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13 Free-Floating Extrasolar Planets Discovered
Maestrogenic writes: "Researchers from the UK have discovered (using a new camera on the UK Infrared Telescope) 13 extrasolar planets, free-floating in the Orion Nebula. None of them are smaller than eight Jupiter masses though. This pretty much proves that vagabond planets are a common thing, and brings the total [number of] extrasolar planets discovered to above 40. Here's the official press release. " Note: the jpeg image linked to on this page is a beautiful shot, and downloads quite quickly.
> Nice haiku. Sorry I can't respond in kind. :)
free floating planets,
too bad space is so damn big,
else you might coalese.
And atheists like you ought to be in prison.
When this country had its churches full on Sunday mornings, we didn't have all of the problems that we have today. Now the churches are empty, and guess what? Surprise surprise, we've got crime and murder and teen pregnancy and abortion and queers running around like they own the place.
Christianity ought to be compulsory, and its enemies do not deserve to walk among us.
To convect, or not to convert, that is the question.
In the case of main sequence stars, you don't get convection between the core and the outer layers.
For brown dwarfs, I was under the impression that temperatures don't rise high enough at the core to cause the formation of convection cells. Because of that, it's believed that Brown dwarfs have a fairly uniform composition.
Or did somebody discover some new data that I haven't heard about yet?
the only large scale source of helium 3 is on the moons surface
A far larger source is the outer atmospheres of the gas giants ( Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune ). Overall you would get about 28 gramms of deuterium and 36 gramms of helium-3 per metric tonne of their outer atmosphere.
One (possible) way to extract it would be to suspend a diffusion seperation plant under a balloon and sift the material out. Hellacious way to do it though when you consider what you would need to do to run a shuttle down into the atmosphere to the plant and back out once it has a full load.
You don't need to do this for terrestrial power production, but this is about the only way that you can get the quantities that you would need for interstellar flight at an appreciable fraction of light speed ( 15% - 35% ;).
the REAL fuel for commerical fusion would be Lithium and Deuterium.
I tend to agree with you here. The other advantage that lithium has over H-2/H-3 fussion is that a tokamak isn't the only way that you can do it. You can just fire a beam of deutrons into molten lithium.
Last I heard, this was actually being looked at as the way to go with tritium production since it doesn't waste neutrons ( deuterium has a much lower cross-section than uranium or thorium, so breeding tritium from heavy water is not a very good way to get the best use of the available neutron supply ).
Precisely! This is why we aren't letting any of you semi-evolved simians out of your home star system untill your social and cultural development reaches an acceptable level.
Sorry, but doing otherwise would cause a major decline in real-estate values right through the entire spiral arm.
Traditionally, real-estate crashes have been the main cause of galaxy wide wars. Were not interested in that. You'll just have to stay where you are untill you can get past of all these neurotic hangups about "first sin" and all the rest.
Either that, or reading too much Curse of the Fanboys!
Heh, I bet that in a few years we'll be able to detect even smaller planets. A class M planet perhaps. (Inhabited by pointy-eared humanoids whose blood is copper-based..) At least we'll know where to point our SETI searches to.
Oh, by the way, has Seth Shostak (sp?) & co. listened at these planets for long periods of time? Do they plan to??
Men are from Mars, women are from Venus. Trolls? Trolls are from Uranus.
Carl Sagan: I think there may be planets outside our solar system. Mainstream Science: Hahhahahahahhahaasashas ahahaha hahaha you freak. Miss ya, Carl.
all this i sGreat..!
http://www.demonbuster.com/trolls.html
An interesting feature of this study is that no planets have been found under 8 Jupiter masses. It may indicate that there is a limit to how small these free-floating planets can be but even more sensitive surveys will be needed to confirm this. In the meantime UKIRT has been used to obtain spectra of about twenty of the brown dwarfs and planets.
The results are still being analysed but they show the signature of water vapour that is expected in relatively cool stars and brown dwarfs, at a temperature of a mere 2700 degrees Centigrade. The planets will eventually cool down to earthly temperatures but it is unlikely that they could ever sustain life. Although the total number of brown dwarfs and planets in the Trapezium may be similar to the number of stars, individually they have less mass. If this a typical cluster, brown dwarfs and planets do not contribute significantly to the dark matter that many astronomers believe pervades the universe.
Alright, correct me if wrong, but I thought I read somewhere that Jupiter radiated energy (but scientists werent sure why or how)? So if these planets are eight or more times the size of Jupiter, there likely would be the necessary energy and water to support life. Hmm. A wandering planet not near any sun that supports life. Those big headed aliens have large eyes, assumably to see better in a low lit world. so...
Fuck, fuck fuck! YOU stole the John Prescott account!!!! Bastard! I'm going to see if "Tony Blair" is still available.
Now let's start building a colony on Mars! We can build, piece by piece inside of some large natural fissure, which would make easier sealing off a large volume of space to fill with a breathable atmosphere. There's water ice at the poles, and perhaps subterranian water, which can be used to grow plants for food. Let's go to mars now!
Like me after too many tacos?
They most probably don't just take such a big image, but patch it together from many smaller images. If there was no image data from the corners, then "so be it, Jedi". The sweet spot is in the middle.
"You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means...."
/-"bn-dish/ adjective
-----------------------------------
Main Entry: 1vagabond
Pronunciation: 'va-g&-"bnd
Function: adjective
Etymology: Middle English, from Middle French, from Late Latin vagabundus, from Latin vagari to wander
Date: 15th century
1 : moving from place to place without a fixed home : WANDERING
2 a : of, relating to, or characteristic of a wanderer b : leading an unsettled, irresponsible, or disreputable life
- vagabondish
*** Definition (c) Merriam-Webster, Incorporated. Visit http://www.m-w.com/.
He used the planets and a star
math makes Vegan signal fly
a sliderule calculation only goes so far
pardon me while I kiss the sky
Hey bagy eyes! Check out this wild geek satire site I found! They even have Pro Free BSD/Anti-Linux e-Card area
If OS Makers Made Cars...
Oxygen with Linux? Science fiction could become science fact
Rare meteorite promises glimpse into creation and the source code of Windows2000
Hackers suspected as Microsoft 747 explodes in mid-air due to blue screen of death.
Cisco integrates routing, switching and underwear drawer technology.
IBM plans to change the shampoo world.
There's a great book called "the Sparrow" that's about a Jesuit priest winging off to Alpha Centauri... it's not X-ian lit by any means, but does talk in a lot of very interesting depth about the religious implications of meeting with alien life forms... I'm doing it a errible disservice by glossing over the plot so much, but you can check it out a little more for yourself here (on the B&N website, sorry)
Chuuu!!!!!!!!
But the main issue is WATER. Mars has it. The moon does not.
for those that give a shit, the tv show is on imdb http://us.imdb.com/Title?0072564
Perhaps you haven't heard about China's manned space program? This could turn into another space race! And did anyone notice that even though critics said don't waste your money, Mission to Mars was #1 its first week? If you give the general public something interesting enough, they pay attention. I hope China wants to go to the moon so that the US says, "Yeah, while you're there, maybe we'll take a picture of you...from Mars!"
What is a gas giant but a star that doesn't have enough mass? I'd bet these "planets" are very common in star forming regions.
The help you need is a medicine, a very special medicine that can only be gotten by sucking my dick :-)))888800000 (extremely obese)
you just wait until they get those rotating interferometer scopes out there *drool*
The resolutions of those willbe so amazing that even your dog will be awstricken by the cosmos
Have a look at the slash code sometime. It has been done already...
I strongly believe that trying to be clever is detrimental to your health. -- Linus Torvalds
Did the slashdot maintainers just get back from a strip club?
:P)
I know I did, Deja Vu Regionals gotta love it!
(And they wonder why programmers are poor yet make more then most people, hehe we suck at real life so we must compensate
All politicians are inveterate liars, and always have been. To put it simply, power corrupts and the corrupt seek power. With a positive feedback chain like that, the chances of a politician being a good man are less than a snowflake's in a caldera (that's the geographical feature, not the company).
"What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist." Salman Rushdie
Caption: An infrared picture of the central part of the Orion Nebula constructed from the three separate images taken with UFTI (the UKIRT Fast Track Imager) on the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope.
Thats why there are bits missing.
------------------------------------------------
Good as Gold. Stupid as Mud.
They don't fuse lithium, it's detectable in their ir-signature. So they won't cook He-3 either.
Just ignore the last part of my rant in the above posting.
They had to cut away the images of my internplanetary space resort, Babe-a-lon 5, the favorite stopping place for billions of intergalactic space frieghter pilots.
We should all feel fortunate, or blessed, that our solar system and orbit turned out to be so beneficial for the sustainment of life. I can't even begin to calculate the odds against it. For the gas that formed our solar system mostly condenced into a large ball (the sun) and the rest formed into much smaller balls that had slightly eliptical orbits. One of which has a perigee far enough away from the sun so that all water is not a gas and a apogee close enough to keep it from being all ice. That does not seem too common, to me at least.
Well, this sounds a lot like what philosophers call (IIRC) the 'Anthropic Principle' and what I call the 'Cat Blood Argument'*.
Creationists like to invoke God's Grand Design in how well-suited Earth is for human life, ignoring that it's the other way around--human life is ideally suited for Earth. And even there, there's a pretty broad range, from the hideous cold of Antartica to the furious heat and pressure of ocean heat-vents.
I can just as easily imagine some critters on Venus ranting about how perfect their atmosphere of boiling sulfuric acid is to life, and how nothing could survive on an arid hellhole like the next planet out...
*(Why the 'Cat Blood Argument'? Because it always reminds me of a strange little postcard I once saw that said "Isn't it convenient that we breathe oxygen instead of cat blood?")
> here is the link to the story he mentioned. It really is a great :)
:)
>article for us amature star gazers.
>so we have these huge things floating around... suppose one of them
>entered out system? i suppose it would be captured and begin orbiting
>our sun also, but think of the damage it would do before settling down
>(if it ever would).
>perhaps the next great "comet" movie should be about a free floating
>planet or star
You've never seen "When Worlds Collide"? The movie is kinda cheesy even for a 50's movie, but the novel is pretty good.
Not just orbital perturbation, but tidal forces as well - a mass that size passing closely enough to smaller objects (like our earth, etc), could strip away atmosphere, dislodge oceans, cause earthquakes, or even break them up.
now THAT'S damage.
Ever see the classic sci fi film, "When Worlds Collide"?
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
5-7-5? I thought it was supposed to be 3-7-5. . .
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
--
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
As opposed to midget gas giants? : )
"I coulda been a star, but I just ran out of gas."
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
There's an really scary HG Wells short story on this theme. It looks like it's going to collide with earth or screw up the orbit but juuuust misses. IIRC. Haven't read it for ages. Title is something like "the second sun".
--
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
And your point is...what?
Why would finding an inhabited class M planet bother Christians? Do you know enough about orthodox Christian doctrine (not the rantings of someone on the fringe of the Church, mind you) to explain why this should be a problem? Or are you thinking of some narrow stereotype of Christians you picked up from TV?
I'm a Christian, I've read the Bible, I have a solid understanding of Christian orthodoxy, and I _expect_ that God has created more than one planet with life as we know it. (Actually, I believe they might be experiencing life better than we know it; the effects of the Fall may be limited to our little planet.)
------ "Darn floor. Big bite." (Koko the gorilla's best attempt at explaining the experience of an earthquake.)
For something not meant to be flamebait, you sure opened with an inflammatory subject line.
What I originally said does not necessarily imply what you concluded. I don't know whether A&E (sorry, but the first time I read that, I thought you were talking about the cable network, and I'm still giggling about THAT image) had sex prior to the fall, because the Bible is silent on that. I don't know why they wouldn't have; they were created male and female for a reason. Sex did not spring into being after they ate the fruit.
------ "Darn floor. Big bite." (Koko the gorilla's best attempt at explaining the experience of an earthquake.)
...about the guy who keeps going from planet to planet trying to catch up with Christ?
------ "Darn floor. Big bite." (Koko the gorilla's best attempt at explaining the experience of an earthquake.)
There's another report Here.
The picture is really nice, but I don't see anything that tells me which dots are stars, which are dwarfs, and which are planets. Is there a better caption somewhere?
You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
Damn, I want one of those things as my secret interstellar base for launching invasions of planets.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
I forget the title, but a missionary lands on a planet where the aliens must test everything.
They crucify the missionary, expecting him to rise up again on the third day.
And a robot one.
Someone a robot gets known as God's incarnation.
A fanatic injures the robot with a laser, in the side. It takes about 3 days to repair the wound.
For the life of me, I can't remember the titles.
George
Of course, there are many SF stories that feature Xianity in some way without being Xian, like (IIRC) Clarke's The Star.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
No matter what I do, no matter what planet I collide with, I'll never get to collide with Sol III...
Intolerant people should be shot.
We've had test cases in our own history. The first voyages to the New World, to Cathay, and the uknown reaches of Africa were seen in those days in the same kind of light that voyaging to another planet would seem to us. The peoples inhabiting those unseen far off lands did not have their humanity taken for granted. Science Fiction has explored the topic at length, usually in short story format. Bablylon 5 touched the subject occasionally, and Deep Space 9 missed a great opportunity by ignoring the topic altogether. (What would Christians and Bajorans have to say to each other? Or better yet, how about Bajorans and the followers of Islam?)
The most likely reactions depend on two possiblities. 1. The discovery is nothing more than a statistical phomomenon, a radio anomaly that's significant enough to be artificial, but too distant and weak to be intelligible. In that case, most religious types, like just about everyone else would pretty much ignore it once the novelty has passed off.
2.The second possibility is evidence on the level of Carl Sagan's Contact. In that scenario, you probably will have a spectrum of reactions ranging from rejection to outright accomodation into existing worldviews. I would suspect that most Christian leaders would think long and hard before pronouncing an alien race free from Original Sin, and might even start thinking about missionary programs like the predecessors of centuries ago.
Religions evolve as the world expands. Sometimes it's just moderate ways, like the continual pushback of Armageddon by the Jehovah's Witnesses', others more dramatic and profound as formerly suppressed groups (i.e. women, minoriites) start flexing economic muscle.
As to the impact of actually finding a habited habitable world? (I ABSOLUTELY REFUSE TO USE TREK TERMS) Unless we actually pick up a stray radio broadcast from a twin to Arecibo out there, the technology required to do so is far enough away, that by the time (if) it's developed, we'll be changed enough to make answering the question now, a meaningless exercise.
G-type star, dammit! M-type planet, Earth. Or somethin'.
Wow, I had no idea it would only last that long. Kinda makes me think how much we've spent to get that minor amount of time out of it.
Also makes me wonder how much longer it might have lasted if it used something better than a 486.
TheGeek
TheGeek
http://www.geekrights.org
Kill the monkey
An interesting feature of this study is that no planets have been found under 8 Jupiter masses. It may indicate that there is a limit to how small these free-floating planets can be but even more sensitive surveys will be needed to confirm this.
What would it take to detect a moon(earths) size mass that far out? Thats a very small target, even 8 Jup's is a pin prick.
At the very least, an inhabited Class M planet would get a number of groups behind an effort to build starships; they'd want to send missionaries.
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
He-3 can cook with deuterium, but given the probability of having a collision between He-3 and D vs. hydrogen and D, it seems awfully unlikely that it would contribute much to the energy production of a brown dwarf. Once the deuterium was gone, fusing He-3 to He-4 requires another weak interaction, which is unlikely as you noted.
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
I know you're being silly, but you'll notice most "images" you see from space are actually mosaics. Take any picture you've seen of a planet close up from Voyager or something like that - these are all many smaller pictures put together to create the big one. They only put together what we needed to see the planets and left the rest off.
Of course, tcl is also used. Most of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey software is written in Dervish, which is a Fermilab branch of tcl.
I think he means:
/Duncan
Knowledge is not a short term investment with direct payback. It is a long term investment that will most likely pay off in a completely unforseen way. We need to invest in Space and Space exploration to continue the diversity of knowledge that we have inherited and are currently reaping.
Duncan Watson -Rock climbing, Encryption, privacy
PGP Fingerprint -PGP Key on www.keyserver.net
Duncan Watson
The story is kind of interessting, but more
interessting are the pictures i think. When i
looked at them i noticed that they had removed
the upper right and lower down corner. Just
cutted away (i suppose everyone who
saw thoose pictures noticed that). Wouldent
it be great to know what it actually
would be under there....
Will we never know? Why are they like this? Who do govs keeps seacrets? Why cant just everything go "opensource".
i would like to finish this one with a citate
"What we are is Gods gift to us, What we become is our gift to God"
just because they aren't bound to a star doesn't say they move more/quicker.
Erik Dalén
Despite the fact that astronomers have proof of many extrasolar planets, the public hasn't become fascinated with them at all. I thinks its just great that /. is paying attention to this story, but how much will the other press and people? In my opinion, until we can get some great visuals of these planets, projects to study this branch of science will remain underfunded. Thats a bad thing. I know that these planets are pretty far from us, and pictures of them might be hard to do, but something needs to help re-excite the public on space. Hubble was launched in 1990, and has an estimated 15 year life span, what will be around after it. Can the new X-Ray telescope do that function? We need better support for our astronomers. I'm no expert on the area, but more space telescopes could help. I don't see the great usefulness of our impending International Space Station. Maybe money spent on it could be better spent on science elsewhere more effectively. What can we do, because I really don't know.
Has anyone seen that ancient film 'When Worlds Collide'? Pretty cool to think it could actually happen (although I'd reckon we would be less likely to find life on an extrasolar planet, seeing as solar power is the primary energy source of most life on this planet, excepting only geothermal powered life forms and theoretically certain computer programs).
"What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist." Salman Rushdie
Man was that a bad show or what? Still, I planted my kiddie butt right in front of the tube for every episode since it was just that and Star Trek episodes you'd already seen three or four times. Thanks for the memories, I'd forgotten all about it.
There is a moderately informative article in the current Scientific American about the entire topic of brown drarfs. Recommended reading for those who are rusty on the topic.
Zan:
:I assume you meant:
: If 13 < Mass < 75 jupiters then Deuterium fusion: brown dwarf.
Correct. Thanks. I also had trouble w/ the
last "less than" symbol. HTML did something w/ it so I had to just say "less than."
These objects cannot be more distant objects since the molecular cloud behind them obscures any background objects. We can only see the object in front of the cloud, the Trapezium Cluster, any random foreground stars, and the planets and brown dwarves in question.
And I just have to say that this whole thing is cool. If anyone knows of any sites related to planet discoveries or other astronomical coolnesses... I'd love to see some URL's posted!!
---Anvilak
And if you're more of a hardware buff, there's the NASA Image Exchange. Searchable index, and if you waffle with the URL, you can force it into giving you the large copies of the image, suitable for use as desktop pictures.
blog |
This article reminds me of an old T.V. series with Martin Landau where the moon left earth orbit, and was just sort of floating around the universe.
It's interesting to note in the article that the smallest "free floating" planet is eight times the mass of Jupiter. In theory, these planets could have their own lunar systems in orbit, so the result would be a dark (non-solar) system... Just a thought.
Desperation is a stinky cologne
Maybe they are just visiting aunt Margareth?
Seriously, maybe this is answer to intergalactic
travelling. Now I just have to figure out how to
make the Sun move where I want it.
Hey wait a minute - what if we already are on that travel?
I seem to remember some crappy star-trek book I read which starred that dude with the cool shades (black dude, I forget his name) in which he was in the academy and was going to go watch to giant planes colide to make a sun
... I wonder what would happen if a couple of them collided? (Unlikely, but let's just say.) Exactly how many Jupiter masses would one need to start up a viable star?
If I may be so bold, your assumption did not do so well because it was not based upon observations or facts. Might I sugguest more scientific method and less philosophy when you are talking about science.
I agree. We don't have very good methods for finding planets. Yes, i am guessing. It's an educated guess, but still a guess none the less. I based my guess on observations of the only life sustaining planet we know of. The odds of similar conditions occuring elsewhere are not that good. I can't say that they'll never occur elsewhere. Who knows? I'm just saying that the _odds_ are against it.
Hydrogen can not fuse with itself, it has only a proton, and so can not bond to another proton. However, Deuterium has a neutron, so it can fuse with hydrogen to form Helium three, or with tritium, which ahs two neutrons, to form helium four. a 50:50 mix of deuterium and tritium is what will be used to make commericial power stations work, though Helium 3 and tritium would be better (the only large scale source of helium 3 is on the moons surface, trapped from cosmic rays etc.) Tritium would bred in the reactor by absorbing a neutron given out in the reaction with lithium 7 to give tritium, thus the REAL fuel for commerical fusion would be Lithium and Deuterium. Deuterium has a natural abundancy of 0.015% in nature. Tritium, having a half life of 12.5 years is not found naturally.
If God created us in his own immage, how do you explain Vanessa Feltz?
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
It's hard to tell how common it is, because the methods we're using to detect extrasolar planets happen to be suited for finding gas giants -- Jupiter size and up, mostly up! It with take either major improvements in our observational technology, or development of new technologies, to find Earth-sized extrasolar planets.
Until then, all we can really do is guess -- which is what you're doing. BTW, I happen to disagree with your guess... ;-)
---
---
Politics is about making compromises. Religion isn't. --Michael Horton
Agree, but that was more patriotism than a *genuine* interest in science & space travel. That's being interested for the wrong reasons!
Why did people sail out to discover new worlds, why do people climb mountains, sail the oceans and cross deserts? It lies in our nature to discover new things, to be curious. Maybe there are ways to amplify these aspects. Another thing maybe is avoiding 'bad press', like crashing Mars-explorers and blowing up Space shuttles. These were tragedies, but mostly due to budget cuts and ignorance. These sorts of things can give science & space exploration a bad name.
My point is that Christianity presents an earth-centric, anthropocentric view of the universe; that its inventors made no provisions for the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence; and that the confirmed existence of ET's will undermine seriously the already eroded credibility of Christianity as a way of knowing about the nature of reality.
After all, intelligent aliens are not animals, nor are they men. They certainly are not descended from Adam and Eve. Genesis, alone, precludes the very existence of such persons.
In the past, the church has modified its doctrine in order to accomodate contrary, irrefutable new knowledge about the nature of reality, such as the actual shape of the earth (though not, in this particular case, before murdering a number of heroically intransigent scientists). Some would no doubt aver that this points to a certain 'flexibility' in churh thinking that should not escape admiration; in my own view, however, it demonstrates that church doctrine is so subject to interpretation as to have no meaning, whatever.
That's my point. Of course, YMMV: that's why they print menus :)
--
Socrates was asked where he was from. He replied not "Athens," but "The world."
Plus, none of our new friends will even have heard of Microsoft! I can't wait!
--
Socrates was asked where he was from. He replied not "Athens," but "The world."
Let's hope so!
--
Socrates was asked where he was from. He replied not "Athens," but "The world."
I wonder if it's ok to call them "free-floating planets". Actually, a planet is by dfinition orbiting a star. Shouldn't they be rather called "planet-sized asteroids"?
Maybe they are orbiting a (larger) sun or even a black hole, toghether with some other suns.
Then, of course, they are not free-floating.
Yes, and Venus (eg) is not a planet but a free-floating moon... ;-)
Claus
I agree the reasons were more than academic during the cold war when it came to space exploration. What do you think could be used now to fill the viod left by the cold war, and motivate people to be enthusiastic about space development? Commercialism is still too risky and far fetched to be a propellant.
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JavaScript tutorials scripts
Exactly!
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JavaScript tutorials scripts
Yeah, sorry about that title line. My apologies.
----
Alkali Media, The Digital Media Company
I hate you.
Yeah that IS pretty funny
----
Alkali Media, The Digital Media Company
I hate you.
so that means there will be a dude and a chick there who have been living for a LONG time and will continue to live, without dying? Nobody else on the planet (remember, A&E didn't start having sex until AFTER the fall)...
More xian BS.
----
Alkali Media, The Digital Media Company
I hate you.
Er...I discovered some jupiter sized bodies orbiting the local Dunkin Donuts.
Under which astronomical authorities can I report those findings to?
Can I get some URLs?
Microsoft Certified Expert in Solitaire bitmap manipulation, Mine detection in Win32 application enviroments, and Blue
Several orders of magnitude easier. The problem with the fusion of protonic hydrogen isn't getting the nuclei to overcoming coulombic repulsion. Helium-2 just isn't *stable*, so it immediatly disintergrates.
Occasionally though, He-2 will stabalise by emiting a positron and a neutrino so that the He-2 turns into deuterium.
This decay process takes place by the weak nuclear force, so it's very slow. Once we get past this point, the rest of the cycle to fuse hydrogen into helium is relatively easy.
What's the natural distribution of Deuterium to Hydrogen in the universe?
About 1 in 6000 atoms of hydrogen is deuterium. This appears to be fairly constant throughout the observable universe except in a few instances where some process will either increase/decrease it with respect to this value.
For example, some of the literature discusses some processes that will produce higher than expected values around some types of stellar phenomena ( type II nova and super-nova ), but no one has apparently been able to really confirm this at the moment.
How long would a brown dwarf burn for before fizzling and cooling off?
Sorry, no specific data on that one. The only tid-bit that I can add to this point is that it's also believed that Brown Dwarfs probably also fuse lithium. If that's the case, they will probably also use up the available helium-3 content as well. So overall, they will be using deuterium, helium-3, lithium-6 and lithium-7 for energy production until these are exhausted.
That might keep it going for a while, but only in the infra-red region. This really isn't my area of expertise, but I doubt that they would be emitting in the visible region of the spectrum ( but don't take my word for it ).
Now that you mention it, that sounds right. Somewhere, I have the anthology, I think.
R is for Rocket, perhaps?
Stock LyX does include the astronomical format file . . .
I think this was one of the earliest journal formats included, though I'm pretty sure it came after the AMS set.
Thousands of years, I'd expect, from when it was first detected, and when it got anywhere near our system.
It's not a foregone conclusion it would be captured--it could have a high enough velocity to prevent this, and just get its path bent.
*Please* do not create your own brown dwarf within the city limits. This activity should only be done in areas of the desert with no flamable plants.
The fire you could start in a crowded area would make the great fires in Chicago and San Francisco look like birthday candles . . .
The galaxy is a computer, and the universe a beowolf cluster . . .
The bad news is that our galaxy is running windows . . .
(now I remember)
The plan is simple. Planets are simply giant capacitors. IIRC, it's not very much, but 8 x Jupiter's mass should be a good start. Black Holes give you resistors (the internal resistance of a Black Hole is 33 ohms, according to Roger Penrose). You can turn Gravitational lenses into simple gates, allowing you to construct memory and processing elements.
Unfortunately, the 40 planets so far obtained will not be sufficient, and The Greak Whelk demands the turning over of Saturn and Outer Mongolia to complete his Great Plan.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
This is false. In fact, the proton-proton chain is the primary method of fusion powering our Sun. In the unstable nucleus formed by two fusing protons, one of them ends up emitting a positron, thus loosing its charge and becoming a neutron (it also emits a neutrino). The new deuterium nucleus then fuses with another proton, becoming 3He (He with only one neutron), and a gamma ray is emitted. Then two 3He nuclei fuse, forming ordinary He and emitting two protons.
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"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
If you're fond of astronomy pictures, you should know this wonderful site : Astronomy Picture Of the Day. Every day, it presents a picture related to astronomy, along with a small paragraph that gives some explanation. All previous pictures are still available. This site is a must see ! :-)
Calling these "planets" is a little misleading...these are stars that never got big enough. They are giant gas giants...
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There is also some controversy about when and where our gas giants formed -- there is mounting evidence that they formed much closer in, then drifted outwards to their current locations.
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"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
The current (2000-04) issue of Scientific American has an interesting article on brown dwarfs. The author describes a technique for differentiating brown dwarfs from low-mass stars by looking for lithium in the spectra. Lithium is quickly burned up by fusion in normal stars.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Nice haiku. Sorry I can't respond in kind. :)
Conceivably yes, but the odds of two free-floating planets colliding is probably smaller than the odds of a couple hundred 747s colliding in midair and falling on your head. The combination of two big bodies (stars, planets) is called coalescence and has never been observed. Space is very big and planets are very small. Very nearly all of the mass concentration happens during the earliest stages of stellar birth.
It automagically removes any sorts of defects that are common to CCD observations
You mean like images of little green men waving at the telescope like a bunch of morons standing outside a morning-show studio?
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
Especially when you consider that Jupiter and Saturn are still cooling off (emitting more energy than they absorb from solar radiation) after however many billion years....
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
I assume you meant:
If 13 < Mass < 75 jupiters then Deuterium fusion: brown dwarf.
Intolerant people should be shot.
another NASA funding cut; when will people realize that knowledge cannot and shouldn't be measured in dollar signs?
Everything can be measured in dollar signs. You clearly think we need to spend more money on it, which means you're thinking of it in dollars. If you can't measure it in dollars, how do you determine how much money to spend on it?
So these planets have >8 Jupiter masses, but 13 Jupiter masses (the limit for a brown dwarf).
I think this simplifies to "really big gas ball". Or perhaps a "black dwarf".. Neat to see the distinction between star and planet blurred. It's all big spectrum...
Cool though. I didn't realize Brown Dwarfs actually underwent fusion for a short period. How much easier is it to fuse deuterium than raw hydrogen? What's the natural distribution of Deuterium to Hydrogen in the universe? (Same as in water on Earth?)
Red Dwarfs burn their hydrogen forever (well, about 15 billion years+, longer than the current age of the universe) but really dimly. How long would a brown dwarf burn for before fizzling and cooling off?
Well, if these brown dwarfs and megaplanets ARE produced in large numbers in our galaxies stellar nurseries, and then sent wandering, I'd guess a few might end up being captured -- say, somewhere in the vicinity of the Oort cloud of a certain M-type star. And since the megaplanets, at least, would rapidly cool, such a captured planet would be dark even in IR and hard to detect, not to mention having a highly eccentric and inclined orbit that would make it hard to locate. Just like the planets speculated about in this space.com article.
I'm looking for more info from the scientists quoted in the space.com articles (Matese and Murray) - I've read the papers before, and they're pretty interesting. They both present circumstantial evidence for dark Jupiter-mass-or-higher companions to the sun disturbing comets in the Oort cloud in a telltale pattern. Not quite the old comet-flinging Nemesis, but pretty close.
At the very least, this new information could prove that such dark objects exist, and that's half the battle, right?
Hmm, gravity too
weak for coalescence to
occur frequently?
Interesting. Thanks.
Runty planets--
even brown dwarfs have more mass!
(and get warm at night...)
Hmmmm.... Yes... Yes I think I can see one of those huge gas giants now! MY GOD it's... It's tremendous! It's... oh... sorry... it's Marlin Brando.
Easy mistake.
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
To answer questions re: looking for smaller planets -- NASA has plans to launch the Planet Finder Array -- a cluster of telescopes designed to do optical inferometry -- in about 2005. It will go into an orbit around the sun at roughly the same distance as Jupiter, and be capable of seeing Earth-sized planets out to about 50 light-years. Further, plans call for the ability to analyze the spectrum of the planet, which will allow for atmospheric analysis.
A recent issue of Discover magazine had a "field guide" to all the new extra-solar planets that we've found up to now. 47 Ursa Majoris has a Jupiter-sized planet that orbits its star at about the same distance Mars is from ours... Given that 47Uma is a little brighter and a little larger, this planet could very well have habitable moons, and is actually one of the targets for a new radio search, so the science already has applications.
As for the Hubble issue, I suspect it will be handled like Mir and kept aloft for at least five years beyond its expected life. There are plans for a "Hubble II" that uses a segmented mirror like the Keck. (And whomever asked about the X-Ray observatory: no, it cannot take over Hubble's duties -- it is without optical capabilities.)
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We should all feel fortunate, or blessed, that our solar system and orbit turned out to be so beneficial for the sustainment of life. I can't even begin to calculate the odds against it. For the gas that formed our solar system mostly condenced into a large ball (the sun) and the rest formed into much smaller balls that had slightly eliptical orbits. One of which has a perigee far enough away from the sun so that all water is not a gas and a apogee close enough to keep it from being all ice. That does not seem too common, to me at least.
It seems that during the cold war, the US was a lot more motivated and interested in space development and exploration than after. I cringe each time I hear on the news another NASA funding cut; when will people realize that knowledge cannot and shouldn't be measured in dollar signs?
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JavaScript tutorials scripts
So are these 13 just wandering around muttering "I coulda been a star!"?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
...suppose one of them entered out system? i suppose it would be captured and begin orbiting our sun...
No, it would be very unlikely that our solar system could capture one of these, and absolutely the Sun couldn't do it alone (Jupiter or some other planet would have to help).
It's like the very long, elliptical orbit of comets. What keeps them from being captured into nice, circular orbits near the Sun? It has to do with momentum. Something falling into our solar system from a great distance builds up a lot of speed as the Sun's gravity tugs on it. By the time it reaches the inner solar system, it's got so much momentum that it swings around and shoots back out to where it came from.
Yes, a rogue planet falling into our solar system could do some damage. But that damage would be in the form of perturbing the orbits of some of the planets/moons/asteroids/comets in our solar family. The odds of collision are astoundingly small.
Lithium is also one of the (many) ways we know the Orion Nebula is young. The smallest of the Orion Nebula stars are too young to have started fusion, so many still have lithium. However, all of them more massive than brown dwarfs will eventually start fusion and the lithium will vanish (in a hundred million years or so).
What basically happens is that the data comes in off the telescope, and when ORAC-DR sees it, the data gets reduced. It automagically removes any sorts of defects that are common to CCD observations (flat-fields, bias levels, sky levels), and often produces publication-quality results. We were joking that astronomers wouldn't even have to write their papers. We'd just reduce the data, fill in some fields on a paper template, then ship the paper off to the appropriate journal.
Yes - you could make an Astronomer version of Lorem Ipsum tied into the LyX. I'm sure half the referees would pass it, and the other half would take it as a direct assault on their chosen field of expertize :-) Just joking folks!
Having done three nights of observing on UKIRT doing IR spectroscopy, having the automated reduction facility makes life a lot easier. Alas in our case it told our target object kept falling out of the slit, something later (i.e. after we left) found to be a problem with the telescope. Now fixed, but I don't think I'll get another chance at those observations. But such is life - and you really can't complain when you have to travel to Hawaii to do your observing :-)
And by the way, I'm glad to hear that Frossie's jeep is still in one piece - it was brand spanking new when I was there, and it was great fun bounding over the lava fields in it! Hiya to Tim too - long time no see - thanks for the accommodation!
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
here is the link to the story he mentioned. It really is a great article for us amature star gazers.
so we have these huge things floating around... suppose one of them entered out system? i suppose it would be captured and begin orbiting our sun also, but think of the damage it would do before settling down (if it ever would).
perhaps the next great "comet" movie should be about a free floating planet or star :)
.sigs are dumb!
Regarding these new discoveries, it will be important to make sure that the discovered objects are actually members of the Orion GMC, and not more distant objects. Spectroscopic measurements will help to do this. The fate of stars/brown dwarfs/giant planets is determined primarily by their mass:
If Mass > 75 jupiters then Hydrogen fusion: Star
If 13 > Mass > 75 jupiters then Deuterium fusion: brown dwarf.
If Mass less than 13 jupiters then no fusion: planet.
At least that's one way to define the terms. The very informative Sci. Am. article mentioned above can be found here If you want to Create your own brown dwarfs, and see what their spectra look like, try this site. -chris
I've seen really brief treatements in a couple of places in science fiction, but the most interesting one is the discussion with the chaplain on the chip in Pournelle & Niven's "The Mote in God's Eye."
In general, extraterrestrial life poses absolutely no threat to Christianity. The interesting questions come from whether other races our in need of redemption, like ours, or are in some other state.
ANd then if they are in need of redemption, would our Paschal Sacrifice, be sufficient, or would they need their own Christ?
Unfortunately, that discussion really didn't carry through the rest of the book.
Hmm, another interesting one is Lester Del Rey's . . . awe, nuts; I forget the title . . . Anyway, Christian Fantasy is fairly well represented, but this is the only novel of Christian Science Fiction I've ever seen. I recall another short story by someone travelling from world to world, getting closer and closer to Christ's life, death, and ressurection, but never quite making it. Anyway, in Del Rey's story, the first 50 pages are really slow, but the aliens find a dead and bombed out church, a crucifix, and Bible. They slowly translate it, and get caught up.
*argh* What's that title?
hawk
What basically happens is that the data comes in off the telescope, and when ORAC-DR sees it, the data gets reduced. It automagically removes any sorts of defects that are common to CCD observations (flat-fields, bias levels, sky levels), and often produces publication-quality results. We were joking that astronomers wouldn't even have to write their papers. We'd just reduce the data, fill in some fields on a paper template, then ship the paper off to the appropriate journal. *heh* When I left there was some talk of dedicating a Linux box to the data reduction (instead of the Solaris box they had then).
And it's a Perl-friendly environment at the Joint Astronomy Centre (the place that runs UKIRT in Hawaii). My supervisor (Frossie Economou) has written articles for The Perl Journal, she's got a stuffed penguin on her desk, and the license plate for her Jeep? "PERL5". Another software guy (Tim Jenness) has written stuff for Perldl and is altogether cool for Perl (and stereo equipment too...).
ORAC-DR information is found here. Props to Frossie, Tim, and Chad (who wrote the Apache modules that give the look-and-feel to the JAC webpages -- look for it on CPAN).
X-ray and gamma-ray emitting sources (high-energy sources) of radiation are usually signs of something very extremal going on: black holes, supernovas, neutron stars, pulsars. Now, a new family of such objects has been found -- the full article is in today's "Nature". What are they? Read the article, I'm not much of an astronomer :-)
Regards,
January
Vagabond planets--
if enough collide, do they
alight with fusion?