Alien Solar System Much Like Ours

MrGort writes "Wired News reports that British astronomers say they found the first sun-like star with a giant gas planet in an orbit similar to Jupiter's, which leaves plenty of room for worlds like Earth and Mars. This system is a quick 90 light years away. The similar solar system to ours means that this gas giant could attract most of the debris, allowing smaller planets closer to the sun to develop like ours did!"

Comments

patent

[pyrrho]

This other solar system, it does know that we've patented the planetary creation process... right?

10 billion years of back license royalties... wehooo!

Re:patent

[ChadN]

You know, this reminds me of the setup of a book by John Varley, called "The Ophiuchi Hotline". It starts off with us learning that humanity started receiving transmissions from space, in the direction of the Ophiuchus constellation. We started receiving it about 400 years prior, and have been decoding peices of it ever since. Of the amount that can be decoded and translated, we've learned about medicine, space travel, computers, etc. All kinds of amazing technology. No one knows who is sending it, or why.

But a repeating message has appeared, taking up more and more of the transmission. Our hero is summoned to a meeting where he learns that some of this repeating message has ben translated.

In summary, it reads: "Payment for service is overdue. Please remit immediately, or severe consequences will result."

The book plays out from this premise.

Let's hope we never have to deal with intergalactic IP issues.

This is not Star Trek

[rudy_wayne]

>> This system is a quick 90 light years away.

This is the problem with the whole "is there life elsewhere in the universe" debate. I call it the "Star Trek Syndrome". People have gotten so used to movies and TV shows where space ships go zooming all over the galaxy that they have lost any understanding of the enormous distances involved.

There probably are planets out there with intelligent life -- maybe lots of them -- but they are so far away that it is impossible to have any contact with them. You can debate all you want about whether or not there's life out there, but you can't change the math.

If we could build a spacecraft capable of a speed of 16 Million Miles per Hour (which we can't -- that speed is far, far beyond any technology we have or have even dreamed of) you could reach Pluto in a few days, but it would take 360 years to reach that system that is only "a quick 90 light years away". Even trying to communicate via radio -- we would send a message and it would be at least 180 years before we got a reply.

Re:This is not Star Trek

[Anonymous Coward]

I think Mister Smarty-Pants here hasn't heard of wormholes.

'Eddies,' he said, 'in the space time continuum.'

'Ah. Is he? Is he?!

Re:This is not Star Trek

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

>beyond any technology we have or have even dreamed of

We've dreamed of some pretty impressive things. For example, the Alcubierre drive (http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive). It has some [facetious]minor engineering problems like requiring negative energy density and more total energy than exists in the universe[/facetious], but it's a warp drive that satisfies the equations of general relativity. Faster than light, and physically legal.

Off topic, did the headline of this story strike anyone else as being like a headline from The Onion?

Re:This is not Star Trek

[Christopher Thomas]

There probably are planets out there with intelligent life -- maybe lots of them -- but they are so far away that it is impossible to have any contact with them. You can debate all you want about whether or not there's life out there, but you can't change the math.

"The math" also says two things:

• We can most definitely contact systems within a few hundred light-years by radio. We'll need an array of phase-locked transceivers in space to do it, but it's not difficult or even horribly expensive to do. Contact by optical carrier depends on us building very large interferometric telescopes, which is a tougher engineering challenge but can also be done.
  
  Communication occurs at the speed of light, so round-trip time to 90 light-years is 180 years, and one-way time is 90 years.
  
  
• This is useful because anyone who can hear our signals and generate signals for us to hear in return is almost certainly far more advanced than we are.
  
  Modern humans have existed for about 30,000 years. Human civilization has existed for on the order of 6000 years, depending on who you ask and what you call "civilization". If the lifespan of an alien technological race is longer than this - and it will be, especially once it decentralizes (makes colonies not on the same easily-bombed planet) - then, of the stretch of their civilization's existence where they can hear and respond to us, the segment where they are more advanced than us is much longer than the segment where they are less advanced than us. This makes it likely that _if_ we find someone to contact, they're in the "more advanced than us" stage.
  
  This makes communication, even with a multiple-lifetime time lag, worth it.
  

This discussion overlooks the impact of any future technology that would confer either extreme longevity, or the ability to store and reconstruct a human mind-state/personality. In the first case, slower-than-light travel between the stars becomes feasible because we have the patience for it, and it doesn't take that large a chunk out of our lives. In the second case, we can be sent at the speed of light as data, with no subjective time elapsing en route, to be reconstructed at the other end.

In conclusion, communication is both possible and worthwhile even without FTL travel or exotic technologies.

Re:This is not Star Trek

[tiled_rainbows]

Re. slower than light travel - if you get fast enough (i.e. a sizable fraction of c), then, even if it takes dacedes to get where you're going, time dilation will mean that far less time passes for the crew of a spacecraft - so, if you're going fast enough, a trip of 90 light-years, say, could be accomplished within the natural lifetime of the crew without FTL travel.

Re:This is not Star Trek

[turgid]

I agree with you that we shouldn't be too pessimistic, however the Wright Brothers' flight was more of an engineering challenge than a scientific one. They required no novel physics to accomplish their feat, only the application of known physical laws. It will be possible for us to explore our own solar system using known physics by using nuclear propulsion (fission and some day fusion) and even solar sails. However, travel to other stars in less than a human life-time in our frame of reference will require super-luminal speeds. There is no physics known yet that will allow us to achieve this. So, interstellar travel will be a lot harder for us to achieve than the Wright Brothers' first powered flight.

Re:This is not Star Trek

[sk0pe]

Yes, the Wright brothers managed to apply proven physical laws through engineering. However, in the 1600's, those laws of physics (specifically Bernoulli's principle) were not theorised, let alone proven. Peope did, however, dream of flying like the birds.

The same applies to space flight now. We can dream it, but we can't figure out how to do it. Some day, a bunch of different people will come up with a bunch of theories on "super-luminal" travel, then set out to prove their theories. One of them will be proven.

Soon after that, someone will apply that "proven" law of physics (as the Wright brothers did), and a short time later interstallar travel will be like catching a plane is now - nothing out of the ordinary.

Unfortunately, it's not likely to be in our lifetime. (Oh, that it were!!)

Re:This is not Star Trek

[Gyl]

True, there may eventually be laws that allow for faster than light travel (wormhole anyone?) But the Wright borthers had birds as examples that flight was possible. We don't have any physical evidence of super-luminal travel being possible.

Re:This is not Star Trek

[Christopher Thomas]

Re. slower than light travel - if you get fast enough (i.e. a sizable fraction of c), then, even if it takes dacedes to get where you're going, time dilation will mean that far less time passes for the crew of a spacecraft - so, if you're going fast enough, a trip of 90 light-years, say, could be accomplished within the natural lifetime of the crew without FTL travel.

There turn out to be practical problems with this. Any craft that carries its own fuel with it - including the more practical breeds of antimatter drive - will be limited to a crusing speed of about 0.1-0.2C by the specific impulse of their fuel. The only thing that could approach speeds at which time dilation would be significant is a beamed core antimatter drive (that uses the charged particle shower from an antiproton annihilation as the reaction mass), but that requires unrealistic amounts of antimatter (positrons are easy to make, but antiproton synthesis is very inefficient, and will remain so unless new physics is discovered).

In principle, some kind of sailcraft driven by a stationary laser or maser array could reach relativistic speeds, but the array would be very expensive to build and very large (we need to focus on a planet-sized sail at a range of many light-years). It would also work wonderfully as a weapon capable of melting cities to slag at a range of hundreds of AU (or even light-years, depending on configuration), so I suspect non-proliferation agreements would prevent it from being built in the first place.

In short, the only hope for relativistic travel at less than colossal cost is new physics.

Re:This is not Star Trek

[Christopher Thomas]

It's been far too long since I read a non-fiction book with spaceships in it, but can't you (in theory) propel a spaceship by shining a very powerful light out of the back, using the photons themselves as the reaction mass? Then could you get nearer to c?

You can, but the problem is generating the light in the first place, and the fact that light has a lousy ratio of momentum to energy (it has to be very, very bright to generate significant thrust).

Most light sources that are bright enough to move a ship at any reasonable acceleration (e.g. fusion bombs wrapped in other matter or just shining on a shield block that can tolerate gamma rays) waste matter - the energy to mass ratio of a fusion bomb is much worse than that of the photons you're driving the ship with. This means you'd be better off just using a magnetic bottle to deflect the plasma resulting from the fusion explosion, and you'd still end up with specific impulse too low for relativistic flight.

A light source that doesn't ablate or otherwise lose mass has to be relatively dim (either a hot block of solid matter or a confined plasma ball), which means getting anywhere will take an extremely long time.

The forms of light propulsion that I've seen considered involve generating the light somewhere else (e.g. a laser array) and just reflecting it off the craft's sail. You still have a drive that's horribly inefficient energy-wise, but the energy source doesn't have to travel with the craft.

For reference, power to thrust is 3e8 W/N for a photon drive (energy to momentum ratio is C for photons).

Re:This is not Star Trek

[barawn]

... assuming that said craft does actually carry its own fuel (which you limited yourself to, but...)

That's, of course, not the only kind of craft: ramscoop ideas have been around for a while, and while they're not exactly "production quality" ideas, there's nothing fundamentally killing them. We'd just have to figure out how to do fusion much better than we do now - which is not exactly new physics - it's new engineering. We'd also want to get the hell past the heliopause, to interstellar space. Ramscoops can easily build up to relativistic speeds, because, well, their fuel is free.

Especially when you get to decent Lorentz factors things start to work in your favor: space is compressed, so the interstellar density becomes higher (drag isn't exactly an issue, because presumedly your ramscoop is strong enough to drag in material even at a decent spatial compression) and so you get more fuel as you go faster.

It's not an issue of viability (because it is viable), it's simply scale. A ramscoop type ship would probably need to be large, and the "initial speed" required to start up the reaction is probably high as well, though this depends on exactly how good fusion technology becomes.

Also, as a brief comment, antiproton synthesis is very difficult, but antiproton storage is much easier than positron storage, because they're charged and heavy, so once you cool them, you lose very few. So again, production of large quantities of antiprotons is not difficult at all - it just takes time.

Your final conclusion, though, is definitely right. Relativistic travel = huge cost (in 2003 dollars! note that economies of scale and necessity can help here. Automated antiproton factories, etc.: thank god for that tremendously huge fusion generator sitting next door pumping ungodly amounts of energy out all around us.)

So, finally, calling them "practical problems" may be a bit harsh on them. It's just that, as a species, we're not motivated enough to do it.

Maybe, just maybe, if we ever find a planet which we have a good belief that we could live there, that'll be enough of a motivation for some country to do it.

Re:This is not Star Trek

[sbaker]

What's different about our society looking to develop super-luminal travel compared to people in the 1600's thinking about heavier-than-air flight is that whilst there were no known scientific laws that would enable a heavier-than-air craft to stay aloft, there were no laws to prohibit it either. They had birds, insects and bats flying around all over the place - all demonstrably heavier than air. They knew this was an achievable goal.

With faster-than-light travel, we have a very different situation. He have actual scientific laws courtesy of that Einstein guy that show that you cannot accellerate an object up to the speed of light without consuming infinite energy . Those laws also indicate extreme difficulties with even the concept of something travelling FASTER than light (if you ever got going faster than light, it would take infinite energy to avoid travelling infinitely fast - and getting to a nearby star at infinite speed is MUCH harder than doing it at subluminal speeds.

Then, we also have no examples of super-luminal objects to point at and say "Ha! Those laws must be wrong".

That's an entirely different (and much more depressing) situation than the situation in the 1600's. They could look to a simple child's kite and imagine a hang-glider with a motor replacing the force provided by the kite-string. They could see birds doing that exact thing - taunting us with the ease of it all.

We have no similar thing to look towards - and one of the greatest minds of the last century showed us clear mathematical proof that this isn't going to be an easy matter.

Re:This is not Star Trek

[Christopher Thomas]

That's, of course, not the only kind of craft: ramscoop ideas have been around for a while, and while they're not exactly "production quality" ideas, there's nothing fundamentally killing them. We'd just have to figure out how to do fusion much better than we do now - which is not exactly new physics - it's new engineering.

Ramscoops are fundamentally killed by drag.

Consider a ramscoop to be a special case of a magnetic bottle. In a conventional magnetic bottle, matter leaks through "loss cones" at the pinch points of the mirrors. The tighter the constriction (i.e., the greater the field increase compared to the field in the middle of the bottle), the narrower the loss cone and the less material leaks out.

A ramscoop, on the other hand, works by passing material through the pinch point, hopefully with enough compression to fuse in the process. The problem is that, given the fact that the field is much larger than the coils used to generate it, the pinch point is very narrow indeed, and very little material gets through the loss cone (most is just deflected). So, you get lots of deflection and very little fusion to provide thrust. Bye bye dreams of ramjets.

Making the throat of the ramjet wider means less compression, and lack of fusion.

Using an active compression scheme (pulsed conical field coil, for instance) requires coils the size of the field - either heavy enough to make the ramscoop useless, or small enough to capture almost no fuel.

In summary, ramjets in practice don't seem to work very well.

Any relativistic craft launched would be sailcraft or other beam-driven craft of some kind, as that's the only way to provide enough energy to the craft.

Relativistic travel = huge cost (in 2003 dollars! note that economies of scale and necessity can help here. Automated antiproton factories, etc.: thank god for that tremendously huge fusion generator sitting next door pumping ungodly amounts of energy out all around us.)

Neither solar collectors nor antiproton factories are free, which means that the cost will always be significant. In practice, it will be colossally expensive to produce antiprotons for the forseeable future, for reasons outlined in detail in another post.

A phase-locked maser array would probably be the cheapest method for driving a relativistic craft, but has political problems outlined in my previous message.

Re:This is not Star Trek

[JoeRobe]

They required no novel physics to accomplish their feat, only the application of known physical laws.

However, travel to other stars in less than a human life-time in our frame of reference will require super-luminal speeds. There is no physics known yet that will allow us to achieve this.

True, but it should be pointed out that for decades after that, most scientists thought it was physically impossible to break the speed of sound in an aircraft. There was no physics that allowed > Mach 1 speeds to be achieved. With time, that theory was also proven wrong.

Re:This is not Star Trek

[turgid]

There was no physics that allowed > Mach 1 speeds to be achieved
Not true. Newtonian physics allows Mach 1 to be broken. Einsteinian physics does not allow c to be broken (or to be achieved with rest mass).

Re:This is not Star Trek

[The Unabageler]

have actual scientific laws courtesy of that Einstein guy

last I checked it's still the General Theory of Relativity.

Re:This is not Star Trek

[balaam's ass]

Photons have no rest mass. You do. Figure out how to get rid of your rest mass, and you can travel at the speed of light...

The limitation on faster than light travel can be thought of as a requirement to preserve causality, if all reference frames (freely-falling ones, if you like) are regarded as equally good. Thus FTL travel would violate causality in the standard picture of relativity. But perhaps someone will show that a preferred frame exists. Even so, all alternative models I'm aware of which allow for a preferred frame (e.g. bimetric gravity) require causal behavior to stay within the "light cone."

It's true that Alcubierre's warp drive spacetime doesn't have any causality violation or other funny business going on locally (which is all relativity refers to), however, as has already been noted above, the warp drive requires matter with a negative energy density. Such matter can be defined mathematically but is physically meaningless. FYI, Alcubierre himself regards the solution as an interesting toy but not something to be taken seriously from a physical standpoint.

Wormholes also require negative energy. See above. Various people keep working to push the requirements so you need less negative-energy-matter. I say if you need any at all, the whole thing makes no sense.

Cosmic Wonders!

[Anonymous Coward]

Whatever they find there, it just ain't gonna compare to the cosmic goatse.cx.

Don't worry, kids, it's a NASA site!

we might be able to find intelligent life.

[McAddress]

All we have to do now is make a craft that can go 90 light years within a reasonable amount of time. minor detail.

And one other detail, we have been mostly unsuccessful at finding intelligent life on earth, what makes us think we can find it somewhere else?

Re:we might be able to find intelligent life.

[Xilman]

All we have to do now is make a craft that can go 90 light years within a reasonable amount of time. minor detail.

We already have the technology that could get us there in around a couple of thousand years --- and only 1000 if you were happy with a fly-by mission. The 1970s Daedalus study by the BIS showed us how it could be done using only technology known at that time or reasonably expected to be available by the turn of the millenium. To this extent, it is indeed a minor detail.

There are two major details, IMO. The first is cultural: we no longer seem to want to embark on projects that are expected to have payback times measured in centuries, as the builders of the Egyptian pyramids and the European mediaeval cathedrals did. The other is economic: even if we wanted to do something like this, the cost would be enormous. OTOH, perhaps the cost might be no greater in societal terms than the price to the Egyptian economy almost 5000 years ago of building the great pyramids.

Paul

Re:90 Million L.Y.?

[trompete]

I think the article actually said 90 LY, which isn't that far at all, considering that our galaxy is 100,000 LY across.

Re:It's impossible to use a stick like that.

[Anonymous Coward]

(a) Most physicists think gravity is transmitted at light speed. Very few (and none who believe in General Relativity) think gravity is instantaneous.

(b) (I Am A materials scientist) "Solid" matter is composed of atoms bound together by electromagnetism. When you "push" a solid object, displacement waves (essentially sound waves), travelling from atom to atom inform the material that you are pushing it. For sufficiently fast pushes and short timescales, even a block of carbon steel looks like a wobbly jelly. This is important in impact engineering, for example, and mechanical engineers and materials scientists deal with stress waves in solids all the time (plastic torsion waves are the most "fun"). Nothing is perfectly solid.

Your "stick to europa" would have to have unphysical infinite rigidity for instantaneous transmission. In real life, assuming you could make a stick to europa (not in itself unphysical, just extremely unlikely), a wave train would travel down the stick when you displaced one end, displacing the material of the stick. This would happen at the speed of sound in the stick, which is always significantly lower than light speed (since it is determined by interatomic interactions, themselves subject to light speed) So yes, conceivably, the drum would make a sound, but the sound would come some time after you pushed the other end of the stick, since the stick would be acting like a wobbly jelly on such a scale, as all atomic matter must.

You can even see this in action - surely you've seen the high-speed movies of bullets hitting apples, with deformation waves crisscrossing the surface? All solids behave that way, it's just the waves travel very quickly (but not nearly as fast as light...) in some solids such as hardened metals.

Re:It's impossible to use a stick like that.

[turgid]

There is no such thing as a perfectly rigid body. Everything else follows from this.

Re:Old radio waves from the earth

[tiled_rainbows]

"...but from a long distance one would see a superposition of all those signals for different TV and radio stations, i.e. noise."


Ummm, has someone told those SETI guys this? Maybe that's why we haven't found anything yet...

Re:Old radio waves from the earth

[hankwang]

> Ummm, has someone told those SETI guys this? Maybe that's why we haven't found anything yet...

I think they're hoping to detect a transmission that is meant to be detected, in the range 1.4--1.7 GHz. In that range, the thermal background of the sun is about 1e10 watt, so only a very directional narrow-band transmission has a chance to be noticed.

I remember that people have tried to send a message to a few nearby stars a few years ago with a powerful directional transmitter. The message was a series of pictures, explaining how we look like, how we count, what our solar system looks like, etc. I can't remember what it was called, but that's the kind of transmission that we might receive.

The universe does not care what we dream.

[Christopher Thomas]

The same applies to space flight now. We can dream it, but we can't figure out how to do it. Some day, a bunch of different people will come up with a bunch of theories on "super-luminal" travel, then set out to prove their theories. One of them will be proven.

Why are you certain that one of them will be proven?

The universe is what it is, regardless of what we _want_ it to be. This may or may not include mechanisms for FTL travel, but we have seen no evidence of such phenomena occurring to date, and our models of the universe are self-consistent without them.

In the absence of observerations of FTL effects and of a theoretical mechanism by which it would occur, the most reasonable assumption is that it _doesn't_ occur.

If our universe is truly bound by the speed of light, wishing for FTL drives won't change a thing.

The wise thing to do is plan for STL, and continue learning all we can about the universe in the hopes that a loophole eventually shows up.

[ObPedant: Yes, I know about the various types of "space warp" drive proposed; however, these rely on negative energy density, which causes serious problems (does not appear to be consistent with our models of the universe). A few groups have been trying to demonstrate that negative energy density is possible. If they succeed, great, but until then the null assumption holds.]

Re:The universe does not care what we dream.

[Christopher Thomas]

A study was recently done where the speed of light was actually reduced. I am not sure the degree to which this was done, but the mear fact that this can be accomplished is something to raise at least an eyebrow over.

The propagation speed of light in a medium has been reduced in the lab - not the speed of light in vacuum, which is the important number.

There are hints that the speed of light has varied slowly over the age of the universe, but this doesn't help us build space drives.

holy crap

[AssFace]

After reading that, I can definitely walk away with one thing firm in my mind:

You must get laid incredibly often with that schpiel

Re:It's impossible to use a stick like that.

[barawn]

No. Relativistic contraction happens only in the direction of motion. The stick would "thin", not shrink.

If you shoved it "towards" Europa, for instance, then the stick would shrink slightly, but, if you're jiggling the stick back and forth, the stick would be shrinking, expanding, shrinking, expanding as you stop and start the motion. It's even worse than that as you're attempting to move a massively elongated object, so you get displacement waves rather than motion.

Plus the fraction that we're talking about here is REALLY small. Look it up - just look up Lorentz contraction somewhere, and use a value of, I don't know, v = 1 m/s (which is still fast). It's ungodly small - somewhere in the vicinity of 1 part in 1 billion.

It's not an easy question to answer - there are quite a few complications involved - but it suffices to say that nothing weird happens. The stick would take a long time to move (at least the characteristic period of the object - speed of sound*length) and if you tried to shove it harder, you'd just distort the stick (bend/break, etc.) and send a wave down the stick, thus moving YOUR end, but not moving the entire object!

I mean, let's work it out - let's assume that it's a billion meters long, so moving it at 1 m/s shrinks it by 1 meter. Let's also say that the speed of sound in the material is 1000 m/s, so it takes a million seconds for a "push" from one end to move to the other end. In order for you to actually see any real Lorentz contraction (from the whole stick), the entire thing has to be moving at 1 m/s, not just the end - Lorentz contraction comes from the fact that a reference frame moving with the stick must measure the speed of light the same as you do, and the 'fractional' contraction is due to the fact that the frame at the very far end of the stick is the same frame as the initial end of the stick.

So, in order for you to see the billion-meter long stick shrink by 1 meter, you'd have to wait a million seconds. And by then your end would have moved one million meters, and if you measured the length of the stick while it was moving at 1 m/s, you'd get 999,999,999 meters. It wouldn't be a sudden jump - it'd smoothly decrease in size as more and more of the stick begins moving. Then, when you try to stop it, it'd take a million seconds for the stick to stop, and the stick would smoothly stretch back out to 1 billion meters.

But, in the end, it still would've moved a million meters. It's only during the motion that you see anything weird happen.

So if you grab it before the whole thing starts moving, then the total contraction would only be due to however much of the stick is actually in motion.

More info from New Scientist and others

[securitas]

A bit more info from a previously submitted post:

New Jupiter-like Planet Discovered in Sol-like system

A new Jupiter-like planet has been discovered in a circular orbit around a Sun-like star 90 light-years away in the constellation Pupis. What is remarkable about the discovery is that this system is the most like our own solar system discovered to-date. This development lends credence to the theory that systems with small, rocky Earth-like planets are out there. ''This is the closest we have yet got to a real Solar System-like planet and advances our search for systems that are even more like our own,'' said UK team leader Hugh Jones of Liverpool John Moores University. Jones went on to say that, ''Jupiter's position is probably crucial to the distribution of other planets in the Solar System.'' Current thinking on planet-formation indicates a large, Jupiter-like planet in a circular orbit would allow the relatively undisturbed formation of an inner system of smaller Earth-like planets. The newly discovered planet is about twice the mass of Jupiter with an orbit equivalent to the asteroid belt in our own solar system.