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Planet Discovered with a Massive Core
helioquake writes "A collaboration of astronomers discovers possible a 'Rossetta Stone' of planetary formation study, reported by San Francisco State Univerity and Subaru Observatory. This new planet, orbiting around G-star like our Sun (HD 149026), weighs roughly equal to that of Saturn, while its size is significantly smaller in diameter. Planetary modeling suggests that the core of the planet alone must have 70 times more mass than Earth, indicating the possible existence of a metallic solid core inside the planet. Just like the rocky planet discovered earlier, the finding of this dense-core planet may lead to better understading of the formation of rockey planets in the Universe."
I'd say it's time for IPX to head out and start mining that core. There's probably quite a bit of rare minerals in it.
...since "weight" is a measure of gravitational pull on an object? Have denser mass, sure, but weight? Weird.
how do they determine the weight/mass of a planet that's that far away? Or is it more of just a guess based on what light it refracts/emits/absorbs?
That's what all the Planets say!
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Call me when they discover a giant planet, with a metallic core outside the planet. That's the armored base from which they keep sending us aliens like Ann Coulter and Tom Cruise. Then we just drop magnet-tipped nukes into space, and finally it's safe to watch TV again.
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It's too bad that the only planets we can reliably locate at this time are the freaky-deeky ones that are too massive, too close to their primary, or are in orbits far too elliptical to give life a decent chance...each new system looks like a good example of how not to design a solar system capable of sustaining life.
Hopefully, this will change when the interferometer goes up around 2015.
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[nt]
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Heavy Metal planets are so Hard Core.
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Managerium
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
...Scientists at Tom's Astrophysics Guide and Ars Astra estimate that this new massive core planet is still capable of outperforming the latest Intel dual core planets by up to 20% in the all-important Halo 2 benchmark.
A solid metallic core that's 70 times more dense than liquid rock? That's some kind of metal I'd like to know more about.
Of course, maybe our planet is so light because its core is filled with million-year-old Martian war machines that are flimsy enough to be damaged by current weapons.
Martians have journeyed millions of miles to attack a crane operator and his neighbors (and if they're not Martians, they journeyed a lot farther).
--- Roger Ebert
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
"There are two competing theories for giant planet formation: planets form from fragmentation of a contracting dense cloud, or planets start as small rock-ice cores and grow as they gravitationally acquire additional mass. The large core of this planet couldn't have formed by the first model."
You will have to excuse my ignorance here, but from my understanding, the accretion phase of the Nebular Theory explains that as things planets form as a collection of interstallar mass collecting and colliding in the post Proto-Star phase. And I was under the impression that the Nubeluar Theory, with the Giant Impact Theory thrown in to explain bizzare occurances that could not be explained (such as the off axis of Earth, Venus, and Uranus). Now only being an amature, thats my understanding of it. And how does this planet differ from any other planet they have found, excluding its density.
One time this science guy comes up to me and says "did you know the earth revolves around the sun?" and I'm like "you dumbass, look up at the sky. see the sun revolving around us?"
Besides, if the planet rotated around the sun it would have to move pretty fucking fast, and we'd all get blown off.
I wonder when planetary scientists will get a better picture of what's out there. The current observation techniques only pick up outrageously heavy planets with close orbits. Yes, I know this is inevitable given that the detection methods cue in on gravitational and occultation effects.
Once we can detect an Earth-sized planet in a 1 AU orbit, we should get a much better idea of the actual prevalence of Earths and the fraction of solar systems "like ours."
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Let's give Bruce Willis and crew another tax break to launch up there and drill into that sucker! If anyone can drill it, they can. It said so on tv.
AMD vows to release planet with dual massive cores by end of '05. Intel responds by renegotiating contracts with its distributors.
What's up with astronomers making outlandish claims based on the flimiest of evidence. There's a dozen or so other things than a dense core that would have shown up the same on their model. They have no way of knowing that a dense core, rather than, for example, a dense planet is causing the motions.
/. scientists saying "omg teh dakr spot! tere must be teh lakezorz!" http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/2 9/1610223&tid=160&tid=14
And this isn't new. Just a few days ago, we saw on
And remember the "scientists" who said "gee, there's sediment at the bottom of basins on Mars. 100% chance there was water there in Mars's history!"
Whatever happened to scientific restraint? Whatever happened to waiting for the right evidence?
could survive. The Mole People. We have discovered their secret planet.
I did not RTFA yet, but unless helioquake did a copy and paste from the FA then I'd suggest he, and editor Zonk (wtf good is an editor if he doesn't edit, ah?) go read this article as published on Slashdot. You know, that whole grammar thing? ;)
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How much can we model to show what an environment like this is like? That planet's magnetosphere must be fierce. There must be a lot of side effects from that, both for it and any moons it may have.
Actually, we do.
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Well, this is amazing news that we're hearing from Subaru Observatory. Now that this is all done with, I really have a sudden urge to buy a car...
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"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
begin mining! We could trash a bunch of other planets, stripping them of their natural resources.
It's easy to stand out when the general level of competence is so low.
I have a massive core but no one ever writes about me.
Umm No. Intelligent Design theory does not state nor imply that every single solar system in the universe be one capable of supporting human-like life. Merely that the variety and complexity of our universe is so great as to belie the possibility of it being totally random. So actually, having a funky goofy solar system such as this one supports the concept of Intelligent Design.
Now stop trolling, you silly.
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The page talks about the history of detecting the planets and the various methods used.
And co-orbital planets probably wouldn't last long. An exception to this are asteroid belts. However, in general, two (or n) planets would show up as different frequencies in the wobble of the star. The magnitude of each frequency gives you a lower limit on the mass of the star. You can only get a true measure (as opposed to a limit) by also knowing the inclination of the planets' orbit relative to our line of sight.
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The mass of the star, based on interpolation of stellar evolutionary models, is 1.3+-0.1 M[Sun]; together with the Doppler amplitude, K1 = 43.3 m/s, we derive a planet mass, M sin(i) = 0.36 M[Jup], and orbital radius of 0.042 AU.
Let's go Hurricanes!!! 2006 Stanley Cup Champions!!!
I mean "lower limit on the mass of the planets".
Ben Hocking
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It has a "massive" core, that is fine. But what really matters: does this planet pose a threat? Our weapons are armed and ready.
Just like the rocky planet discovered earlier, the finding of this dense-core planet may lead to better understading of the formation of rockey planets in the Universe."
I think this is a very interesting result to be sure, but I think I would like to see it confirmed. I am a little concerned that perhaps there may be something wrong with their analysis. I am familiar with this kind of work and there are a lot of places where errors can creep into the analysis and give spurious results. I hope that their discovery stands up, but I'm not convinced, yet.
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And if you'd like respond to me or flame for this, please go here http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/30/15 32238&tid=215&tid=4 to argue.
Actually the "funky goofy solar system" neither confirms nor disproves either theory. It is simply another data point. Up until recently we had only one system to observe and we are now finding out that other systems are different from ours. Why this is a suprise, I do not know.
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I didn't RTFA, but the original post says 70 times the mass, not that it is 70 times more dense. It also states that the planet is about the size of Saturn which has a diameter of about 10 times Earths, which in turn means 1000 times the volume. So it seems it would be much less dense then Earth.
I leave "darker in X" as an exercise for the reader
Exactly! Do we really need to know the inner workings of a planet and how they form when there are bigger things to worry about? I'm just saying that this branch of science may be useful one day, but there are bigger problems to deal with in the area of space immediately surrounding us and on the planet we still live on. Last time I checked there are a lot of people dying from cancer, AIDS, warfare, and other problems we've got. Don't you think the brilliant minds looking for planets could be better put to use solving the more serious problems we're facing now?
I read enough of TFA to realize that it wasn't really worth finishing. There wouldn't be any useful information I could apply to my life, just some trivial information about this particular planet and some ideas scientists have about planetary formation. I fail to see how this information can in any way be applied to make the world a better place at the current time.
This information may prove useful at some point in time and perhaps it will be of great benefit to humanity. However, this will be long after I'm dead and gone.
Go ahead and flame me if you want. Mod me insightful, a troll, or redundent, but I'm just voicing my opinion on the matter.
Don't they test these planets before they deliver?!?
Oh well, let's gdb that core and do a stack trace...
...if they have crappy movies about their core too. Poor bastards.
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to strip mine *that*.
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weighs roughly equal to that of Saturn
Last time I checked, everything weighed equal to Saturn. About 0 lbs.
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Someone needs to do a >strings core and see what happened, probably just a overloaded chinese server, you know, 'cause of all the screening of western sites they are doing these days.
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This is the planet that has been found. There are thousands more, but this one has been found. You most likely are not so interested in the planet that has been found, and probably would be more interested in the closer planets you see up top there, where you can customize those planets, change those planets, or just click pretty widgets to kill time.
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The reason it's flawed is because science is unpredictable. We dont really know where, and when the next great discovery is really going to take place or how that discovery will affect us. For all we know, this discovery may be laying the ground work for something truly amazing, but neither you nor I know.
Think of it this way. A little over 200 hundred years ago, people were just starting to play around with electricity. At the time, it was really little more than an intellectual curiosity and nobody had any idea that it would lead to anything useful. Fast forward 200 years, and most of us can't survive without it. That's how most science has worked. A seeming innocuous discovery is made that is later found to completely change how we make our way in the world.
That is why it is reasonable to hedge our bets and pursue lines of research that may not have immediate outcomes. Aren't you glad that Schroedinger and his cronies developed the field of quantum mechanics that made modern computers possible, even though it had a little practical benefit to them during their lifetimes?
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If you have no interst in the universe outside your basement you probably won't get excited. However if you happen to be an astrophysicist or even have a remote interest in new discoveries then you might just find this interesting, because we've never seen anything like this before.
The planet in question posses the largest known core of any known extrosolar planet. So what? you say, well this just happens to be the first observational evidence supporting a planetary formation theory known as core accretion. So thanks to this observation confirming the theory, we now know that there should be a lot more of these planets. And as such a little bit more about the universe around us.
But of course because we cant get there tommorow this sort of work is a waste of time.... Tell you what, why don't you return to your cave and I'll send you an email when we've invented warp drive and found another planet. Then you can go live on it and the rest of us can waste out time with these boring discoveries.
Actually that only gives you the weight of the Earth (as caused by your gravitational attraction). In order to determine it's mass you must divide the weight of the Earth by the acceleration due to your own mass.
So, if you know your mass without consulting the Earth's gravitational pull (which would require that you know the Earth's mass), you're set. If not, you must use an object of known mass to measure the Earth's mass, from which you can then calculate your own.
And yet, I understand you were being funny. But what strikes me as funny is that this approach actually works!
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Earth First, we'll stripmine the other planets later.
"all i wanted was a pepsi..."
Those bastard scientists - studying things that interest them. We should round them up and force to study more practical things... you know... your onto something there... but why stop at scientists? I say we round up all the programmers and make them do something useful like farming while we're at it. Why waste their time making video games, when they could be growing crops for hungry Africans?
Hundreds of others like this one, lol.
There are something like 70 sextillion stars out there. I'm sure for every new type of planet we find, there are trillions of examples out there. Probably thousands if not millions just within our own galaxy. The point isn't that it's a unique planet or anything, just that it's the first of it's kind that we've found. It expands our knowledge of solar system formation and will help us to find the earthlike worlds that you seem to think are the only important ones.
Is that the Rossetta Stone of Lavender Nun fame ?
Or do you mean Rosetta ?
Wouldn't the Death Star be mostly hollow?
The concept of a "Rosetta Stone" in a generic discovery of signifigance. Rosetta Stone referes to a tablet that had a simultaneous translation of Heiroglyphics, Latin, and Greek, that allowed linguists to finally start cracking the secrets of the ancient Egyptian's written Language.
This specimin that takes science in a new direction is more akin to "Mercury's Orbit."
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
With a sample size of only nine (and those only studied close up with a handful of sensing devices) you've determined which planets are and are not suitable for life.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Space flight once needed funding from the government to get kick started, but there are a lot of people in the private sector getting in on the action. Hopefully, NASA or other companies involved with space flight/exploration will be able to sustain themselves based on the fact that they provide a product or service society thinks is worth paying for.
Programmers are generally doing something useful though, so using them is a little off. Even though some people would argue that Microsoft programmers are useless or should be doing something better with their time, society is buying Microsoft products which justify what they are doing. They can stand on their own, so either what they do is of value or society is stupid.
The line gets blurred more when you deal with things like video games. To some they are considered an art form. They're not really adding anything practical, but they add to the culture of society. You could attempt to pass them off as a form of entertainment if nothing else. True, they could better apply their time and effort to doing something more useful for society, but once again people are willing to pay for the product. Human beings will always want to consume some form of entertainment, so it a certain sense it's somewhat vital to have people providing that entertainment. If it's not good entertainment, people won't buy it and it will disappear.
To get this back on track, what these scientists are doing is science purely for the sake of science at this time. This is similar to mathmeticians who prove theorems that aren't of any real practical use. Because this knowledge generally can't be applied to much practical use, it isn't very profitable. At some point in time it might be, but right now it isn't and doesn't serve much of a function to enhance society.
If these people were looking at the moon and wondering if we could grow crops on it, then I'd be all for having money being given to their research because it has potential practical benefits to society. I know there are a lot of people out there who love these non-practical forms of science, but I'd prefer something useful comes out of what is being studied because it will become self-supportive, potentially becoming of use to me or at least not costing me any money to keep the project running.
A healthy skepticism is always a Good Thing, I think.
I haven't read the actual journal article, but I'm sure that the paper is accepted by ApJ because error analysis is performed properly. Or so I hope.
Anyway, what distinguishes this work from others (to me) is that many quantitative values (orbital period, the mass and radius of the planet, etc) are measured via observations. That doesn't happen very often in astronomy these days.
Are they sure it's not just inhabited by geeks?
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Massive variety & complexity sounds more like what I would expect from a universe generated from randomness than intelligent design. Are you sure you're using the same argument that the creationists do?
Those non-practical forms of science eventually lead to the practical benefits you're seeking.
Science is inherently not practical. Most of the experiments that lead to the development of products we used today were not cost effective or useful. This is the core difference between a Scientist and an Engineer.
Scientists lay the ground work for the Engineers to "exploit" the behaviors the scientists find. That leads to products or developments on mass scale. If you blindly denounce the initial research as pointless though... guess what... it never gets accomplished, and the advancements/improvements to life/commercially viable products you're so found of never get made.
If man had always followed your advice, we'd still be waiting for a lightning storm to make fire!
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Exam 4/C again. Maybe I'll do better this time.
Not to be a Grammar Nazi or anything, but that summary made me cringe... By means of a massive core, we discovered a planet? Among other things...
There is a real musician named Jah Wobble. I doubt any fictional name is going to beat that.
You're not alone in thinking like that. As a matter of fact, you can look back in history and find that, circa 1900, quite a few people shared the same view about the studies of electrons and X-rays as you do today about planets. They thought, "geez, why the hell are we spending on money to study these useless things like electrons and X-rays? What GOOD WOULD THAT EVER DO?"
Now admittedly this may not be exactly the same kind of discovery as electrons. But the idea is the same; we are trying to understand the environment we live in. With hope that will lead us to better and prosperous life in a long run.
While its all well and good to insist that corporations only spend money on things that make a profit - that has never been, and hopefully will never be, the mission of the US government.
quick, get the star gate up and running so we can get there before the Gouauld
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while its size is significantly smaller in diameter
The diameter of a size? And here I thought size had a magnitude only! Does size also have color and texture? How about the speed of its velocity, or the weight of its mass?
If every solar system was habitable, that could be taken as proof that God designed them all to be perfect.
If no other solar system in the universe was habitable, that could be taken as proof that God designed us uniquely as His own children.
This 'shoots down' jack. Short of finding an advanced alien society that built, seeded, and has been monitering this planet, there's nothing space exploration can do to rigorously prove the existence or lack thereof of God.I am an engineer, now atheist but formerly Christian, with several scientific friends who are devout Christians with varying levels of secularism. We all thought that evolution was logical and strict creationism not so, but felt that it was not irrational to feel that God may have watched over and tweaked the universe using its natural laws, including evolution and the Big Bang, as tools.
I guess that belief (formulated long before the term) would probably fall under "Intelligent Design". Should it be taught in schools? Absolutely not. Can it form a rational way to reconcile religious beliefs with scientific realities? Yes.
You take the massive core. You point it at the sky. You look through it. If you're lucky, you discover a planet this way. How hard is that to understand?
They have measured the mass in relation to our frame of reference. It may be that it's just another run-of-the-mill planet from it's own frame, but the difference in velocity makes it seem more massive to us. An orbital period of 2.87 days (from TFA), would make for a tremendous speed.
An interesting aside, the orbit of Mercury was an early proof of Einstein's relativity. The planet varies in speed somewhat during it's trip around the sun. Astronomers had a hard time plotting its orbit mathematically, because it appears to change in mass.
Einstein's special relativity was able to quanitify that change in mass.
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Any word on dual core updates for the planet?
Yeah I haven't read the journal article yet either... But, I would say that being accepted by the ApJ just means that the reviewers couldn't find anything wrong with it. But I am pretty skeptical of the values. The techniques for observing the orbital period and mass are pretty well established, but the measurement of the radius of the planet has me pretty concerned, there are pretty well established methods for doing this with stars, but this planet is *a lot* smaller. I think there is a lot of potential for error there. The radius is just not an easy thing to measure, and it wouldn't surprise me in the least if the radius measurement were off by a factor of 3 or 4, or perhaps more. That's the really tricky part I think.
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Also, as for Mercury... Mercury's perihelion advance isn't due to a change in mass from speed variation, it's velocity doesn't vary *that* much. The perihelion advance is actually due to the warping of space-time close to the sun.
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blah blah blah metallic core planet overlords blah blah blah
You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
I'm still waiting for the day when we find a teeny star orbiting a giant planet.
This new planet, orbiting around G-star like our Sun (HD 149026), weighs roughly equal to that of Saturn, while its size is significantly smaller in diameter. Planetary modeling suggests that the core of the planet alone must have 70 times more mass than Earth, indicating the possible existence of a metallic solid core inside the planet.
Great! They found Cybertron. It is only a matter of time before the Transformers bring their war to Earth.
Just so you know, "subaru" is the Japanese name for the star cluster Pleiades.
Prof. Farnsworth: You see, Vergon 6 was once filled with a super-dense substance known as dark matter, each pound of which weighs over 10,000 pounds.
I sincerely hope it has gold wheels a WRC Blue paint job and a bloody great vent on the front. Oh and Petr Solberg aiming it around those gravity lenses, worse than wet snow...
If I had a few massive cores laying around, could I discover new planets as well?
So some planets have candy instead of peanut butter or nougat inside them...interesting.
No luck finding the preprint so far. But here is the thing.
This is a G0 star, so it's likely to have a similar scale size as our Sun. Looking up Simbad, I see that this star is located roughly 80 parsec away, which isn't too far. Now, this new planet. It is 0.72 times the size of Jupiter. So if you take the ratio of apparent discs, it'd be
(pi * (0.72 * 0.7e5km[Jupitar])^2) / (pi * (7.0e5[Sun])^2) ~ 0.005
or 0.5%. So all you need is to achieve +/- 0.1% accuracy in photometry to derive the apparent size...there, easier said than done. No wonder they needed a big telescope to do this accurately.
I think it's doable, though your points are well taken, too. I wouldn't be surprised if there is a factor of two errors.
Saturn is the LEAST dense. So comparing it's density to Saturn to make it sound really dense is sort of silly.
That isn't quite what was happening. The Sun's energy of the Sun's gravitational field is equivalent to some amount of mass. This equivalent mass of the Sun's gravitational field gives rise to a small second order gravitational field that perturbs Mercury's orbit. Actually, it perturbs the orbits of other planets as well but the effect is most noticable with Mercury.
Given the blindspot for Tragedies of the Commons, I suppose we should count ourselves lucky that bringing that much in moon materials here would be outrageously expensive. It would be even harder to breathe with the extra gravity...
But, in response to the GP, it isn't a given that moving stuff off the moon would cause the moon's orbit to change; it depends what the destination is -- it doesn't have to be Earth. You could mine it and use it for something without bringing it here.
If the mass is to be used for a power station placed in lunar orbit, for example, there would likely be no net change. Also, if we had the requisite magical powers, we could split the moon in half and place the halves in opposing orbits, or have four moons, or crumble it down into a continuous ring. There would be no benefit to doing so, but the point is that an orbital balance can be achieved even with large masses. (Not that there wouldn't be other side effects. Replacing the moon with a continuous ring would get rid of tides, which coastal wildlife needs for its survival (particularly coral reef habitats)).
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I agree completley with Andy Gardner. Seeing as how we can't even send people to Mars let alone another planet even further than that, all of this is a waste of time unless scientists plan on documenting everything. This way, when we do develop warp speed engines similar to that of star trek, or Slipstream as the Halo novels put it, we'll be able to mine their resources (and essentially have some alien race mighty pi**ed off at us) Personally, I don't know how much interest I can retain in discovering new planets. To my knowledge, we have found three more in our galaxy -- who knows how many more we know that I was never cued on. That's just the Milky Way alone. I can't imagine how many more we'll find in this infinite space of a universe. Quite frankly, I don't want to, either.
IIRC, you can make a ringworld with about 1 earth mass. Actually, you can make a dyson sphere with that little mass if you don't mind it being really thin. So for that 2.5% of earth's mass, call it a factor of 50. (Assuming that 90% of the work is in removing the mass. It shouldn't be too hard to aim it where you want for reassembly). Yes, I'm unsure. At this level, intuition really doesn't work very well =/