terrestrial planets.
So your dreams of bug-eyed-monsters are as alive as they ever were.
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The Galaxy is well mixed. Stars within 100 light years of us should be a good model for other stars at a similar distance from the galactic centre around the disc.
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True but the rarer a phenomenon is the bigger the sample size you need to quantify it.
Suppose we could tell whether or not there is life in a hundred thousand star systems (I don't think we are anywhere near that yet) and the chance of a star system developing life is one in 10 million. We would be far from alone in the universe and yet we would also be unlikely to spot one of the other star systems with life.
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The planets we see are mostly Very Big Rocks, or gas giants. It'll take a while to see smaller, more earthlike planets.
It doesn't take time, just someone to fork over a couple of billion dollars. The technology already exists, it's just that no one wants to spend the money to actually get it to space.