Earth-Size 'Pi Planet' Rocks a 3.14-Day Orbit (cnet.com) 40
An anonymous reader shares a report: Everyone's favorite mathematical constant has received an inadvertent tribute from the universe. A team led by MIT researchers discovered a distant planet that orbits its star every 3.14 days, mirroring the famous first three digits of pi. MIT described the rocky Earth-sized planet K2-315b as "baking hot" and "likely not habitable" in a statement on Monday. "The planet moves like clockwork," said MIT graduate student Prajwal Niraula, lead author of a paper on the planet published in the Astronomical Journal this week. The team found the exoplanet (a planet located outside our solar system) in data gathered in 2017 by NASA's Kepler Space Telescope K2 mission. The planet-finding telescope was put into a permanent sleep mode in 2018. The researchers confirmed the planet's existence by taking another look with the ground-based Speculoos telescope network. "Speculoos" stands for "Search for habitable Planets EClipsing ULtra-cOOl Stars." It's also a fun reference to a type of spiced cookie.
Cheeky (Score:2)
"The planet moves like clockwork,"
Hah! Because planetary motion has something to do with... clocks. Awesome.
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Our planet seems to be ruled by Clockwork Orange.
Yet (Score:2)
The Watchmaker [wikipedia.org] seems to play dice [wikipedia.org].
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The Watchmaker [wikipedia.org] seems to play dice [wikipedia.org].
No QM, let alone hidden variables, needed for planets. They are totally deterministic. If you fired planets through a double-slit, there would be no interference pattern. Though it would be cool to test this.
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Collectively on the macroscopic scale it is easier to describe it with classical mechanics than QM. We don't have mechanics that describe both the macroscopic and the quantum, because we don't have a full understanding and haven't devised the formula. Conceptually when you have a staggering billions upon billions of particles in your planet it averages out to something that makes sense, instead of behaving like the nutty quantum world.
It's *all* rolling dice though. The odds of rolling many quadrillion snak
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Tick, tock, tick, tock, tick, tock, oops, journalists with short attention spans forgot about the 20th century again. Whoopsee.
MIT described the rocky Earth-sized planet (Score:3)
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Damn, you beat me to it. But not knowing the USA very much and after a quick Google search, I would have written something about Death Valley, California.
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And also the usual "Yeah, but it's a dry heat" meme.
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[smacks forehead] (Score:2)
"The planet moves like clockwork," said MIT graduate student Prajwal Niraula, ...
Funny how orbital mechanics works like that.
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"The planet moves like clockwork," said MIT graduate student Prajwal Niraula, ...
Funny how orbital mechanics works like that.
They don't. Newton was wrong; the article is wrong. Look up "Vulcan and Mercury".
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the do, even with General Relativity, Mercury moves and wobbles like clockwork
Tau = 6.28 (Score:4)
An orbital period of Tau [wikipedia.org] would be cooler.
That would be exactly one radian per day.
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But Earth days don't really mean anything on an interstellar scale. Would be cooler still if it was some multiple of a basic universal constant.
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There are precisely 2pi in a circle because a radian is defined by the number of radii in a circle's perimeter. Pi is defined as a ratio between a circle's perimeter to its diameter, so the perimeter is Pi*d. A radius (more useful unit when dealing with circles) is hal
shitty article (Score:1)
get out of here
Don't care about the planet (Score:2)
Even though I have love for hot weather, this one might possibly be a bit outside my range.
However, I had to look up speculoos since I had never heard of them. Similar to a molasses cookie though not as strong. Those I can get behind.
Lower-brow desire (Score:1)
I'd rather go to Planet Pie.
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Guaranteed to be in the Goldilocks Zone if you can bake a pie! I'm in.
Planet Tau sounds inviting until you realize it is still nearly half as hot as planet Pi.
I'm more partial to e than pi (Score:2)
I don't agree that pi is everybody's favourite constant.
Personally, I'm more of a fan of Euler's constant - a much more useful value in mathematical operations.
Re: I'm more partial to e than pi (Score:2)
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Everything flows from Planck's Constant. Everything.
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If we're just talking about Physics, I would agree with you.
For math (and as an EE), I tend to think of Euler's.
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As a software type, my favourite constants are the much under-rated 0 and 1. Zero and unity. On and off. The additive and multiplicative identity elements.
Everything else is derivative.
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I have to agree, the idea that math gets its own category of Special Favorites is ridiculous. Anything important math wants credit for, it is stealing from physics or logic.
Whereas with Euler's Constant, it is just masturbation over a basic hand tool. It is like a man who ignores the woman, because he's so excited sniffing the panties she already removed.
They left off a few decimals there (Score:2)
3.14 OR 3.14592? Is it exactly Pi?
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The problem is, philosophers who studied math all understand what you mean. Half the engineers probably understand what you mean. But none of the mathematicians studied philosophy, and they slept through "that boring shit" about the philosophical underpinnings of math, and so they'll fight to the death insisting that you're offending science, and that math is nature.
Some people are so stupid (Score:2)
This article is infuriating. (Score:2)
I mean, first you get garbage like this:
Then, at no point do they clarify if they mean 3.14 EARTH days, or 3.14 of its own days. I mean this is the LEAST scientific science article I've seen in deca
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And they've never baked a pie. It isn't a pie until it cools down.
If you cut it while it is still hot, you'll find this out. It will run out all over the table. When it cools and solidifies, now it is pie.
If you can't do math, you can't bake. And if you can't bake, I wouldn't trust your math.
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pi r squared my ass, pi r round
Zero day (Score:2)
Actually, it's a zero day, because (I suspect) it always keeps the same face toward its sun.
(And before somebody tells me it still makes one rotation in one revolution, that's true only from a perspective outside that solar system. But we consider Earth's day to be 24 hours, not 23h 56m, because we keep solar time, not sidereal time.)
Which? (Score:2)
3.14 Earth days, which is incredibly arbitrary, or 3.14 of its own day? If it's the latter, and the orbit matches PI of their days to some eight-digit accuracy, maybe it's a message!