Giant Planet Around Tiny Star 'Should Not Exist' (bbc.com) 82
Thelasko quotes the BBC:
Astronomers have discovered a giant planet that, they say, should not exist, according to current theories. The Jupiter-like world is unusually large compared with its host star, contradicting a widely held idea about the way planets form.
The star, which lies 284 trillion km away, is an M-type red dwarf - the most common type in our galaxy. An international team of astronomers has reported its findings in the journal Science.... The distant star has a mass that's, at most, 270 times larger than the planet. For comparison, the Sun is about 1,050 times more massive than Jupiter.
The finding challenges the widely held idea of planet formation known as core accretion. "Usually we think of giant planets starting life as an icy-core, orbiting far out in a disc of gas surrounding the young star, and then growing rapidly by attracting gas on to itself," said Prof Peter Wheatley, from the University of Warwick, UK, who was not involved with the latest study.. "But the authors argue that the discs around small stars don't provide enough material for this to work. Instead, they consider it more likely that the planet formed suddenly when part of the disc collapsed due to its own gravity."
The star, which lies 284 trillion km away, is an M-type red dwarf - the most common type in our galaxy. An international team of astronomers has reported its findings in the journal Science.... The distant star has a mass that's, at most, 270 times larger than the planet. For comparison, the Sun is about 1,050 times more massive than Jupiter.
The finding challenges the widely held idea of planet formation known as core accretion. "Usually we think of giant planets starting life as an icy-core, orbiting far out in a disc of gas surrounding the young star, and then growing rapidly by attracting gas on to itself," said Prof Peter Wheatley, from the University of Warwick, UK, who was not involved with the latest study.. "But the authors argue that the discs around small stars don't provide enough material for this to work. Instead, they consider it more likely that the planet formed suddenly when part of the disc collapsed due to its own gravity."
Easy to explain (Score:3, Funny)
Since theories cannot possibly be wrong, it can only mean one thing: the Universe is broken!
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It's like "flammable" and "inflammable" meaning the same thing. "Theory" and "theory" mean different things. One is a case of confusing synonymy, the other a case of confusing polysemy.
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In science there is no confusion between the two terms, but ignorant journalists keep the confusion alive for the general public. It makes us more vulnerable to those lucrative journo panic scenarios.
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The issue isn't innocent confusion; it's deliberate equivocation. Reporters aren't scientists nor are they writing for scientists; by in large their use of "theory" is in the colloquial sense rather than the philosophy-of-science sense. It's PR hacks that deliberately conflate the two.
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Reporters aren't scientists nor are they writing for scientists
But that never stops them from spouting utter tripe about things they know nothing about. Sadly, their editors are as clueless as they are. Thanks to an ever increasing "dumbing down" journalism will soon be indistinguishable from gossip.
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confusing polysemy.
Probably the first time polysemy has ever been used on Slashdot.
Some of us likely think that means multiple male orgasms.
Re:Easy to explain (Score:4, Informative)
>It's like "flammable" and "inflammable" meaning the same thing.
Actually, they don't. Flammable means something is capable of being set on fire. Inflammable means it's capable of spontaneously bursting into flame without an ignition source.
Still not remotely what you'd reasonably expect it to mean given the apparent prefix.
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I guess it's the same way as vincible means something that can be defeated and invincible means it's capable of spontaneously defeating itself without being attacked.
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It's just CowboyNeal on vacation, everybody calm down.
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Since theories cannot possibly be wrong, it can only mean one thing: the Universe is broken!
Or maybe this "giant planet" is just a low density cloud. If we take simulation theories others have suggested above this post off, what is important is mass. The original article title is:
A giant exoplanet orbiting a very-low-mass star challenges planet formation models
How very "very-low-mass" is the star? It could be as simple as the star orbiting a bigger mass or at least, something like a binary star system with one of the star dead without blowing up or going supernova. It is hard to find out more about it since the article seems to be pay walled if you want to "read more...".
https: [wikipedia.org]
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Try searching for this page [sciencemag.org] at https://sci-hub.se/ [sci-hub.se] and you'll get the paper.
To answer your question, Table 1 (mangled because of Slashdot's inability to handle tables well):
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LOL! I see you know more than terrestrial rocks! Nice post RockDoctor, thanks!
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Giant Planet around Star Negates Theories (Score:3, Interesting)
If something does exist, how can that possibly mean it shouldn't exist? It means your theories are wrong.
Do Slashdot's editors have no knowledge of basic science?
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It means your theories are wrong.
The question is, which one? The one regarding the formation of planets like the article suggest? Or the one regarding the measurement of planets? Or both?
Reminds me of an article a couple of months back where they tried to come up with some wild dark matter (or lack thereof) theory because a system displayed anomalous behavior based on distance measurements. Turned out their distance measurement models were wrong.
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Most scientists don't have a basic knowledge of science, especially modern scientists.
Science is:
while (!conclusion) {
Observe
Question
Hypothesize
Test
}
Modern Science is:
Conclude
while (!data_fits_conclusion) {
Experiment
Observe
filter(&data);
}
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I have rewritten your program in python, so that people who appreciate proper indentation can read it.
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Disagree. Now if you'd said most science reporters who get quoted don't have a basic understanding of science I'd tend to agree with you, but notice that there are two layers of filtration happening between the "most scientists" and the stuff you read.
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If something does exist, how can that possibly mean it shouldn't exist? It means your theories are wrong.
Do Slashdot's editors have no knowledge of basic science?
Or the method of observation is broken. I don't get why they are so certain with their observations when the star is 284 trillion km away.
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What wonders me more is: why did they use km as unit and not light years or parsec?
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No absolutes (Score:2)
It always bothers me when things like this are taken to "negate" theories. The universe doesn't deal in absolutes, and is a mindbogglingly big place. Anything that can happen, will happen - and will almost certainly do so countless times.
If you have a theory of star and planet formation, it can be perfectly valid for how stars and planets usually form, without in any way ruling out the possibility that other things may sometimes happen.
For example, maybe this early proto-star cloud was disrupted by a near
Why not possible? (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't see why this can't be possible, similar to how a binary star system can form. In this case, it's just scaled down - a small star and a gas giant that wasn't big enough to turn into a star itself.
And fairly close to big enough for binary (Score:4, Interesting)
The summary compares the object to Jupiter.
Only 13X the size of Jupiter is a brown dwarf, a mini star that does fusion of deuterium (2H) rather than ordinary hydrogen (H2). So it does sound a lot like a binary system with one of the two objects being relatively small.
The universe doesn't form objects in neat little categories - plenty of objects exist that don't fit neatly into our "planet" and "star" categories. Even our own solar system has an object larger than Jupiter but smaller than our sun orbiting out beyond pluto. Then there are roughly Jupiter-sized objects that wander around the galaxy, not orbiting any star. So we wouldn't expect this object, any arbitrary object, to fit neatly into our artificial category "standard planet".
In any event, if this particular object wasn't formed in a certain way, that does NOT mean that "planets aren't formed that way". It could very well be that all of the typical planets are formed in exactly the way they thought. This particular object may have been formed in a different way than planets typically are.
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Even our own solar system has an object larger than Jupiter but smaller than our sun orbiting out beyond pluto.
There may be conjecture that such an object exists, but so far there is no direct evidence.
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A good example of people taking someone's hypothesis and believing it to be fact. Similar to multi-universe, holographic-universe, dark matter, etc.
Dark matter definitely exists. We can detect it by its gravity in our own galaxy and throughout the Universe. The existence of a material that only interacts with visible matter, and itself, by gravity alone is directly observable by its gravity, Dark matter isn't a hypothesis, it is an observation.
We just have no idea what it is. No good hypotheses about it at all (we had some by they kept failing until we've all but run out.
Re:And fairly close to big enough for binary (Score:4, Interesting)
Dark matter definitely exists. We can detect it by its gravity in our own galaxy and throughout the Universe. The existence of a material that only interacts with visible matter, and itself, by gravity alone is directly observable by its gravity
No, it's more like: "If dark matter existed, our current model of gravitation would produce the results we observe."
Dark matter 'exists' in the same way that we once thought luminiferous aether did.
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Dark matter definitely exists. We can detect it by its gravity in our own galaxy and throughout the Universe. The existence of a material that only interacts with visible matter, and itself, by gravity alone is directly observable by its gravity
No, it's more like: "If dark matter existed, our current model of gravitation would produce the results we observe."
Dark matter 'exists' in the same way that we once thought luminiferous aether did.
This! A thousand times This!
I wish they hadn't named it "Dark Matter" That gets a lot of people confused thinking that it is certain that there are blobs of something out there that is definitely matter of some sort. Fact is, we don't know, and at present, "Dark Matter" is a placeholder, and performing that adjustment to make the present observations fit.
Maybe it is God Vaping?
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Today we call it the photon field.
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Actually, we don't usually call it "the photon field", and when we do it has rather different properties than did the "luminiferous aether".
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Sure, electromagnetic field if you prefer, so long as we're clear I'm talking about the QFT field that pervades all of space, in which photons are excitations. Sort of like the aether, which was supposed to be a medium which pervaded all of space, in which light was an excitation. Aether certainly wasn't as developed a concept as QFT, but the concept is similar. Note that there wasn't one "luminiferous aether theory" but rather a whole bunch of them, several of which were consistent with special relativity.
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Dark matter 'exists' in the same way that we once thought luminiferous aether did.
Well, maybe. The aether, in the sense of a substance having certain material properties, which was what scientists meant at the time, was an incorrect hypothesis. If, however, your understanding of 'aether' is a little more flexible, you might decide it's pretty good way to think about space(-time) once you find out space(-time) can have things like curvature. The aether strictly speaking doesn't exist, but neither does Newtonian space. The name 'dark matter' really implies it's some form of matter, even
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Thing is that is not the case. The dark matter is required because using Newtonian gravitational theory to model galactic rotation does not produce the results we observe.
Problem is Newtonian gravitational theory is known to be a simplification for over a hundred years now. Sure using General Relativity to model galactic rotation would be very hard, but till it is done (and to the best of my knowledge it has not) we cannot say the observations don't match our gravitational theory because we simply have not
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Dark matter definitely exists. We can detect it by its gravity in our own galaxy and throughout the Universe.
Dark Matter is a placeholder, until we figure out the physics.
There is *something*. We don't know much about it (Score:2)
There is a lot of debate about what the object is, its origin and nature. It is pretty clear that there is *something*. NASA has said "it's harder to imagine our solar system [acting this way] without it being a planet thhan with planet 9" - in other words, the object probably is a *planet*, not a SBH or something else. The likelihood that what we've been seeing is nothing is small at this point. Astronomers generally agree that there is something massive, then they diverge in their theories about what t
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In any event, if this particular object wasn't formed in a certain way, that does NOT mean that "planets aren't formed that way". It could very well be that all of the typical planets are formed in exactly the way they thought. This particular object may have been formed in a different way than planets typically are.
Or, Occam's Razor; The planet in question could have been captured from a close-passing star's planetary system or possibly another more distant star's planetary orbits became unstable and kicked out the planet and it was eventually captured by this star.
I mean, c'mon! This isn't rocket sci....oh wait....
Strat
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Occam need to learn about angular momentum and what sort of orbits are possible from captured bodies. It helps immeasurably to know something about a subject before you propose answers.
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Occam need to learn about angular momentum and what sort of orbits are possible from captured bodies.
So you're saying that it's impossible that these two bodies could have come into near enough proximity at relatively low enough relative velocities and at relative bearings and direction such that their mutual gravitational attraction could have brought them into a stable orbit? You know this for a fact, do you? I guess all those years at Rockwell, Martin-Marieta, and RCA at Cape Kennedy were all for not, LOL!
It helps immeasurably to know something about a subject before you propose answers.
You should listen to your own counsel. For all anyone knows at this point in time, that planet coul
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IIUC, capture is a 3-body problem, and requires one of them leaving at high speed, unless there's a collision or some other method of causing frictional losses. So perhaps there was a close passage with another star, and the planet was originally orbiting the other star, but this is getting into really low probabilities. Still, three independent bodies coming together at once is even lower.
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IIUC, capture is a 3-body problem, and requires one of them leaving at high speed, unless there's a collision or some other method of causing frictional losses. So perhaps there was a close passage with another star, and the planet was originally orbiting the other star, but this is getting into really low probabilities. Still, three independent bodies coming together at once is even lower.
It's not necessarily a 3-body problem. All it takes is for two bodies with mass, gravity, relative velocity, and bearing/direction to fit on a curve determined by the variables I described. We do it all the time with satellites, probes, and spacecraft. An object is an object. As long as we set the initial velocity and bearing to fit within the curve determined by the variables described above a stable orbit will be achieved. Also, the planet in TFS could have been an "orphan" planet perturbed out of it's or
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We do it with satellites, etc., but those are powered changes. I.e., there is a body (rocket exhaust) leaving at high velocity. If the masses are right (one a lot higher than the other, extensive atmosphere, etc.) it can also be done with atmospheric braking...i.e., frictional losses. That doesn't apply in this situation unless the "planet" moved into the neighborhood quite slowly while the star was still condensing and thus had an extended atmosphere. But then you need to explain why the "planet" is so
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We do it with satellites, etc., but those are powered changes.
This actually backs my point. A satellite is boosted to a certain velocity to achieve orbit, but there is a thing called relative velocity, otherwise asteroids would need engines to be travelling at the relative velocities they do in relation to other objects like Earth. Everything in the entire universe is naturally in constant relative motion.
It doesn't matter how the relative velocity/bearing is achieved, as long as it hits the 'window' to achieve orbit.
Strat
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Nobody credible said this wasn't possible. Just a clickbait title.
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...because of the conceit of human observers who've been watching what, 0.000001% of the universe closely for all of maybe a century? We *must* have seen nearly everything possible by now, right?
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Big surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
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Captured exoplanet? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Maybe the planet formed around another bigger star, separated from the original star because of some event and then some time later was captured by the current star?
Or it could have formed on its own, by accreting gas and dust, like a star that failed grow big enough to ignite.
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Or, that's no planet.
It's probably a huge ball of ice cream. The big mystery is, which flavor?
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The problem is that capture requires shedding angular momentum somehow. The normal way is via ejecting a third body or collision. Collision doesn't seem to have happened, and the third body solution is a bit improbable.
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I am not a physicist.
I would expect that any event that could catapult such mass out of its origin star system would imbue it with enough energy that a smallish star wouldn't be capable of capturing it, and it seems unlikely that this planet captured something the mass of the star.
Interesting hypothesis however.
It's all relative (Score:1)
Considering how many light years away it is, which I don't know specifically, because TFA used trillions of kilometers instead of the usual light years, and what is the deal with that anyway? Are they expecting you to take the family car on vacation to this thing? "Oh honey, I hope you got the oil done before we go, 284 trillion kilometers is a long trip. You also might want to hit the bathroom before we leave."
Anyway, since the speed of light ain't what it used to be, we're observing this thing as it ap
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TFA used trillions of kilometers instead of the usual light years
A light year is 9.4e12 kilometers. So 284 trillion km is about 30 light years.
So it is in our neighborhood.
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TFA used trillions of kilometers instead of the usual light years
A light year is 9.4e12 kilometers. So 284 trillion km is about 30 light years.
So it is in our neighborhood.
Yeah but how many football fields is it?
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Yeah but how many football fields is it?
2.58 Quadrillion, including the end zones.
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We have a similar thing in Elite Dangerous. (Score:3)
There is a system that has a planet and a moon that has an orbit of 7 minutes. The moon is so fast, you can't land on it from one side. You have to wait in orbit for the moon to move towards you. Entertaining. Elite Dangerous being in a computer game that is, to a certain degreen, correct with its orbital physics.
Frontier discovered this abnomaly in their procedural algorithm but decided to leave it as it was once it was discovered. It's a popular sight-seeing-system in the game. Video [youtube.com]
Maybe we're living in a simulation after all?
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284 trillion km sounds achievable in a Volvo (Score:2)
284 trillion km sounds like something you could do in your old Volvo
roughly translates to 30LY
"Giant Planet Around Tiny Star 'Should Not Exist'" (Score:2)
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No, we're just on a new frontier of fat shaming, where it's happening to planets now.
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Failed binary? (Score:4, Interesting)
Binary stars are very common in the galaxy. Our solar system is an exception.
Some scientists propose that Jupiter was to become a star, a companion of our sun, but it failed to ignite because it did not accrete enough gas to start fusing of hydrogen.
So perhaps that new star/planet duo is another failed binary, and again due to not enough material to work with.
Further reading;
http://askanastronomer.org/pla... [askanastronomer.org]
https://astronomy.com/magazine... [astronomy.com]
https://www.sciencefocus.com/s... [sciencefocus.com]
The remaining theory is ... (Score:1)
Nothing is proven, but that's what we've got.
Earth shouldn't exist either, but it does. (Score:1)