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Extra-Solar Planet Is Probably Just A Star
ussphoenix writes: "NASA has issued a press release stating the the object Hubble photographed in 1997 is probably just a star. Originally, astronomers believed it was a proto-planet several times the mass of our own Jupiter. Oh well, there are other extra-solar planets."
I don't really want this to be a flame, but I guess it's going to be one. Not of you, but of journalists.
:-)
You say that we need better trained science journalists. That may be true, but let me point out a flaw in that line of thinking. As someone who is knowledgable about science, I usually spot huge errors in every single article I see. It's once a month maybe that I see an article that's basically OK.
What makes me believe that it's just science news that these idiots are screwing up? Nothing. I imagine that the police cringe every time they read an article about a crime investigation, because they can spot the obvious errors. I imagine that the sports guys do the same. And that goes for every section of the newspaper.
I want to correct you statement to declare that we have a need for better educated and trained journalists in general. From what I've seen, mega-dummies work at newspapers.
Sorry Cmdr. Taco. I guess your excuse is that you don't actually write the news, you just post it.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Nope. If the earth was in a circular orbit there could theoretically be a planet on the other side of the sun that existed and wouldn't be observable from earth. But the Earth's orbit isn't circular, it's eliptical. (It's really close to circular, but not quite.)
Some would then say, "well, it's just directly opposite on the ellipse. But that doesn't happen either because the planet spends a lot more time on the far side from the sun than it does in the part of the orbit closer to the sun.
For a better explination check out <a href="http://zebu.uoregon.edu/textbook/planets.ht
provolt
Astronomers have had a number of bad experiences based on "filaments" which appear to connect two objects -- which are actually at very different distances from us. There was a heavily publicized case a few years back, in which Halton Arp claimed that such a "filament" joined a quasar and a nearby galaxy, thereby "proving" that the quasar was much closer than its redshift would indicate. Sigh.
Anyway, back to TMR-1C. I remember talking to other astronomers at the summer meeting of the American Astronomical Society in 1997, in San Diego, and most of them agreed with me that this was just a chance superposition of a background star with the binary. We thought that the discoverers should have waited for some additional evidence:
My guess is that when the researchers (who work for NASA) started talking about their work with their colleagues, word reached the upper echelons of administrators, who probably ordered the press releases. I am speculating that it might have been hard for one of the astronomers on the team, if he or she had serious doubts about the claim;
it's not easy to tell your boss to shut up.
But a scientist is supposed to do this
Oh, and the poster who claims that astronomers have not detected ANY extra-solar planets is dead wrong. The radial velocity measurements he interprets as "changes in stellar shape" are really due to the motions of stars in orbits around their center of mass with bona-fide planets. Check out
http://cannon.sfsu.ed u/~gmarcy/planetsearch/planetsearch.html
and
http://www.obspm.fr/encycl/encycl.html
Michael Richmond "This is the heart that broke my finger."
mwrsps@rit.edu http://stupendous.rit.edu
There's not a huge amount of difference sizewise between a planet several times the size of Jupiter and a small brown dwarf star. The differentiation is that the star is massive enough for fusion to begin in its core...but EM radiation is emitted long before that point due to compression and friction. (Jupiter itself is large enough that it emits more heat than it receives from the sun.)
I can tell you, he is NOT in the least bit proud to have sent others looking in the right direction by his mistake!!
An excellent reference on extra-solar planets in general is the Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia.
The real Captain Avatar is a fictional character, so I suppose he doesn't mind if I impersonate him.
I read about this recently. There are actually no confirmed reports of extra-solar planets. When NASA first issued their claim, many scientists were skeptical and criticized NASA for issuing a press release before their claim of an extra-solar planet was reviewed by the scientific community. The chances of a discovery of an extra-solar planet is very slim since planets, unlike stars, reflect light rather than emit light. Extra-solar planets, if they exist (they probably do), would be too hard to see even with the most powerful telescopes.
While there are no observed extra-solar planets, something like 38 solar planets have been inferred by discovering abnormalities in a star's shape because of the gravitational pull of the planet.
"Control the media, control the mind."-Cabal
No, Geoff Marcy and his group had been searching for (and perhaps discovering planets) long before this was announced. What made this "discovery" significant was that it was the first time anyone had directly detected a planet optically (or at least thought they did).
All the extrasolar planets discovered to date have been spectroscopic, meaning that the astronomers used the Doppler effect to measure changes in the velocity of the parent star and detect the presence of an unseen body (a planet), by it's influence on the velocity of the star.
Shop Smart, Shop S-mart!
What researchers once thought was the 4th planet of our solar system happens to be a dead beetle on the telescope lens. Still no news on how the germful meteorite struck earth, but NASA is currently invesigating in a new product called Windex...
Hey, if this false reading is what started all the planet-hunters, then it's one false reading I'd be proud of.
Dave
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
Who says space isn't cool?
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
I remember the day that this "extra-solar planet" was announced. I was working for a major British telescope in Hawaii, and the only people who believed that this thing was actually a planet was us students. None of the astronomers thought it was a planet. I distinctly remember someone saying, "In a couple of years they'll figure out that it's a white dwarf or something. It's no planet."
This story seems to be an indication of the sorry state of astronomy these days. There's not enough money going into it, and so astronomers have to release whiz-bang discoveries in an attempt to gain public support and thus more money. Witness also the announcement that the Mars meteorite had fossilized life.
(P.S. I'm only posting as AC because I can't remember my password and the email account I use is at work and I'm at home... *ugh*)
There have been several hypothetical planets that did not turn out to be real, but none specifically between Earth and Mars. The term Planet X was used by Percival Lowell around a hundred years ago to refer to a specific mass beyond the orbit of Neptune that seemed to be causing its orbital inconsistencies. The search for Planet X took decades (really beginning in 1841), finally ending with the discovery of Pluto in 1930. To some extent, this search continues, with the discovery in the last decade of hundreds of so-called "Transneptunian" asteroids, representative of a great cloud of small rocks. While it's not impossible that there is still a large planet-sized body far out there, it's unlikely. There have been numerous non-scientific books and articles that have used terms like "Planet X" or "Planet Ten" to refer to other imagined planets, but these works aren't scientifically supported.
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