Thrilling Discovery of Seven Earth-Sized Planets Orbiting Nearby Star (theguardian.com) 273
At a press conference on Wednesday, NASA scientists announced that they have spotted seven Earth-sized planets orbiting closely around a small, ultra-cool star. The star is 39 light years away. From a report on The Guardian: It is the first time that so many Earth-sized planets have been found in orbit around the same star, an unexpected haul that suggests the Milky Way may be teeming with worlds that, in size and firmness underfoot at least, resemble our own rocky home. The planets closely circle a dwarf star named Trappist-1, which at 39 light years away makes the system a prime candidate to search for signs of life. Only marginally larger than Jupiter, the star shines with a feeble light about 2,000 times fainter than our sun. "The star is so small and cold that the seven planets are temperate, which means that they could have some liquid water and maybe life, by extension, on the surface," said Michael Gillon, an astrophysicist at the University of Liege in Belgium. [...] While the planets have Earth-like dimensions, their sizes ranging from 25 percent smaller to 10 percent larger, they could not be more different in other features. Most striking is how compact the planet's orbits are. Mercury, the innermost planet in the solar system, is six times farther from the sun than the outermost seventh planet is from Trappist-1.
I am not saying it was aliens... (Score:2)
Sterile and shattered. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Sterile and shattered. (Score:5, Interesting)
I think that greatly depends. Without a strong magnetic field, the Earth would look a lot like Mars, with much of its ancient primordial atmosphere blown away. I can imagine if one or more of those planets do indeed have a strong magnetic field, then I don't see how it is improbable that they could not harbor life. At the moment, we can't even declare with a high degree of assurance that Mars does not host life.
Dude, that's like a triple negative. (Score:2, Funny)
I don't see how it is improbable that they could not harbor life.
Quote of the day! I had to apply Boolean algebra to deduce your actual meaning.
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Wow, rereading it, talking about clunky. Logically and grammatically correct, to be sure, but Jesus Christ, how did I ever manage to weave that set of words together. Ouch!
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Bacteria living underground/underwater don't care much about radiation or earthquakes. Of course, it's bacteria, so we aren't going to be swapping porn or MP3s with them anytime soon.
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But you can bet there will be a bunch of space cadets saying we should mount a mission to explore these "earth like" planets in our intergalactic back yard.. Never mind that it will take tens of thousands of years with current technology to actually get there and back at the speeds we can manage right now...
Re:Sterile and shattered. (Score:5, Insightful)
Mars first. No need to run before you can crawl.
Though so far our record is to crawl to the moon, feel proud, then crawl back down our hole and declare the rest of the universe isn't that good anyway.
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And what makes you think the rest of the universe is 1. good and 2. reachable?
Our most efficient drive system to date (in terms of how much acceleration you get for the amount of propellant used) are plasma/ion engines. They run on electrical power. If you do some rough calculations on the size and weight of a manned space craft with provisions enough to make even a short (say 12 light years or so) trip, the power requirements of the engines alone will exceed the total generation capacity of the world's
Re:Sterile and shattered. (Score:5, Informative)
You're missing a rather important detail there that makes your claim essentially meaningless: time.
We've already launched a few probes that, had we chosen to aim them correctly, would eventually have reached a nearby star system. Sure, Voyager 1 would take ~17,900 years to cross the 4.2ly to Proxima Centauri, but it would so with paltry energy consumption and far less efficient propulsion systems.
Granted, that's probably too slow to interest anyone in making the trip, and the energy requirements increase dramatically as you travel faster, but that's why most near-term plausible speculation assumes (non-FTL) travel between stars would be in generation ships - it's a much easier problem to solve if you're willing to take a century or three to make the trip.
Of course that's a long time to keep a relatively small closed ecosystem healthy, so we'd probably want to wait until we had a century or two of experience building and maintaining long-term viable space stations before we even attempted it.
Also, you talk about the "total generation capacity of the world's electrical grid" as though it's some sort of meaningful indicator about future energy producing capability. In fact though, that's not even a tiny fraction of the energy we're already adding to the Earth today - the CO2 released into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels captures about a million times more energy than was generated by the power plant.
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Instead we could send a robotic explore there in say 80 years (spending half the time speeding up to light-speed, half the t
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I'm talking about the *current* state of technology... If we do this *now* what could we reasonably expect and make the trip in less than 50 years using our most efficient solution currently in development (or flying).
There is a theory that until we get round trip times down to 50 years or less, it's not worth trying.. Why? Because it is expected that advancing technology will likely make future trips possible at a faster speed and missions using that extra speed will likely pass the previous mission in ro
Re:Sterile and shattered. (Score:5, Informative)
Where are you getting "a few percent" from?
There's only 400ppm total CO2 in the atmosphere, that 100ppm represents fully 25% of the total.
Perhaps you're thinking of the fact that CO2 is only a few percent of the total atmosphere? But that's largely irrelevant because almost all atmospheric gasses are completely transparent to thermal infrared radiation, and so don't provide any insulation at all. If they were the only things in the atmosphere the Earth would be as cold as the moon (colder actually, the moon is actually coal black and thus a good thermal absorber)
Water vapor, CO2, and methane are responsible for the overwhelming majority of Earth's atmospheric insulation. Water makes up about 0.4% of the atmosphere (mostly at low altitude), CO2 is about 0.04% of the atmosphere,and methane 0.0002%.
Water is obviously the biggest contributor, but it can't build up in the atmosphere since it rains out as the concentration builds, so it remains fairly constant at a given temperature. It's worth nothing though that it acts as a positive feedback system - the warmer the planet, the more water vapor builds up in the atmosphere, and the more heat will be trapped. So it will tend to make any global temperature changes more extreme.
Methane is actually a considerably more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2 per pound, but there's so little of it that it still only traps a fraction as much heat as CO2. It's also worth mentioning though that humans are estimated to be responsible for somewhere around 2/3 of global methane emissions - we're working hard on that front as well.
Which leaves CO2 as a sort of "thermostat" - more CO2 leads to a warmer planet and faster plant growth, which pulls CO2 out of the atmosphere leading to a cooler planet and slower plant growth, which lets CO2 build up in the atmosphere again... it's a self-stabilizing system that oscillates around some "average" point until something disrupts it - such as dumping carbon into the atmosphere that's been locked underground for millions of years.
As for what difference a few percent can make? Lets do some rough math. Say CO2 is responsible for about 10% of the total greenhouse gas "insulation" (I have no idea, but it makes up about 10% of the total greenhouse gases in the atmosphere so that seems like a good guess). The 100ppm increase would therefore be responsible for about 2.5%. That means the Earth will have to warm up enough to radiate 2.5% more heat in order to shed the same amount of energy through the insulation to restore the energy balance and stop heating up. The amount of heat radiated is proportional to the fourth power of temperature, so a 2.5% increase in radiant heat translates to ...1.025^(1/4) = 1.006... a 0.6% increase in temperature. Earth currently averages about 61F, or 289K in absolute terms, and a 0.6% increase of that translates to 1.8K, or about 3.2F.
A three degree increase doesn't sound terribly catastrophic all on it's own, but that's assuming nothing else changes, which isn't the case.
First off as things warm up we'll have more water vapor in the air, further increasing the amount of insulation.
More dramatically, the warming isn't uniform - the poles are heating much faster than the rest of the planet, which means those shiny white ice "mirrors" that currently reflect sunlight back into space before its absorbed are being replaced with dark sunlight-absorbing water. That means the planet is absorbing more energy from the sun, and it's going to heat up even further until it's radiating all that extra energy back into space as well.
And of course there's the rising oceans to contend with: water has a coefficient of expansion of 0.00012/*F, and the oceans have an average depth of about 12,100 feet. 12,100feet x 3.2*F x 0.00012/*F = 4.65 feet. So even without any icecaps melting, the ocean would rise that much. Which maybe doesn't sound too terrible, but something like 90% of the worlds population live within 10 feet of sea level. That's going to b
Re:Sterile and shattered. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a red M class Dwarf star. The lack of radiation is the more immediate concern rather the excess of it. Red M class dwarf stars emit most of their radiation as infra-red, and barely emit any ultraviolet. If ultraviolet radiation is indeed a requirement for life, then this will be a problem. Total sterilization is unlikely, since the amount of energy hitting the planets will likely be similar to what the Earth is already getting.
Also, wrt tidal locking, the main concern would be that one side of the surface will be boiling while the other side will be freezing (one side gets all the sun, the other side gets none), which IS a concern wrt. life. Earthquakes are not a direct effect of tidal lock. That would be geological activity.
Of course, all of this is conjecture. We need to study these kinds of planets a bit more to know for sure. Hence, their importance.
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I remember playing a SciFi tabletop roleplaying game years ago that had a world generation system, and that one suggested that a tidally-locked world could have a "habitable zone" along the terminator, where temperatures were relatively moderate. I don't know how reasonable that is, since I would imagine that having half the planet's atmosphere at one temperature extreme and the other half at another could lead to some pretty extraordinary heat exchange, in the form of pretty brutal storms.
Ah but as Douglas Adams would have said (Score:2)
An unlikely impossibility is equivalent to a likely possibility, not to be confused with an infinite improbability.
Sterile and shattered. Or Not (Score:2)
Where are you imagining earthquakes from? If the planets are tidally locked, then their sun would no longer be having any substantial effect on their crusts. Much like the moon doesn't suffer quakes due to being tidally locked with the Earth, unlike the Earth whose crust is constantly being flexed by the gravity of the moon and sun. In fact, being tidally locked likely *reduces* the tectonic activity, since there's no longer any tidal "massaging" of the crust.
As for the x-ray blasts - I admit that's bad
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The moon has quakes, but only the incredibly mild deep moonquakes (700km below the surface) are potentially caused by tidal effects. And it's probably a safe bet that those are *solar* tides rather than Earth tides, since the only Earth-caused tides are the very slight fluctuations caused by the Moon's slightly eccentric orbit and the associated libration. Meanwhile the sun will still be causing tides on a roughly 30 day period (as I recall, on Earth solar tides are about 50% as high as lunar tides - whic
Re:Sterile and shattered. (Score:4, Insightful)
The blast of sterilizing radiation at that distance, combined with being tidally locked and probably wracked with catastrophic earthquakes at that distance would make life on these planets an unlikely impossibility.
The sun is a red dwarf and is 0.05% as bright as our sun. It has 8% of the mass of our sun and is 10% of the radius of our sun. It is much smaller, lighter and cooler. Not very much larger than Jupiter. The planets are likely to be tidally locked. Jupiter's Galilean moons are tidally locked to Jupiter, but they are not blasted by radiation. The study showed gravitational synchronization in their orbits, so that could cause earthquakes.
If the star were our sun the planets would be blasted wastelands tidally locked to their sun. I think the exciting point is that this system is 'only' 40 light years away, so we should be able to study it over the next few decades and learn much more. The planets are transiting their sun, as seen from earth, so we should be able to detect gas within their atmospheres through spectroscopy. Over the next few decades advanced space telescopes should help us gain a great deal of information on this system.
Could there be life> maybe. There is a whole lot to learn and a great many engineering challenges to solve to let us learn. For me that is more exciting than maybe a small chance of life.
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One thing we know for certain about at least some of the Galilean moons that due to the gravitational craziness of Jupiter and the big moons, these bodies are pretty damned dynamic. Io is probably the most geologically active body in the solar system, and while Europa's icy crust is fairly dull, a liquid ocean underneath suggests that it is very geologically active as well. I wonder with planets being that much closer to the star, and that much closer to each other, that the relatively low energy output of
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Jupiter's Galilean moons are tidally locked to Jupiter, but they are not blasted by radiation.
Actually, they are. And it is a major source of headaches for probes we have sent to Jupiter. Jupiter has a very strong magnetosphere, which has given rise to radiation belts much like Earth's Van Allen belts only much more so. And at least the inner Galilean moons are right in the middle of these radiation belts.
Re:Sterile and shattered. (Score:5, Interesting)
People who get excited about aliens living on planets orbiting dwarf stars are kidding themselves. These stars are a dime a dozen and make up more than 90% of all stars, their light is more strongly affected by planetary transits, and they tend not to gobble up their innermost planets when forming. It's no wonder we find exoplanets around them all the time. But there is nobody interesting living on any of them. You can really only trust type F and G stars with life. Larger stars explode so fast their planets haven't even had time to solidify, and smaller stars have to be hugged so closely that the planet is affected by the star's fickle weather patterns.
Names for 7 planets orbiting a red dwarf star (Score:5, Funny)
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If they name them after Donald Trump and his family members, NASA will probably get a trillion dollars a year.
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If they name them after Donald Trump and his family members, NASA will probably get a trillion dollars a year.
Only if he moves there first.
Re:Names for 7 planets orbiting a red dwarf star (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Names for 7 planets orbiting a red dwarf star (Score:4, Interesting)
Relevant xkcd: http://xkcd.com/1253/ [xkcd.com]
I would rather see naming rights auctioned off to the highest bidder, with the proceeds to benefit space research. Let the human ego do some good.
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Waist-Deep Cats always gets me.
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Belgian beer (Score:2)
Remember, as the Trappist name indicates the whole system is dedicated to Belgian beer.
Re:Names for 7 planets orbiting a red dwarf star (Score:5, Funny)
I'm sorta expecting New China, New Russia, New India, New Brazil, New France, New Australia, and Trumpworld.
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"Trumpworld"
NewtRumpLand.
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How about: Bashful, Doc, Dopey, Happy, Sleepy, Sneezy and Grumpy?
Get it over with and call them Achel, Chimay, Orval, Rochefort, Westmalle, Westvleteren and La Trappe already!
Anything else would be blasphemy. Yes, I am Belgian. :-)
Re:Names for 7 planets orbiting a red dwarf star (Score:4, Interesting)
How about: Bashful, Doc, Dopey, Happy, Sleepy, Sneezy and Grumpy?
That's appropriate because by definition, they are dwarf planets, even if bigger than Earth. There are only 8 "real" planets according to the rules makers. Nothing orbiting a different star can qualify, according to the hastily made rules designed to exclude Pluto. But you can call pretty much anything that doesn't qualify a dwarf planet.
Re:The star is named Trappist-1 (Score:5, Funny)
Chimay be right, chimay be crazy..
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Yeah not going to visit (Score:4, Funny)
Why would I not want to visit other planets that are the most likely so far to contain life?
Simple - it's a Trappist!
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If one of those planets is found to contain a lot of liquid water, we should name it Mon Calamari.
"What star does Mon Calamari orbit again?"
"It's One Trappist!"
I knew Wheeden was from the future... (Score:4, Funny)
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Alliance (Score:2, Funny)
This must be where we eventually go to form the Alliance.
A small, ultra-cool star (Score:2)
a small, ultra-cool star.
What you talkin' 'bout, NASA?
Let's set up a telescope array on the moon now (Score:5, Interesting)
No seriously, we should set up a very large synthetic aperture array of telescopes on the far side of the moon to look at these and similar promising exoplanets in high resolution and spectroscopically etc.
Yes. I know the far side of the moon isn't always dark, but half the time it is, and is shaded from Earth's light and our EM emissions etc.
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Until we have manufacturing facilities on the moon (not happening this century), it's easier to just launch another space telescope.
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EM transmissions are the only real issue, and does in fact make the far side of the moon an attractive location for radio telescopes. Anything more optical though is better off in orbit. Just don't look towards the Earth won't see any Earthlight, sunlight is a far more powerful, and we block that out easily enough.
And orbiting has one *huge* benefit over anything built on a planetoid - you can keep your telescope pointed at the same spot indefinitely without any seismic disturbances, and those extremely
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>And orbiting has one *huge* benefit over anything built on a planetoid - you can keep your telescope pointed at the same spot indefinitely without any seismic disturbances
Except that Earth orbit involves having the Earth block your view a lot of the time, and the Moon can block or blind you, too.
Solar orbit is a lot less convenient for repair missions, but you can get much, much longer undisturbed exposure times if that's what you're looking for.
Not in this political climate (Score:2)
The President doesn't want to hear about the possible presence of more aliens!
Pluto is a planet. (Score:2)
I'll sleep better now (Score:5, Funny)
That's where God keeps Earth's backups.
I wonder how far back the oldest goes?
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That's where God keeps Earth's backups.
I wonder how far back the oldest goes?
With seven of them? Clearly a weekly full and daily incrementals.
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$sudo -u god mount -t godfs /dev/trappist1p1 /mnt/p1folder
$Error: Username:god not in sudoers file
They forgot to mention X-Rays (Score:5, Interesting)
Strong XUV irradiation of the Earth-sized exoplanets orbiting the ultracool dwarf TRAPPIST-1
https://arxiv.org/abs/1605.015... [arxiv.org]
I think its time we hack space travel. (Score:2)
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I'm having a very hard time seeing how a spacecraft could NOT contain an immense amount of patented tech. I don't think it's possible to make a patent-free spacecraft.
Any craft that can reach a star system 39 light years away in a reasonable amount of time is also a fearsome weapon.
Not interesting. (Score:2)
" if there is life there, [we will know] within a (Score:2)
Awesome. That's sooner than we'll know if there's life on Mars
Invisible planets real, climate change false (Score:2)
So when NASA tells us that invisible planets light years away are real we all clap, but when it tells us that climate change right here is happening some how it's all a big con?
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One of these issues is hurting established business interests. The other not. That's the key difference.
Starting system (Score:2)
They found Kerbin! (Score:3)
Seven planets - check.
Exceptionally compact solar system - check.
Exceptionally small star - check.
Try to check if the sixth planet is a gas giant with five moons. Or try to determine if the second planet is purple!
Re:Unlikely (Score:5, Insightful)
Well yes, much in the same way one infers the presence of a stream of electrons from an electrical charge or the Big Bang from the CMBR, relative proportions of hydrogen, helium and lithium in the Universe and the red-shift of distant galaxies. Even a particle accelerator like the LHC at CERN does not in fact directly image subatomic particles. For chrissakes, what you "see" isn't a raw image, but is heavily processed by your nervous system, beginning right at the retina itself, then by the optic nerve and then by visual centers in the brain. In other words, what you "see" isn't actually the photons that the physical structures of the eye captures.
Lots of science is inference, seeing as many phenomenon cannot be directly observed. If you're saying inference is somehow questionable, then you're basically calling all form of observation questionable.
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Even more.. They are estimating the size and orbits of these planets and using all this estimation they figured that one or more of these planets *might* have liquid water on the surface. So assuming all their decades of observations are enough to correct out all the observation errors are good enough and matches their math close enough, they are likely right.
However, you are correct, we are not detecting these using any kind of direct observation but though inference from other observations that might indi
Re:Unlikely (Score:5, Informative)
These were found using the transit method, which measures a star's reduction in it's brightness as something passes in front of it.
They know that these sorts of occurrences are not things like sunspots because they can follow up using measurements of the wobbling of the star due to the gravity the planets exert on it.
Combine the two and you have a reasonable inference that there are planets orbiting this star.
If these are not planets, given the above two types of evidence correlating with each other, what else could they be?
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>If these are not planets, given the above two types of evidence correlating with each other, what else could they be?
Giant non-invisible teapots.
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If these are not planets, given the above two types of evidence correlating with each other, what else could they be?
Star Wars XII. "That's no planet... it's a space station"
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That gravitational deflection could be caused by any nearby massive body, like yo' mama.
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Welcome to astronomy.
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Hey, just because you think it's a long walk to the grocery store, doesn't make that any more of a absolute yardstick.
In the context of astronomy, 39 light years away is practically in our back yard - close enough that one day we may build telescopes capable of directly viewing the planet surfaces in enough detail to tell if there's (obvious) life there.
And it's well within the range to which we can send probes in the relatively near future (say within a century). As I recall we've already got a project go
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Hey, just because you think it's a long walk to the grocery store, doesn't make that any more of a absolute yardstick.
Tell that to a quadriplegic. The back yard may be closer than the grocery store but that still doesn't mean he's gonna get there any time soon. Without the wheelchair and a motor or someone to push, all distances greater than zero are out of reach.
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I wonder if, being close to their star, gravitational interactions between the planets and between them and the star could lead to the necessary "churning" of at least some of their cores to produce a strong magnetic field.
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What is different about these planets?
They are closer than any other ones we have found...
Re:Thrilling? (Score:5, Insightful)
Finding that many Earth-sized rocky bodies orbiting a star just 39 lightyears away, with the possibility that some of them may be able to have liquid water on their surface doesn't excite you? Did you have your sense of wonder and curiosity surgically removed?
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It will excite me more if there are some alien honey's that sport an anthropomorphic hourglass if you catch my drift. ;)
If I learned anything from Star Trek it's that it isn't bestiality if it's non-terrestrial. Thank you captain Kirk.
Re:Thrilling? (Score:5, Funny)
Your guide to distant worlds:
http://i.imgur.com/6jp4DVK.png [imgur.com]
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i giggled. thanks.
Re:Thrilling? (Score:5, Funny)
Flawed! I don't know what "consentual" means, but surely don't rely on ASKING when determining if an alien is old enough. The alien I fucked SWORE to me it was 22, then I find out it's planet circles its sun every 90 MINUTES!
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Excuse me, but I don't think you saw my sig that I most certainly did not just change right now.
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More importantly, even, are that we can detect planets that small at this distance, and that such a small and cool star, the most common kind, has rocky planets. If the Copernican assumption holds, there are a lot more planets of this kind waiting to be discovered.
Challenging? (Score:2)
Seems like it probably wasn't much of a challenge, besides being lucky enough to look in the right place. Planets that close to the star will generate a comparatively strong signal, especially if they used Doppler shifts rather than transits to detect them. And with orbits varying from 1.5 to 20 days it doesn't take long to get many periods worth of signal to be confident in your detection.
Recognizing that they had seven overlapping signals rather than random noise was probably the most difficult part, and
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They used the transit method. But even the transit method will give a stronger signal the smaller the star. The shadow of a terrestrial sized planet will be a larger percentage of the total stellar output.
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I thought the fact that the star is "ultra-cool" is the most exciting thing about this story...
Maybe we can send all the hipsters there?
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the star is "ultra-cool"...Maybe we can send all the hipsters there?
They were there before it was cool.
What it says about this world (Score:4, Informative)
It's a sad commentary about the state of affairs on this world that access to the original article, based on research on paid for with public money, is no free. It's truly appalling.
Re:What it says about this world (Score:5, Informative)
You can see the figures here for free --- and they provide much of the meat of the study.
http://www.nature.com/nature/j... [nature.com]
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Well? What did you decide?
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So how fast are they moving? And in which direction?
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I'm glad you've recovered so quickly from Milo's downfall.
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Because being a pedophilia defender is the surest way to fame and fortune...
I love how Milo's fanbois still desperately cling to the idea that he's going to make his way out of this one, even as he becomes too toxic for even Breitbart.
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Wasn't he the victim of sexual abuse? I don't follow him, so I don't know exactly what he said, but that's the sort of circumstance that a reasonable person makes allowances for.
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I can certainly understand why he is a pretty vile human being, but that doesn't going any distance towards defending him.
My honest view is that he has no sincerely held views. I think he just says things to piss people off, and has gathered together a following of young white men in their late teens and early twenties who think that it's really cool to be a repugnant bigot. I don't think that has anything to do with whether Milo was the victim of abuse as a child, and everything to do with the fact that he
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Something like 30% of victims become pedophiles themselves. So while this goes some way toward explaining his toxicity (only some-way mind you, since plenty of victims choose not to become vile, despicable people, unlike Milo), it certainly does not warrant "making allowances for."
"Pedophile" != "child molester". Not sure which you meant here. But didn't he say something like "I was molested and it wasn't that bad"? (I don't actually know.) I'm no psychologist, but from what I understand that's a sort of mental illness caused by trauma.
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Try reading, it does a mind good.
1x fainter doesn't mean anything more than 1x larger - i.e , the same.
2x fainter means 1/2 as bright. 2000x fainter means 1/2000th as bright. Pretty standard terminology.