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Interesting Planet Apparently Heating Its Star
T. Panimaesh writes "A Canadian graduate student has discovered a planet which is heating the star it rotates around. 'Evgenya Shkolnik detected a spot on HD179949 that was 700 degrees warmer than the surrounding areas and circled the star at the same pace as the planet's orbit, once every three days. First seen in 2001, it also appeared in two sets of observations in 2002. It is probably not an intrinsic feature of the star, which takes nine days to rotate. Instead, the planet appears to possess a magnetic field that interacts with the star's magnetic field.' The 'roaster' planet being studied is almost as big as Jupiter, a gas giant planet in our solar system, and has 270 times the mass of Earth. It moves at 150 Kilometres per second, completing it's orbit in just 3.5 days."
I dunno about that. I went to a fairly decent high school near Seattle and remember when our Biology teacher gave us an impromptu geography test to satisfy his own curiosity about the state of our geography knowledge. It was a world map with no country borders drawn in and we had to roughly draw in and label something like 20 countries and the oceans.
I was fairly happy that I got everything correct except to put Mongolia on the South side of China. My friend managed to put Britain where France is. Most of the class got fewer than 1/3 of the countries right. Several people didn't know where the PACIFIC OCEAN was. (Hint: if you're living in Seattle, it's the big bunch of water next to you on the map)
Even worse, about 1/2 of the class didn't know where Canada was. (Somebody put Vietnam where Canada is at, seriously) 5 people DIDN'T KNOW WHERE THE US WAS on a map. I'm sorry but if you can't even find your own country on a map, you need to be beaten.
I''m not sure if that was more depressing than when I was doing writing tutoring as an undergrad at the University of Washington (a fairly selective 4 year public university, or so I thought) and I regularly had to show people how to write a sentence.
Yes, you read that right. Several times, I had to show people enrolled at a university the basics of subject-verb-predicate. Oh yeah, most of them didn't know what a paragraph was either - as in they'd never heard of one.
During a brief stint at a community college, I had a geography teacher that didn't know how orbits worked. He was somehow under the impression that as soon as you left the atmosphere, you just kinda hovered in space as if it were made of Velcro or something. Nice old guy, crap teacher though.
So yes, it's probably not a bad idea to reiterate that Jupiter is one of the planets.