Two Earth-Like Exoplanets Don't Actually Exist 102
Two suspected exoplanets, Gliese 581g and 581d, have been shown to not exist, and are instead misinterpretations of data from starspot activity. From the article: "Gliese 581g doesn't exist," said lead author Paul Robertson of Penn State University in State College, Pennsylvania. Neither, he said, does another planet in the same solar system, known as Gliese 581d, announced in 2009—less clearly hospitable to life, but still once seen by some astronomers as a possible place to find aliens. ... What's happening, they say, is that magnetic disturbances on Gliese 581's surface — starspots — are altering the star's spectrum in such a way that it mimics the motion induced by a planet. The star itself rotates once every 130 days, carrying the starspots with it; the disputed planets appeared to have periods of almost exactly one half and one fourth of the 130-day period. When the scientists corrected for the starspot signal, both planets disappeared.
Get it right (Score:5, Interesting)
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Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Get it right (Score:4, Insightful)
You joke, but, there exists a problem with that idea.
How do you even establish a communication protocol with an entirely alien (technologically) civilization?
We can possibly work on showing a basic data format with numbers first, but after that, what then? Send Fibonacci sequences at each other ad nauseum?
There's some interesting ideas, but, how would we even move beyond mere shouting math at each other? How would we establish even a more advanced data format capable of handling characters? And then, how would we develop an intermediary language?
All of this with hundreds of years in gaps between sending and receiving communications, at that. It's not just hard, it's going to be effectively impossible within the lifespans of the people who sent the first message.
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This assumes that any thoughts more complex than mathematics will be mutually comprehensible or that the written language will use a recognizable grammar.
We also still make a big assumption that meat-based life forms will develop similar enough brains that communication will be possible.
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But, we learn it from pure saturation and situational awareness. We had to have access to the Rosetta stone to make sense of Ancient Egyptian.
There has to be at least some sort of context to work with.
You're not talking to the ancient Egyptians... (Score:2)
You're talking to a species that understands math, chemistry, physics...
You share the same Universe. There's your context.
And simple 1+1=2 vs 1+1=3 (i.e. something like: .^.-.. .^.-...) is enough if you'd just want to match up two vocabularies of terms.
You got your TRUE and FALSE right there.
And then there are entire languages already constructed for just such a purpose.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C... [wikipedia.org]
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I've seen sci fi that implied the foreign language was all adjectives, but that doesn't seem very practical.
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It may be that placing babies with the aliens will be the only way to gain effective communication. For an exploration of this, see Suzette Haden Elgin's _Native Tongue_.
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make sure to use IPv4 TCP frames, as those are universal...they are unlikely to have upgraded to IPv6 due to the additional cost, just like we haven't.
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I'm expecting a response, even if you aren't.
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Oh, yeah, welcome to Independence Day.
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I like when people try to pick apart ID4 to look smart, only to look really stupid.
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Greg Egan had one in a novel that relied on being able to copy and modify human minds then run them as software. You make a copy, tweak it so it has some understanding of the alien and is human enough to communicate with the mind upstream, then another and so on until you have a chain of a dozen or more intelligences that pass a message from the human to the alien.
For a less optimistic view there's Lem
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But that's not really credible. The basic motivations for all living things on Earth are reasonable simple to understand, once you know their environment and evolutionary/personal history. And while an alien planet is alien, it still exist in the same universe under the same basic principles of existence. Thus, an alien would still experience the same archetypes - conflict, bir
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Not necessarily. Lem's lone planet sized alien in Solaris seems to avoid at least a few of those and for the rest nobody can work it out at the time of the story.
Irrelevant since easily comprehensible and incomprehensible are not the only choices. Lem's example is a century+ of almost no progress but that doesn't mean forever. In reality we've
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Lem's planet and its inhabitant exist in the land of make-believe, and doesn't have any actual history, but actual planets existing in actual spacetime are still subject to be guided by actual archetypes over actual time.
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Nice put down if we were not speculating about something nobody has observed. Of course we are using examples from the land of make-believe.
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I once read a story about an alien who didn't have to eat because it was powered by a perpetual motion engine. Does such an alien make a good example of something we might actually encounter? No, because it's at odds with reality as we know it.
Just because we are using imaginary examples doesn't mean all such examples are equally credible.
Consider reality then - virus, prion etc (Score:2)
Solaris is deliberately a bit of an extreme but the important question it asks is this: "What if aliens were truly alien?". The more different from us something is the more difficult it is likely to be to communicate
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We have managed to establish a basic form of communication with some chimpanzees, well within human liftetimes, because they are able to see us (visual sensors in the right frequancy band) and they are able to make delicate motions that we can see.
If we make contact with aliens of approximately that level of sophistication, we should be fine.
Add to that the possibility of them hearing us (again, sensors in the right range) and hopefully vice-versa, and we should not have too much problems that cannot be ove
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To be able to visually see, and audibly hear each other, we would have to figure out how to even communicate with each other to begin with - video and audio file formats.
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You don't. You use the parts of your own protocol that aren't too compressed (think .bmp instead of .jpg, .wav instead of .mp3), and hope the other side can figure it out. Since the messages will be travelling for tens or even hundreds of years, a few decades for understand the other side's protocol shouldn't delay things too much.
Once you think you have figured out the other side's protocol, you sen
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No. You use basic universal truths to start.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V... [wikipedia.org]
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"Truth" is a heavily cultural thing. If anything, you use facts.
And the Voyager record does basically exactly what I mentioned. It uses a subset of our own communication protocols with very low compression.
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You might want to check out Stanislaw Lem's "His master's voice". He writes about the futile attempts of humanity in decoding an alien signal sent to earth, not only because of the difficulty of the encoding itself, but also due to the chasm between the two civilizations, mindsets etc. It is very dark and pessimistic, but definitely a good read.
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Isn't that how Jesus was born?
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Right, well the generational ship is going to be sent any day now so I'm glad the scientists at least put the brakes on this one.
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We could still send the B-Arc
Re: Get it right (Score:2)
Standard astronomical procedure now is to confirm detection of an expoplanet using toe or more detection methods before trumpeting the existence of MyWorld.
Yeahhh (Score:3, Insightful)
I love physics, but I've really felt like the exoplanet thing has been irresponsibly laid on pretty thick for the common man (mostly by scientific media and then mainstream media, in order to sell copies/ads, of course).
There's a lot of zeal in announcing newly found planets, pontificating on their atmospheres and doing up artists impressions and whatnot. It's just not good to take back that type of information and say "ah shit, it was actually just a sunspot". It's really the only true vector of doubt in the religious mind - when science corrects itself. This type of stuff does not help.
But then again, it's mostly the mainstream media who create such a house of cards.
Re:Yeahhh (Score:4, Informative)
Ditto here. The "New planet may support life!!!! meme is so COMPLETELY overblown based on a telescope that detects occultations, and doesn't generate any images. The "artist's renderings" were way off in fantasyland, entirely unsupported by the data.
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It's just not good to take back that type of information and say "ah shit, it was actually just a sunspot".
You are wrong, exactly this is the power of science, that it can correct itself. In fact, this is always exciting because you found something new, you can use this in future to recheck data and thus improve findings. In science you can challenge findings, learn and improve. Religion just stays as it is.
Or maybe (Score:5, Funny)
Some aliens came along and vaporized them with a futuristic weapon?
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Or the DOD just finished its Death Star?
Actually, our world doesn't exist either (Score:2)
"my sysop types all this in."
Wow. (Score:1)
When the scientists corrected for the starspot signal, both planets disappeared.
So they possibly just committed genocide on two planets?
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They're now 'Ex-o-planets".
Great headline, guys (Score:2)
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there are also an infinite number of you that don't exist, and one that does.
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and at least one that does exist.
Infinite space, finite arrangement order of particles = small infinite subset of everything.
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Pluto is still a player (Score:1)
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Don't know about the god/animated characters' love lives, but get over the "Pluto is a planet" nonsense. Just because there are ossified grooves in your brain doesn't make it true.
There are still people around from BEFORE Pluto was discovered (named in 1930), and there was plenty of time when some of the larger asteroids, such as Ceres in the 1800s, were considered "planets", and if we have to end up counting all of the Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) as planets, why not comets (at least the ones with millenial
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Mercury and Venus don't have moons either, and I don't think anyone would seriously argue that we shouldn't call them planets.
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You STILL don't get nine. You either settle for the current eight, or you will, eventually, have hundreds, at least.
Not necessarily. If you make the definition of "planet" as wide as possible, you can then create (non-exclusive, overlapping) sub-categories for different classes. Terrestrial, gas-giant, dwarfs, KBOs, super-Jupiter, hot-Jupters, hot-Earths, super-Earths, rogue (or free flying) planets, etc.
And, of course, then you can have "Traditional Planets", which is the nine.
Everyone gets a toy, everyone goes home happy.
[Except I'd make the definition wide enough to include large moons (eg, "non-stellar bodies over 50
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Yes, lets butcher science so the ignorant plebes can be happy. What could go wrong?
Plane was ill-defined. So now it has a more specific definition. That is all.
You know what? we will probably find more data and cause it to become even more specific.
Great, more ammo for the deniers (Score:1)
So many Republicans don't believe in the existence of space, and this sort of conspiracy just makes them more bold.
Re:I always wonder about things like this (Score:5, Informative)
This is why most discoveries are double-checked by someone else.
Whether it is table-top cold fusion, stem cells, planets, or the Higgs boson, you publish "we found X by doing Y". Someone else tries and does or doesn't succeed. If they do, it adds evidence to your discovery. If they don't, they go back through your "Y" and see where it doesn't add up for them. In this case, it was found that "Y" didn't take into account "Z" (rather like the "faster than light" neutrinos a few years back where the timing signal was slowed by a weak electical coupling).
Additionally, there's a lot of data coming from the space-based and, still, Earth-based, telescopes. A data item can show up after you've started your analysis that you didn't know at the time, for example, the stellar rotation period for which to account might not have been known.
On the plus side, this will require all of the to-be-published research to check for this factor, reducing that type of erroneous reporting.
Re: I always wonder about things like this (Score:1)
There is one exception to the double-checking rule though: climatology. Since the discipline went political, questioning a researcher's work in the field is 'denialism'.
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Wrong. That's just an accusation present by people who have no data to back there assertions.
Have you ever notice that deniers don't actual attack the science? They make ad homs. lies, non sequitors, or cherry pick something they consider 'wrong' even though it's within error bars.
Blindly ignoring facts is denial-ism. If it was wrong it could be solidly shown to be wrong with high school level of scientific understanding.
Let start with AGW, No, it's not the same as Climate change.
These are all scientific fa
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A whole rant in "response" to a post in which I made no assertions about the validity of AGW. All I said was that it has become a political pet project of the left, like man-hating feminocracy. Just as any criticism of the latter is "rape culture," any criticism of AGW is called "denialism."
I'm personally neutral on AGW, because I trust the scientific process to eventually come up with the truth on Arrhenius' venerable hypothesis.The outcome will be either:
1. AGW will turn out to be nonexistent or (more lik
Damn (Score:3, Funny)
Before you 3D print your FTL private colony ship, better check twice.
I felt a great disturbance in the Force... (Score:4, Funny)
as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened.
According to Darrell Issa, (Score:1)
it's Lois Lerner's fault for deleting planets.
Known issue, Has workarounds: (Score:2)
M dwarfs [wikipedia.org] are very interesting because they are the most common kind of star, and they have a very high potential of hosting planets able to support DNA-based life as we know it. M dwarfs are also expected to exhibit strong magnetic activity (star spots are magnetic features) as they are highly convective. Star spots appear darker in the optical wavelength, and can easily be mistaken for planets.
There is active research going on that tries to filter out this interference caused by the magnetic effects, and
Shhhh (Score:2)
Can't we call them sunspots? (Score:2)
Can't we call them sunspots instead of starspots? It's the same phenomenon. It seems needlessly ambiguous to call them one thing when they're on one star, but another thing when they're on any other star.
Neither, he said, does another planet in the same solar system
Aha! It's a star system. Nyah.
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IT's another step away form we are special and towards accuracy.
The 'sun' gets its name from when we thought it was not the same as stars.
I am getting pretty old, and I am very grateful I'm not the 'it'was this way when I was a kid and it should stay that way!' type of old person.
Next Great Example of Planet Hype (Score:2)
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap14... [nasa.gov]
Gleise 832C is another "planet" with a remarkably Earthlike "artist's rendering" of an exoplanet in a very close orbit around a smallish star. Is this a real planet candidate, or another case of "sunspot confusion"?