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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."
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.
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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
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Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
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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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