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

[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

[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

[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

[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.

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: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.