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Largest-Known Planet Befuddles Scientists
langelgjm writes to mention that scientists are quite puzzled over the discovery of the largest planet yet. According to study-leader Georgi Mandushev it should theoretically not even be able to exist. 'Dubbed TrES-4, the planet is about 1.7 times the size of Jupiter and belongs to a small subclass of "puffy" planets that have extremely low densities. The finding will be detailed in an upcoming issue of Astrophysical Journal. [...] "TrES-4 is way bigger than it's supposed to be," Mandushev told Space.com. "For its mass, it should be much smaller. It basically should be about the size of Jupiter and instead it's almost twice as big." "TrES-4 appears to be something of a theoretical problem," said study team member Edward Dunham, also of the Lowell Observatory. "Problems are good, though, since we learn new things by solving them."'"
Prediction: The gravity 'constant' is not constant everywhere in the universe.
I'm guessing it's bigger than it should be because with a lower gravity constant it isn't as dense for its mass.
Makes me think of something a physics professor of mine said.
"You can allways use God to explain everything, but that's not a useful answer unless you can always and invariably get what you want by asking God. If you are of the mindset to accept that answer, you need to then ask what natural tools did God use to achieve that outcome, because that is what you can use, and so far, things tend to have been done with natural tools."
My theory is God gave the planet a lot of moons, or heavy moons, puffing up the atmosphere by releasing some of the pull from the planet on its gasses, as well as making the gravity from that region appear more than that of the actual planet.
'course, I'm not an astrophysicist, so my thoery is 99% likely to be WRONG.
I am sorta haphazardly amazed that people are surprised
No one is surprised that I know, though I'm sure someone is. Headlines on Slashdot notwithstanding, the only general and systemic surprise when we discover something new stems from the thrill of discovery, not a violation of anyone's expectations that the universe was a well-defined and cataloged thing.
... that something isn't playing by the rules that we have artificially set when we haven't gotten our tails out there and truly tested.
Well, to be fair, there's an awful lot that we can know without going to a place. For example, going to Mars resolved quite a few questions, and introduced new ones, but we knew a great deal before a rover ever touched down.
On the big bang question, understanding that there are points we haven't seen yet due to the speed of light (horizon theory) and points we might never see, is it possible that we are mis-guessing ages by not understand our position to the position of the sighted object versus the position of the singularity point?
Hrm... quite a few problems with that question.
First off, we are the position of the singularity. The singularity of the big bang wasn't a firecracker in an empty room. It was all of space (and time, we think). As it expanded outward, our universe came into being as we know it. There's no place in the Universe that's the origin of the big bang, just as there's no "center" of the expansion on the surface of a sphere as it's inflated from the inside. There's a center of a sphere in 3 dimensions, but THAT center isn't actually part of the surface. Similarly, if there's a geometric center of our universe's expansion, it's not a 3-space point within our frame of reference, and thus moot when talking about distances between two points in our Universe.
Now, on to your question: is it possible that we don't understand distances in space, and thus are mis-measuring the age of the universe? ABSOLUTELY! I'd say certainly, but being certain about uncertainty is a sticky concept. However, it's important to understand the scale of that uncertainty. We have many ways of measuring distance, and at the very least we can be pretty sure about the size of our own galaxy (on the order of 100,000 light years in diameter, depending on where you measure it). That means that light arriving to earth from the center of our galaxy is tens of thousands of years old. We might be off in our measurements, but it's very unlikely beyond reason that we'd be off by an order of magnitude, so these rough approximations are about as reliable as you're going to get.
Now, when measuring further out, effects which we have less understanding of start to become more important. Gravitational lensing isn't a huge problem for measuring the distance to other Local Group galaxies (such as Andromeda), but it does enter into measuring the distance to distant galaxies outside of the Local Group. Again, we can be pretty sure that the distance to Andromeda is about 2.5 million light years. Now, we might be off on that, but it's very unlikely to be by an order of magnitude (e.g. while 2-3 million light years might be conceivable, it would require that many different, unrelated sorts of measurements were wrong in the same ways for it to be 100,000 or 10 million light years away). This is almost unimaginably improbable.
When you start to talk about galactic superclusters and structures that are larger, still, then there's significant uncertainty. Is the most distant object that we can see at the "edge" of the Universe? Is there an edge at all, or does space form a continuous surface like the circumference of a circle? Are these objects 8 billion lightyears away or 15? More? Effects such as gravitational lensing and the unknown makeup of the vast cosmic distances involved make it impossible to be certain.
On the logic part, scientists are humans first. I knew a guy who was very smart and excel
Belief in what? Gravitation as per current general-relativity taught in universities to physics grad students, or the simple fact that objects seem to fall towards earth as observed by human beings?
If you are talking about general relativity, it's status as a theory is very highly regarded and has withstood many tests (hence it's promotion beyond other hypotheses) but it contains various serious problems and difficult situations that are unsolvable with the current understanding of it. In fact, the system of equations are self-referential in places i believe, and Kurt Godel showed Einstein some tricks with self-referential mathematical systems that provenly yield demonstrable contradictions, and Einstein therefore reconsidered and finally doubted his theory as a result. And a few years from now we may consider solutions that simultaneously solve the dark matter/energy issues as well, so yeah, it is "just" a theory.
With evolution we can similarly either talk about whether it happened (this is pretty much indisputable) or how/why - a much more difficult question. It is difficult because it involves probabilistic events that are extremely difficult to simulate exactly, so people will be arguing about the possibility of all the successful combination of germline mutations happening on this planet being utterly random, for a long time to come. I , like many, am interested in that argument, particularly if people develop discrete computational power that can actually simulate a fast-forwarded small earth on all scales (planetary to nano). But our interest is overshadowed by disgust at the behavior of participants in these conversations (not you, just the typical others).
Love the math, dump the fleshy feelings, mathematics is the only [possible] truth.