Extra-Galactic Planet Discovered In Milky Way 111
astroengine writes "Between six to nine billion years ago, the Milky Way collided with another galaxy. As you'd expect, this caused quite a mess; stars, dust and gas being ripped from the intergalactic interloper. In fact, to this day, the dust hasn't quite settled and astronomers have spotted an odd-looking exoplanet orbiting a metal-poor star 2,000 light-years from Earth. Through a careful process of elimination, the extrasolar planet (known as HIP 13044b) actually works out to be an extragalactic planet, a surviving relic of the massive collision eons ago."
Re:BS Alarms (Score:4, Insightful)
The star is part of a group widely accepted to have an extragalactic origin due to their orbit.
splitting hair definitions (Score:3, Insightful)
When I first read the headlines elsewhere, I wondered how we could have advanced sensitivity by a few orders of magnitude to distinguish individual stars in another galaxy, nevermind planets. Slashdot's headline is nonsensical. I find it kind of hard to think of a star that's "in the Milky Way galaxy" as being extragalactic. I'll even trust that the astronomers' science is right on: they're able to detect if a star matches indicators for originating in this galaxy or that galaxy. Maybe it used to be a part of a different galaxy pre-collision, but I would say it's in this galaxy now, so it's not an extragalactic star system. This article itself occasionally uses the phrase "of extragalactic origin" and I'm okay with that, but simplifying it further actually makes it more confusing.
Re:splitting hair definitions (Score:4, Insightful)
I find it kind of hard to think of a star that's "in the Milky Way galaxy" as being extragalactic.
Why not? The Immigration and Naturalization service considers many people in the United States of America to be aliens! Heck, they called me an alien first, then a resident alien before finally succumbing to my relentless pursuit of citizenship and agreed to call me a naturalized citizen, as though I was somehow not natural before Sep 21, 1999.
Re:splitting hair definitions (Score:5, Insightful)
I find it kind of hard to think of a star that's "in the Milky Way galaxy" as being extragalactic.
It's extragalactic because it came from another galaxy. If a space alien visited Earth, it would still be extraterrestrial even when it was on Earth.
Re:Old (Score:1, Insightful)
Galileo said it best:
"The Bible tells how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go."
Re:Old (Score:5, Insightful)
The Bible makes no claims as to the age of the galaxy, only the age of the earth.
Actually, it's worse than that. The bible makes no claims about the age of the earth either, it simply says that in the beginning, whenever "the beginning" was, God created it. 6000 years comes by counting the ages listed from Adam down through his descendants. The problem with using this as the age of the earth, or anything listed as created before Adam for that point, is two-fold.
First of all, if Adam was immortal before sinning, then he also did not age before sinning, and therefor one can not infer from the text if his listed age is from the moment of his creation, or from the moment he became mortal. With this in mind he could have been 10 million years old when he sinned and became mortal, thus starting the aging process.
Second of all, There is no record of time before Adam was created. Sure, the Bible records everything that is as being created in 6 "days", but it also uses the word "day" arguably before the Sun is listed as being created, assuming the Sun was created not on "day" 1 when he said let there be light, but on "day" 4 when he created the lights in the heavens. Does "day" mean 24 hours? Or is it an arbitrary separation of an unknown amount of time? And regardless of the answer to that question, if a day is a cycle of light and darkness and/or 24 hours and/or whatever, light didn't exist until verse 3 of the first chapter. There is no record or indication of how much "time" occurred prior to verse 2, if "time" even means anything in that context.
Furthermore, there is no evidence that supports that any of that means light in general was created for the first time in verse 3, or simply light visible to the mass of ocean called "earth".
In a nutshell, if you (and by you I mean anyone, not AC parent) want to try to pick apart the historical accuracy of the bible, you should try to pick apart Exodus, or perhaps Kings/Chronicles. Mid Genesis at the latest. The account of creation is rather vague with time periods and meanings. Some people believe that millions if not billions of years of men and dinosaurs and all kinds of nifty things happened between the first and second half of genesis 1:1.
WTF is with all the haters? (Score:3, Insightful)
Now, you're all experts in astronomical nomenclature? Have any of you even heard the term "extragalactic" before this article? People are whining like the planet has to come screaming out of the void from the edge of the universe to be "extragalactic". You don't like the definition, get your PhD in astrophysics and make up a new one.
Re:Old (Score:4, Insightful)