Richest Planetary System Discovered With 7 Planets 245
eldavojohn writes "The European Southern Observatory has announced that with the aid of their 190 HARPS measurements they have found the solar system with the most planets yet. Furthermore they claim 'This remarkable discovery also highlights the fact that we are now entering a new era in exoplanet research: the study of complex planetary systems and not just of individual planets. Studies of planetary motions in the new system reveal complex gravitational interactions between the planets and give us insights into the long-term evolution of the system.' The star is HD 10180, located 127 light-years away in the southern constellation of Hydrus, that boasts at least five planets (with two more expected) that have the equivalent of our own Titius–Bode law (their orbits follow a regular pattern). Their survey of stars also helped reinforce the correlation 'between the mass of a planetary system and the mass and chemical content of its host star. All very massive planetary systems are found around massive and metal-rich stars, while the four lowest-mass systems are found around lower-mass and metal-poor stars.' While we won't be making a 127 light-year journey anytime soon, the list of candidates for systems of interest grows longer."
Richest? (Score:4, Insightful)
At seven planets, I'm reasonably sure this qualifies as the *second* richest planetary system we're aware of.
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Re:Richest? (Score:5, Funny)
[tears up]
Re:Richest? (Score:5, Informative)
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"Her"? How one determines the gender of pet rock? Also, do people still weep for Ceres one and a half century later?
Re:Richest? (Score:4, Funny)
"Her"? How one determines the gender of pet rock??
Obviously you ask, asshole.
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The way I count, we have 11 to 13 planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Ceres, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, Haumea (presumed), Makemake (presumed), Eris. There could even be more, depending on what we learn about other candidate objects.
In any case, we need a new mnemonic. MVEMCJSUNPHME...
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At seven planets, I'm reasonably sure this qualifies as the *second* richest planetary system we're aware of.
No no no, you're thinking the wrong way. They've found Magrathea!
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One of the planets detected has 1.4 times the mass of the Earth, making it the smallest exoplanet detected yet. Wanna bet on this system having at least one more less massive and currently undetectable planet?
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Not likely given this 1.4 mass planet is one of the two 'missing' planets, and the other is a gas giant with 65 Earth masses. Still an exciting discovery:
From TFA:
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Are they not already called dwarf planets.
Just like our sun is a dwarf star.
Re:Richest? (Score:5, Insightful)
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We also receive material from space on a regular basis in the form of meteorites. I don't know if that balances us out or if there's a net gain/loss.
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All of that stuff's actually still here, except for the couple tons of metal that we sent to other planets.
The atoms are still here, but they aren't resources anymore because they have become too costly to exploit.
Re:Richest? (Score:4, Funny)
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I must disagree with your conclusion based on your premises. If the human race has spawned RIAA lawyers which will live on and evolve after humanity is gone, I think we've left the world a much worse place with our presence.
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I for one welcome our new RIAA Over...erp..excuse me. I just threw up a little...
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There'll always be prokaryotes, cockroaches and RIAA lawyers to reboot evolution.
Ah, all species that reproduce asexually.
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You mean to say RIAA lawyers breed asexually?
I thought they were just the excrement of the cockroaches after consuming the prokaryotes.
This is too weird
hyperboling much? (Score:3, Insightful)
We only have one more in our own, and we're killing the earth,
What the hell does this has to do with what is being discussed?
our planet don't even contain half of the ressources it took billions of year to produce.
Source or citation for this please? And whoever voted this post as insightful, please go back to school and learn some analytical thinking (or to middle school if you have to.)
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Seems there's no shortage of apostrophes...
Re:Richest? (Score:5, Informative)
I'm right with you on basically everything else you said, but I'd still like to suggest that in modern usage, "its" should be used for the possessive. Yes, it breaks the "rule" that you put an apostrophe for the possessive. It's a standard and useful convention that resolves ambiguity, and I can see essentially no benefit to allowing "it's" for the possessive other than shutting up pretentious douches on forums - which, don't get me wrong, is a noble pursuit.
I don't see why the rule of "its vs. it's" is any more baseless than the rule I'm inferring from your argument, "an s added to indicate the possessive is always [either allowed to or required] to have an apostrophe prepended". I have, at least, the OED backing me up on this.
If you go back far enough, you can find very strange spelling, grammar, words, and even letters in the English language, but that doesn't have much bearing on what's easy to understand today.
Also, insisting that flammable is not a word is a little odd. It's in lots of dictionaries, has latin roots semi-independent of the roots of inflammable, and came into English in the 19th century. Thus, it fits the prescriptivist view as well as the descriptivist one. Yes, inflammable is slightly older.
I would enjoy a world very much where people stopped getting pissy about starting a sentence with "and" or "because", or splitting infinitives, or other things that are perfectly valid, commonly used, and don't hurt much of anything.
Don't start planning that vacation just yet (Score:4, Informative)
For everyone here who has seen a lot of science fiction movies or lived in a trailer park where hillbilly meth-heads are routinely abducted by little green men, you might want to keep in mind that 127 light years is a very long way--an almost unimaginable distance, in fact. Most people have absolutely no appreciation for interstellar distances in general (when I was a wee lad, for example, I thought that the next solar system began right at the edge of our own). Let's put it this way: our fastest craft take about 9 years or so to go from the Earth to Pluto. At that same speed, it would take about 125,000 years to reach our next door neighbor (Proxima Centauri). And that's a mere 4.2 light years away (right in our cosmic back yard).
So if you're planning a visit to this newly discovered system, you'd better pack for about a 4-million-year trip, one way.
Re:Don't start planning that vacation just yet (Score:5, Funny)
Did you extrapolate Moore's Law in that calculation, Captain Obvious?
Re:Don't start planning that vacation just yet (Score:5, Informative)
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"The amount of electron-spitting components doubles in density every 18 months."
There you go. I call it Ulriks law. Spread the word.
Re:Don't start planning that vacation just yet (Score:5, Funny)
So you're basing a 4 million year trip on current propulsion technology? Seems pretty archaic to me. I certainly hope that in 4 million years enough new ideas would come out that our ideas of propulsion would be long obsolete.
When I travel to distant systems, I plan on using some super cool technology that I will call Magnetic Focusing Expansion of Relative Space (MFERS for short). The idea is that we just generate a magnetic attraction between two distant points and turn the thing on. It should also have the benefit of shielding the craft from any inconvenient chunks of matter between A and B. Also, this is science. Science that I base entirely on facts that are not factual (yet). Propulsion is for cavemen. Think of this more like Propullsion.
Re:Don't start planning that vacation just yet (Score:5, Informative)
It's funny that you should mention that. They are already developing new propulsion systems that no longer require solid rocket fuel. This one for instance can shorten the trip to mars to just about 3 months:
Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket
http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/shuttle/support/researching/aspl/index.html [nasa.gov]
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I missed this one. They are also looking at real designs for Antimatter Drives:
http://www.transorbital.net/Library/D001_S01.html [transorbital.net]
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You do realize that they are already creating antimatter today right?
They started creating almost two decades ago, although it's prohibitively expensive as all new technology is in it's infancy. It's only a matter of time before they can create it in bulk at a reasonable cost.
The technology to create antimatter, although new, is already advancing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimatter#Artificial_production [wikipedia.org]
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There's a lot of pulling going on here pal but I'm not sure it's the kind you're talking about, know what I'm saying?
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Don't forget the Borg modifications along the way that will speed up the trip.
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If only politicians were the only thing stopping that humanity thing from cooperating on all those great ideas. At least they surely aren't a reflection of said humanity, nope, no way.
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We're going to turn into birds? Awesome - I always wanted to be a seagull!
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Look up atomic rockets... there is a process... nobody has the guts. LOL
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As far as i remember, homo sapiens is about 200.000 years old.
Even assumnig that the technology was no problem, I wonder if we would survive such a trip, both on earth and on the ship, and how different we'd be when we arrived.
I think it would be fair to assume, that those in the ship evolved quite differently than those on the planet.
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Even better, a container (ship) would leak everything stored inside on such timescales. It's probably a good idea to aim at max ~1 thousand years journey - in which case the Universe limits us to absolutely nearest stars, and to some light mode of transport; via embryos for example. Alternatively - use full (advanced & small) industrial base to maintain minicivilization while feeding off comets/etc.; this oen will take really long time.
Re:Don't start planning that vacation just yet (Score:4, Funny)
As far as i remember, homo sapiens is about 200.000 years old.
Wow, that's a damn good memory you have. What was it like back then?
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Oh yeah?
What about wormholes? Duh.
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Its really too bad they partially debunked the guy that proved that the light speed limit was little more than a myth. I'm hoping for new evidence to back up a non-existance of a light speed barrier.
Theoretically though, if you could somehow make an engine constantly add thrust and never plateau due to relativity(where max speed would be the maximum exit speed of the particles being used for propulsion) you could exceed light speed.
I really think we need a lab somewhere in space. Something along the terms o
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Except that it's not the plateau of the exit thrust that stops it, it's the increase in inertia of the rocket as it approaches light speed, which approaches infinity as the rocket speed approaches the speed of light.
To take an optimistic view, time dilation does slow th
Re:Don't start planning that vacation just yet (Score:4, Funny)
you might want to keep in mind that 127 light years is a very long way--an almost unimaginable distance, in fact
I mean, you might think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts compared to space.
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Damn... now I'm gonna run out of clean underwear for sure!
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Perhaps, however, we can start planning the date when they might come see us...
My money's on 2057, personally...
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In reality, 127 light years is not that far away. The most distance objects that we see are close to 13.4 billion light years away from Earth.
We are seeing the system as it was 127 years ago. So it is a stable system, with planets in stable orbits. The question if there is life there or any planet in size range of the Earth are different questions, and require a different method to figure out.
This discovery however shows that out solar system is not the only solar system out there with more plants then two
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It's a long way to travel with current technology. But communications could be possible. 127 years is a long time to wait for a reply. But it would be terribly significant just to detect signals, even without two-way conversations. At least it lends hope to projects like SETI. The more systems like this we find, the less likely it becomes that we are alone in the universe.
On the other hand it's always seemed likely to me that life on other planets, if it exists, and even if the beings are sentient, is proba
People will be born & will die in one system (Score:2)
I suspect most humans, at any given time, will be far too old for organized interstellar journeys, the way we might probably do it (imho) - those young enough will be composed of dozen or so cells, cryogenically frozen. Or even not really existing yet, travelling in the form of egg & sperm bank on a quite small, light & fast spaceship (which would still be an enormous strain to build & launch, but at least plausible; plausible enough also to do it every few decades, maximizing chances of success
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And communication into the past with not-yet-present robot, it seems?
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Well, yes - but on the local scale. Like teleoperation of nearby semi-autonomous (doing many tedious & routine tasks by themselves, sometimes requiring direct input) fleet of robots, or some decently autonomous ones within system.
Full autonomy for interstellar.
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Don't know if you're being serious or not, so I'll be as succinct as possible. The fastest that a message can be sent to or from anywhere is the speed of light, which might be fast enough for you to waldo a robot on the other side of the planet, but even going out as far as the moon would be a frustrating experience, asking your robot arm to move and it doesn't respond for a few seconds. Sending information (or a physical object obviously) faster than the speed of light leads to violations of causality, w
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I'm being snark-serious. What I wrote is clearly a fantasy that flaunts our current knowledge about how the universe works.
I think it's only a matter of time before a lot of previously held ideas about light, matter, gravity, etc are going to have to be heavily rethought. The emergence principal has been rearing it's ugly head quite a bit recently in unexpected places and it's possible that the speed of light is an emergent property of the universe, not a hard or set one.
It's just a hunch, not science,
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I have a seriously hard time understanding how going faster-than-light could violate causality. If you go faster than sound and arrive at a location before the sound of your engines does, it doesn't mean no one can interact with you until they hear you coming. Light should work the same way: event A happens at a given time and the light reporting that event begins spreading out. Observer B is located one light year from event A's location and starts moving at twice the speed of light towards A. B reaches A
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This creates a paradox. Imagine in your A and B scenario that B is stationary and A flies to B faster than the speed of light using some as of yet undetermined method. When A arrives, he/she quickly pulls out a telescope or some such device, turns around, and watches her own arrival. How can she already be there if she is just arriving?
Re:Don't start planning that vacation just yet (Score:5, Funny)
I hope someone can come up with a better example... she isn't "just arriving", the light is "just arriving". If you cannot separate one's "self" from the light representation thereof, have fun in front of the mirror!
Kinda reminds me of the Joo Janta 200 Super Chromatic Peril-Sensitive Sunglasses...
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When A arrives, he/she quickly pulls out a telescope or some such device, turns around, and watches her own arrival. How can she already be there if she is just arriving?
When the speed of sound is broken by a jet, they could actually fly for quite a while, stop, turn around, and then hear the sound of them arriving. Why should light be any different? I don't understand why light and time are seen together. I think it should be something more akin to a sort of faster version of sound..except it's light.
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Wait a second here, this sounds familiar.
When A arrives, he/she quickly pulls out a telescope or some such device, turns around, and watches her own arrival. How can she already be there if she is just arriving?
When the speed of sound is broken by a jet, they could actually fly for quite a while, stop, turn around, and then hear the sound of them arriving. Why should light be any different? I don't understand why light and time are seen together. I think it should be something more akin to a sort of faster version of sound..except it's light.
Indeed, the example given was flawed in the way you describe: the light != the event, therefore no paradox. However, there are various ways to arrive at the conclusion of no faster than light travel:
1) Light travels at the same speed through a vacuum no matter how the observer is moving. This was a well tested experimental result before Einstein explained it theoretically. The light coming out of a car's headlights at 60mph is not going at the speed of light + 60mph, it's going at the same speed as that fro
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So, if you can affect something which is outside of your light cone, e.g. travel faster than light, some observers will observe you affecting something happening before you acted to affect them.
*To be mor
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Quantum entanglement-based teleportation will enable us to create robots, teleport them to far away lands, and then said robot will teleport back the video, sensor data, etc instantly as if it were a computer sitting on the floor next to you.
Is that before or after we send John Travolta to teleport the giant poison-gas-carriers to depopulate all the "animals" from the "client" planet? Or do we fire AGMs at their home-trees? I guess it depends on if the natives are tall & blue, I suppose.
Interstellar tra
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Or are you being funny?
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Well, you take a double-blind test panel of psychology students, get them to sign a mental health waiver, and ask them to imagine a set of different astronomical distances.
Then you develop a graded imagination test: probably something involving Legos and crayons.
Finally you screen out the students whose minds have boggled due to failure* of imagination, remove them to a secure hardened psychiatric facility**, and continue testing. At 100% failure rate, you have a known unimaginable concept. You then put it
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How funny (Score:2)
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How did EU suddenly get involved with European Southern Observatory?...
(plus generally, healthy competition is nice & there's a lot of crossparticipation in many projects anyway)
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Yeah, if only all of those 14 actually were EU nations...
7 Planets? Pff... (Score:5, Funny)
I know of a solar system that has 8 planets. Used to have 9.
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I think they're limiting it to real solar systems, Alderaan doesn't count.
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I read of one planet in the seventh dimension got used as a ball in a game of intergalactic bar billiards. Got potted straight into a black hole, killed ten billion people. Only scored thirty points, too.
GTFO (Score:4, Insightful)
"the solar system with the most planets yet"
There is only one Sol. There can only be one System Sol. Anything else is a star system.
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"the solar system with the most planets yet"
There is only one Sol. There can only be one System Sol. Anything else is a star system.
Isn't that kind of like saying the only Lindsey is Lohan?
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It's more like saying the only BobMcD is 601576.
Any time Sun or Sol (or Solar) is used to reference anything other than the star that Earth orbits is kind of like a misuse of the name, like saying ALL Lindseys are Lohans.
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My point was more along these lines:
All names are arbitrary.
We named the sun 'sol' and could thusly name other things that as well. It isn't as if the thing was labeled by God himself before we got around to thinking about it.
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A solar system is any system around any star, and whatever star you are orbiting is the Sun (at least if you speak English). There is one particular star called Sol, and its solar system is called the Sol system, just like you might say "the Vega system" or "the Polaris system".
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Solar does not mean star. I don't know who taught you that, but they are wrong. Solar means The Sun (and is extrapolated to incorporate everything directly influenced by The Sun). The Sun (Also known as Sol) is the only one known as THE Sun and thus we call it THE Solar system.
Only rarely does someone innacurately call another star A sun, because its actually a star, and not THE sun. You'll notice they even said in the summary
The star is HD 10180, located 127 light-years away...
They didn't say "The sun is HD 10180..."
So, to review, there is only one The Sun,
What's that name again? (Score:2)
Am I the only one who first read that as "The star is HD 1080".
To put this in some perspective (Score:3, Interesting)
It would require a radio telescope with a 1 Km dish (or many with equal collecting area as well as comparable resolving power) to be able to detect an Earth-sized planet 1 AU from its sun at a distance of 100 LY from Earth at a resolution of a single pixel. (Information courtesy of the director of the SETI Institute during an on-site lecture at NASA.) This is 127 LY away and some of the planets are closer to their sun still. The current proposal for the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) telescope has it distributed across continents - boosting the resolving power - but the collecting area might still be too feeble to directly observe a whole lot.
(The proposal would likely need to be upgraded to a Square Mile Array or larger before you could do much in the way of direct observation. The SKA project has been painfully slow to advance and, frankly, upgrading it to the size necessary to actually look at Earth-sized alien worlds at that kind of distance just isn't going to happen. It's unclear to me if SKA as it stands will ever really happen.)
impending Thursday announcement from NASA-Kepler (Score:3, Informative)
Send a probe now if possible... (Score:2)
If faster than light travel is never achieved, we'll eventually have an archeo-space exploration science, where future scientists must track and watch for signals from (then ancient) probes as they reach waypoints and destinations.
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On the other hand you could build a gigantic telescope now and be able to spend less or at most equally as much and be able to watch information that is only 125 years old and that without waiting ~10000 years or more for the probe to arrive.
Anyway, I bet we aren't going to see a Probe mission for a long time. I would rather expect people to travel there and take what they get. This implies that we are actually able to support such a mission with relative ease or that we feel pressured into starting it.
Master of Orion 2 (Score:5, Insightful)
Does anyone else remember playing Master of Orion, and finding a planet, where the info-box says "Ultra rich, heavy-G".
I always thought that sounded like a nickname for a gangsta rapper.
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I sure as hell hope our first colonization effort isn't an introduction to the jaws of a Space Dragon.
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Not interested (Score:2)
"...the Solar System's eight planets..." (Score:3, Funny)
Nine.
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It's a planet if it is on the list of the nine planets. Pluto is. Eris isn't. Either that or we go back to the original five.
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What if I hold a favorable opinion of Ceres but not Pluto or other Kuiper belt objects? Then it's nine, just like the man said. :)
(And yes, before you ask, yes I do consider that to be a more sensible categorization scheme than the one the IAU actually adopted,)
Richest solar system? (Score:2)
Did they find Arrakis (Gune) ?
But seriously, the richest solar system would be one that contains a habitable planet. Gas Giants are 10 a penny...
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Did Richard Stallman re-write a Frank Herbert novel?
Maybe Maybe not (Score:2)
Without the ability to determine definitively whether they have 'cleared the neighbourhood of its orbit' can we really prove that we've discovered *any* extrasolar planets?
And yes, I know that the IAU says that is the definition of a planet in our Solar system, but as even the most basic student of science philosophy knows science assumes that definitions are not variable across time and space. So really we just don't know.
FU Tyson - {G}. If Pluto can't be a planet I'm not recognizing any of these others ti
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So what are we living on, an Earthoid?
You know what, I'm renaming every planet to Hammer just to spite you.
Other Star Systems; Not Solar Systems (Score:2)
Don't you wish warp drive was real? (Score:2)
It is these kinds of announcements that make me wish warp drive was real. Space is so interesting!
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Celestia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Universe_Atlas [wikipedia.org] , http://astro.uchicago.edu/cosmus/projects/sloangalaxies/ [uchicago.edu] , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universe_Sandbox [wikipedia.org]