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Strange Mini Solar System Found

starexplorer writes "In 1990, Penn State's Alex Wolszczan found the first exoplanets. But he never got much credit from mainstream researchers, because his planets (3 of them, roughly Earth-sized) orbit pulsars and hold no chance for harboring life. Now he's found a 4th object on the outskirts of the system, SPACE.com is reporting. Call it a planet, call it an asteroid, Wolszczan says, but call the setup a dark, eerie twin of the inner half of our solar system. Also in the same story, news of a brown dwarf just 15 times the mass of Jupiter that has a planet-making disk of stuff around it. Together, more problems for astronomers, who still don't have a basic definition for the word planet or a firm idea of what separates planets from stars."

4 of 373 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Mini-Martians? by crummynz · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    People want to quickly get first post while retaining their self respect. So they post a quick joke that they made up, that way they dont have to spend a decent amount of time thinking up an interesting or insightful reply.

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    ~ Crummy
  2. Re:TMBG by spuzzzzzzz · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    OK, I'll explain this slowly. This post used apostrophes in inappropriate places. An AC responded, complaining about the extra apostrophes. At which point you jumped in to "correct" the grammer of the AC.

    You seemed not to realise that the AC had correctly pointed out errors in his parent. You then claimed that you couldn't find the errors in the original post. So I thought I would help you out by pointing out the lines in which the original post erred.

    So I quoted the incorrect lines from the original post. That's all.

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    Don't you hate meta-sigs?
  3. Re:TMBG by CrackerJack9 · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    try it in hex, or another browser...92 and 27 are hexadecimal characters. On is an apostrophe, one is not. The original post used 92, which wasn't showing up as a 27 (believe it or not). Try it out yourself and then pat yourself on the back for being one of the 'smart kids'. Good job.

  4. Re:TMBG by spuzzzzzzz · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    And your point is?
    The meaning (in english) of it’s is the same as the meaning of it's. They are both contractions, they both mean "it is" and they are both incorrect in the original post.

    Here's what I think happened. You were using some broken browser which doesn't correctly display extended ASCII. You made a bunch of stupid comments because you didn't see the "it's" (or "it's" if you prefer) and now you're trying to cover for yourself by pretending to be clever. Well done.

    But you're still wrong. The original poster was incorrect and the AC who corrected him was right. Live with it.

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    Don't you hate meta-sigs?