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Tatooine-like Planet Discovered
ATP writes "CNN is reporting that a planet has been discovered in a solar system with 3 suns. The observation brings into doubt the theory stating that planets form from the dust orbiting around a single sun. The discovery also resulted in a new method of searching for extrasolar planets-- until now most searching focused only on single-sun systems."
This is not the planet we're looking for.
Move along.
Move along.
Start a happiness pandemic
Don't let George Lucas see this. He'll want to change the next release of episode 4 and have Luke looking over 3 suns setting.
"Really, I had always wanted it to be 3 suns, and now we have the technology to produce my original vision"
-FL
Come on... even google knows how many suns there are.
http://www.google.com/search?q=tatooine+suns
I guess the galaxy isn't so far away after all
Ask me about repetitive DNA
As noted by The Register, the planet is not in a galaxy far, far away, but a mere 149 light-year jaunt through our own Milky Way.
Might it be more like the planet in Pitch Black instead of Tattoine?
moo.
Would agriculture ever start? Would dwellings all be subterranean? Would concepts of work and play be utterly different? Religions would evolve differently. Would gender roles be affected?
Does anyone know of a work of science fiction that delves into this, in the way that The Left Hand of Darkness explored gender issues?
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
More like Mike, Robbie, and Chip :P
moo.
THE SPICE!!!???
It's called nightfall and it's by Isaac Asimov. It's not one of his better works-- it has some neat ideas in it, but it was originally a short story that was later extended to novel length and as a result it feels rather stretched. Perhaps the original short story is better, I don't know (I've only read the novel).
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
From the article:
The planet, a gas giant slightly larger than Jupiter, orbits the main star of a triple-star system known as HD 188753 in the constellation Cygnus.
Unless I missed something major when watching the movies, Tatooine isn't a gas giant...
To me, Tatooine-like would be "that earthish desert planet", not "that gas giant with 3 suns"...
The observation brings into doubt the theory stating that planets form from the dust orbiting around a single sun.
No, it doesn't. That's assuming the star system is as old as the planet. There's no way they can see how the four move relative to each other, so they're just guessing. The two most likely scenarios I can think of are that a star with a planet drifted into a binary system, or three stars and failed star (gas giant) managed--by chance--to drift together without crashing into each other. When they can show me four stars in eliptical orbits in the same plane, then I'll be impressed, but it'll still only suggest a big star had two gas giants big enough to start burning.
No love for Pitch Black?
Besides, Vin Diesel can kick Chewbacca's ass. He can do anything.
I like big butts and I cannot lie.
If you had done your research on this before speaking, you would find that except for one or two exceptions, all extrasolar planets have been indirectly discovered. They were discovered by using spectroscopy over a sometimes long period of time,depending on the planet's orbit. The shift in the spectral lines over time allows observers to calculate the radial velocity of a star with respect to the center of mass of the planetary system. This information in turn infers that there is a planet orbiting the star and certain characteristics such as mass of the planet, eccentricity of the orbit, and distance from the star. www.howstuffworks.com has a very simple description of extrasolar planet searching.
Also, the Spitzer space telescope has directly confirmed the existence of already known planets that were discovered using the indirect method. It is possible with the Spitzer telescope rather than Hubble because stars put out much less light in the infrared than in the visible wavelengths.
"Tatooine-like Planet Discovered," I read. Eagerly, I clicked the link. "They've found a way to tell just what the planet is like! Now that is news!"
Oh, but wait... It's actually a story about a planet that was discovered in a solar system with three stars. What in the hell does that have to do with making the planet "Tatooine-like"? That's like calling every other planet in our system "Earth-like".
*sigh*
I think science does demand healthy sckepticism, however, you are making some comparisons that don't quite match up.
For instance, detecting planets within our own solar system is far different than detecting one many lightyears away. In our solar system, all you really need is a good earth based telescope and a little luck. To detect extrasolar planets, one must observe things like star wobble. IANAA, but considering that we've not even photographed the entire sky using orbit based long range cameras (so I've heard), the chances of an actual photo of a planet is extremely remote, even knowing where one is, because of brightness issues.
I've often thought that it is equivilant to trying to see a moth flying around a lone streetlight 2 miles away with the naked eye. Unless the moth is extremely large, and far enough away from the light itself, you'll never see it. Though, you may see the light wavering as the moth flies around the light. Thus, you can know that something is flying around it, but not actually make out what it is.
On one hand, you state that we're in for disappointment and that the likelihood of a real direct observation is small. I agree 100%. But, that the evidence is thin, I would disagree. Gravitational pull (and wavelength shifts) on a star, while certainly not concrete evidence, has been used long before other planets were reported discovered. The foundations of the theories are solid, in as far as using credible contemporary science.
Now, if they found these planets using Seti, claiming to have uncovered a prime number sequence transmittion encoded with a 3d schematic of a machine who's purpose is unknown, but looks like possibly a gyroscope... I'd say they've been watching too many Jodie Foster movies.
I8-D
With the exception of the one rock planet observed, ALL are gas giants and virtually all many times larger than all the Gas Giants in our own solar system combined. We are NOT talking something the size of Venus, here, we are talking something closer in size to our own sun. This does make a bit of a difference.
To directly observe a planet the size of Earth at a resolution of 1 pixel at a distance of 100 light-years would require a radio telescope with a 1 Km diameter. The proposed Km radio telescope array would do this. Nobody has such a telescope (yet) so nobody is making this sort of claim (yet). But it could be done, it has been designed and (last I heard) it was being built. Once it is finished, planetary discoveries will be made much more rapidly and much more reliably.
It is unlikely to happen in my lifetime, but such an array, in space, would be able to scan a lot of absorbtion frequencies, allowing you to not only detect such a planet, but know the composition of the atmosphere as well. A 1 mile diameter array in space would give you 6.25 pixels-worth of data - certainly enough to detect the existance of weather patterns and possibly enough to detect large moons (provided they are radio objects).
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Actually, it is somewhat surprising that a multi-star system would have a significant planet-forming debris cloud. Orbital mechanics tend to be relatively unstable in multi-star systems, so it's considerably more likely that the dust and debris would end up in unstable orbits and fall into one of the stars, instead of clumping up into a planet with a stable orbit. The fact that a planet can actually have a stable orbit in a system with three stars is actually somewhat surprising to me.
As for the system being thrown together after forming seperately, that's highly unlikely. First of all, space is mostly... well, space. The chances against two star systems colliding at all, nevermind doing so in a way that forms a stable three-star system are, no pun intended, astronomical. Even if a stable three-star configuration formed, it's even more likely that the sudden change in orbital dynamics would promptly eject the planet from the system (not hard to do--actually, if memory serves me, Mercury is in the process of being very slowly ejected from our own solar system. The sun will probably die first, though).
So, yes, lots of things could have happened... most of them probably even more fantastically implausible than the system forming as-is.
....that's a Death Star in orbit.
Table-ized A.I.
And even worse was a movie based roughly on the ideas in the story. I walked out of the theatre after about fifteen minutes. David Birney (almost as talentless as a Baldwin) as some kind of weird priest, using a hawk to blind a pretty volunteer so she could understand the coming darkness. Or something. I can't remember if Asimov was still alive at the time, but if he was, I suspect this movie killed him. Bleh.
I had forgotten how much cooler teenagers look when they are smoking. Oh, wait
...a solar system with... three suns!
Seems like the more stars we look at, the more planets we fine. Maybe we can start to make educated guesses as to what at least one of the values in the Drake equation is, instead of the wild ass, pull a number out of my butt, guesses we had been using.
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
... but only in a certain village in tunisia.
Free as in mason.
More details here: http://planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov/news/7_13_images.h tml.
Nice animations too.
Think about the gravitational field shapes required to get stellar dust to coalesce into planets.
:)
With 3 bodies, you have no guarantee that there'll ever be a stable node in the field, let alone that enough matter will land there to bunch together.
Pretty neat fluke if it did, mind.
~Tim
--
Rushing on down to the circle of the turn
observation brings into doubt the theory stating that planets form from the dust orbiting around a single sun.
The observation doesn't necessarily call into question this theory - there has long been a theory that rogue planets (i.e. planets that have either been knocked from their own solar system or where their star has exploded) can be taken into the gravity of star(s) that it wasn't formed around.
What does call the theory into question is the paucity of information on extra solar planetary formation. Simply, we don't have enough data to start making convincing general principles of planetary construction.
"As a writer / novelist you might want to spellcheck your sig.
Tatooine doesnt exist, does this?
I'm just waiting for the first DS9 like wormhole to the delta quadrant to be discovered. Hell I'd settle for the most nasal starship captain that doesn't have a clue.
* You'll never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.
* The womp rats are about 2 meters in length.
* The sand is coarse and rough and irritating, and gets everywhere.
Speaking of gravity (I know this would be a big rehash), isn't it funny that every planet the intrepid explorers (in most of the Sci-Fi movies) land on has a permissibly breathable atmosphere and a gravitational pull equal to that on earth (or home planet)? Even the 'small planet' of Tatooine or Naboo has the same gravity. Even the same ambient temperatures (except for the snow-filled planet, of course, where the native animals' innards are surprisingly warm, and it snows - I wonder how the water evaporates).
The native creatures aren't usually scared of the aliens. They don't welcome them open-armed either. You can find palatable (and hopefully non-toxic) food everywhere. (Yechch, I am a born vegetarian).
Oh, by the way, I am a big Star Wars fan - I watched the first two releases when I was too young for such observations.
-clueless Nick
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