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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."'"
...scientists discovered the "puffy" nature was due to its interior being mostly made of a substance remarkably similar to "fluffy chocolate nougat". Mars, Incorporated could not be reached for comment.
This was reported in the Tampa Tribune as a small page-6 blurb under the headline "New Largest Planet Sports Squishy Surface", a conclusion drawn from a quote by a scientist saying the planet has no firm surface. I almost cried.
ResidntGeek
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.
As in our theory has a problem.
Isn't this just another in a long line of gas giants that are too young, and too close to the host stars for our theories of planetary formation?
I have a theory... it could be bunnies!
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.
> "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."
Dude! This guy should be an adviser to Congress. He can explain science to them.
(And I mean that!)
It's way too big to be a planet and since small planets are called dwarf planets, please welcome the first discovered troll planet.
I've got a theory, that it's a demon, A dancing demon... no, something isn't right there.
I've got a theory, we should work this out...
My Babylon
Uh no.
Go back to school. The hierarchy in science, in order of increasing evidence, is speculation, conjecture, hypothesis, theory.
The word "theory" in common parlance is an unsubstantiated guess. In science, the word "theory" means hypothesis supported by a large body of evidence, where the truth value of the theory is considered very high. Evolution is a theory that has so much evidence in its favor that the IDers are essentially nutcases who can't read or reason properly. It is the IDers that try to equivocate the position by using the common parlance flavor of the word "theory" when discussing science.
I've got a theory, it could be witches, some evil witches, which is ridiculous because Wicca good and love the earth and woman power and I'll be other there.
Ok, it isn't the mass that is surprising, it is the volume. Larger (in mass) exoplanets have been found, sometimes they fall in to the category of Brown Dwarfs. But TrES-4 is hardly massive. According to the article, the density is .2 g/mL and the volume is 1.7 times that of Jupiter. That gives a mass of
1.7*(1.43128*10^15 km^3) * .2 g/mL = 4.866352 * 10^26 kg.
Jupiters mass is 1.8986*10^27 kg. That means TrES-4's mass is only about one quarter the mass of Jupiter ((4.866352 * 10^26 kg)/ (1.8986*10^27 kg)= 0.256312651)
If it floats on water, then it must weigh less than a duck, which means...
A WITCH! It's a witch!
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
No self-respecting advanced technological civilization would bury significant amounts of useful matter at the center of a planet. They would instead construct objects filled with fiber optic cables to carry large amounts of data between all of the computational nodes. The compute nodes have to be on the surface because they have to radiate away the heat they generate but the central part of the Jupiter Brain (aka Borg sphere) should have a density low enough that gravitational compression doesn't distort the one-to-many point-to-point transmission over the fibers.
The difference between a Jupiter Brain and a Matrioshka Brain is that the center of a Jupiter Brain is not running off of a gravitationally bound and driven fusion reactor (aka "star"). Most of the energy used by the Jupiter Brain comes from the external solar energy it absorbs (though in theory it could house a number of "small" fusion reactors fueled by hydrogen or helium siphoned from the nearby star).
Side note to the Dyson "Sphere" advocates -- classical "spheres" are impossible (you've been watching too much Star Trek) -- Dyson never used the word "sphere" and made a point of clarifying this in his response to the letters following his original paper. A better term to avoid confusion is a "Dyson shell".
Are we sure NASA is reporting in inches and not centimeters?
Unfortunately, it hasn't been kept current
Are you fucking serious? Sure, Darwin's original ideas have been tested and built upon, but the idea of competition driving genetic variance still holds pretty fucking strongly.
See, the thing about evolution is, by most scientific standards of today, a good majority of the principles Darwin outlined in The Origin of Species are actually provable. I'm guessing you think they aren't just because the fundies and IDers are yelling loud enough.
On the more flamebait side, when one of those nutjobs are lecturing in the main mall of your local university, try asking them what they think about crystal lattices- complex, beautiful geometrical structures which will form naturally, and ask if there was an intelligent designer forming the covalent bonds in your ice tray this morning.
+5, Truth
Have you ever seen an electron?
After all, I am strangely colored.
Because their theories better fit the data. When they find a place where their theories and those of their predecessors don't work (this planet may be such a case), they work on formulating more general theories based on what they already know. And when they do this, they don't start from scratch each time, but build instead on previous discovery.
That's what science does. It progresses. It works. Would you rather we abandon the scientific method and just make up random stuff without testing it against reality? Even dark matter and dark energy aren't arbitrary: they're provisional descriptions of stuff we're actually seeing happen.
I'm getting really sick of this "oh, we can't really ever know anything because no theory is perfect, so let's just give up on this science thing" attitude.
DNA just wants to be free...
Astronomers have given the planet an official name, "Puff Daddy".
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Why are you assuming that all these scientists think they've got it all figured out. Right there in the article summary one of the quoted scientists says that they like when things don't fit their theories, because they'll learn more by figuring it out.
You're not being insightful, you're faking it by creating an issue that doesn't exist. Astrophysicists know as well as anybody how little they've actually figured out. All the new observational and simulation techniques that have been developed recently have raised way more questions than they've answered. I doubt you'd find a real scientist anywhere out there who'd say that we've figured out how the universe works.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
Dark energy is a mathematical placeholder name. There is an observed force which we can measure, but which we have no tested model to explain. We call this force dark energy.
When you say, "maybe dark energy," you demonstrate that you don't know what that phrase means. That's like saying, "maybe the solution to the problem is x!" X is just a variable name, not an answer to a question. Even maybe we have to revise theories in astrophysics because we were wrong on something... Which happens all the time as our ability to measure and test the universe around us expands. This is an expected consequence of having more information. Someday, we'll marvel at how little we knew "back then" (e.g. today). For now, we have some very good ideas of how the universe in our local vicinity works, but no one expects to not be surprised by something new. sigh, why do scientists think they are right now when their forbears were wrong? Why do you think that scientists are some alien species that don't understand basic logic? Of course astrophysics know that they have some things wrong today, but this is how we learn. We build solid ground upon which to base further ideas, and we constantly assail these ideas and their underpinnings in order to determine which parts are reliable enough to continue to bear the weight of many other theories. Speaking of Astrophysics, if we can look into the sky and only see x millions of years back based off of light years, That's kind of broken statement. Let's try again, shall we? We can measure distance (in ways that range from simple triangulation to measuring red-shift). We know that light travels a certain distance in a certain amount of time. We therefore know how long light from an object would have traveled in order to get to us.
Now that's not quite "seeing x millions of years back," but it's close enough that I understand (I think) where you're going. how do we know that we are not seeing the opposite side of the big bang curve? What is the "big bang curve?" Do you mean, "how do we know that we're not seeing light that started out at a time before the big bang?"
Well there are several easy reasons for that: 1) The big bang started as a singularity. You can't measure or view anything through a singularity. It's a cosmic wall through which no information can pass 2) If that were true, then the expansion of the universe would change as we looked out into deep space, and those distant objects would be moving toward us. This is not the case.
Of course, your question (at least, as I understand it) assumes that the big bang was "preceded" by a big crunch (the universe collapsing into a singularity). That may or may not be true, and we have no way to prove that it is or isn't, since we can't extract information about what happened before the singularity.
Here we are -> ( *Bang* )
More dumb observations later.
It's getting eerie... What's this cheery singing all about?
P.S. Quite sad that I have to use bold tags to keep the spelling nazis away
Pot. Kettle. Black.
Plus, the grammar Nazi insists that you must capitalize the "N".
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
I saw someone mention a perhaps it has a ring like Saturn and that is causing some false readings. I figure they have presumably run into this before and know how to discount that. I will go one step further and say perhaps the planet has a crazy amount of moons orbiting closely and/or other debris of various sizes swirling around it. This would increase its size mistakenly and decrease its density at the same time (as there would be significate amounts of space between planet and orbits (presumably).
:)
Anyway thats the extent of my Grade 10 Physics, so please don't be too harsh with me!
In any event, how "fluffy" a center are we talking here. What defines a "Planet" from a slight congealing of gas? I say if it isn't dense enough to crush the life out of me as I try and float through on a drunken spacewalk, then I don't think it is a real planet!
Also perhaps we are looking too hard at what it is, and not what is could be or might become. Perhaps look at processes that make up our celestial bodies. I am not sure how concrete our science is as to the creation of various kinds of planets, perhaps this is part of the short (in space/planet creation terms) phase of planet construction. The gathering of a bunch of lose material that is slowing coalescing due to gravity into a rough planetoid. If the phase if brief in galactic terms perhaps this is why we haven't seen it before. The coalescing material not having totally solidified nor compress due to significant gravity and space could account for the light density and great size. A sort of proto-planet if you will, a huge glom of material just swirling around falling in towards itself slowly, just hasn't reached the stage that is it really recognizable as a real planet yet.
Ok now I am really just wasting work time...
I've got a theory, some kid is dreaming, and we're all stuck inside his wacky Broadway nightmare.
Eh, just wondering, because that seems to be counterproductive to the point you're trying to make.
Cheers!
Atheist: Buddhist in a Prius
http://www.mhall119.com
I think he's confused Wicca for the broader category of neopaganism. It happens a lot, but Wicca is a specific religion. It's not a "roll your own" sort of religion.
"That which does not kill us makes us stranger." -Trevor Goodchild
It's besides the point, but I don't think we do. Systems thought to be non-functional in the past, such as the appendix, have long since been found to be otherwise.
No, it's the theory neodarwinism that believes that every feature must have an immediate purpose (though not necessarily the same purpose as past or future generations) or it otherwise cannot evolve, as otherwise there's no natural selective pressure on that feature. The point of Irreducible Complexity is to attempt to prove that there are systems which could not have had a function at an evolutionary step before some critical point, and therefore the existence of those systems are incompatible with the neodarwinian theory. While it is an exceedingly difficult thing to prove, it is at least strongly suggestive, and in my mind puts the burden of proof on the neodarwinists to offer evidence that such systems in fact evolve "blindly" rather than with some "end in view," so to speak.
I have a degree in Homeopathic medicine!
You have a degree in baloney!
While the title is "Scientists Puzzled" and emphasizes the lack of knowledge.
Why is it that the obsession is with confusion rather than learning. At a time when many people are turning to stupidities like Intelligent Design because it claims to have "answers" perhaps some of the blame can be put on horrible reporting which seems unable to distinguish between finding new info and being "confused" "lost" or "puzzled".
Maybe God just likes puffies, you know?
We all have our fetishes. I know I do.
Could be that they were nonfunctional in the past. Could be that they are slowly gaining functionality, and are right now the equivalent of eyespots that can sense light and dark, but will eventually evolve into real eyes that can make out a far greater level of detail.
An appendix is not critical, like a heart or brain is. It's not even serious, like eyes. It's on the same level as tonsils. Things that do something, but not so much that they'll be immediately missed when removed.
Also, why should something ever be completely nonfunctional? I have skin. Skin is important stuff. Among all of its important uses, it also has mostly useless photoreceptors. So far, the only use I've heard of for them is trying to beat jet lag by putting bright lights behind the knees. We don't really need them right now, but if blindness becomes a selected trait for whatever reason (Cthulhu waking up and walking around the world would do it, but probably nothing else) those with nonfunctional eyes would start breeding more that those without. Genetic blindness would spread throughout the (drastically depleted) population. And the photosensors would get better, first discerning light and dark, then all the levels of illumination between light and dark, then colors, and so on until we had they best visual senses we could that didn't have issues with the madness-inspiring form of a Great Old One.
That's not what skin does now. But if skin does that in the future, the future people will say the same things people say now about evolution and useless organs, without consideration of what was there first.
I see your informative link, and raise you a pithy comment.
It seems the simplest explanation is one of the estimates or both have a large error. Measuring the mass and volume of things like this isn't easy, especially when it is so far away. I wouldn't be surprised if one of them is off by 50%. For example, they measure the mass by the effect of its gravity. This could be perturbed by another object(s) in the vicinity yet undiscovered. That seems more probably than a planet made of a compression resistant spongy material IMHO.
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
Could it be a planet that was impacted by another large body? That would account for a diffuse mass as the matter settled back into a coherent form. I really don't know how long it would take to reform but it's possible.
It beats the hell out of some of the other stuff I've been reading here...
This sig contains a manual self-destruct. Kindly please put your foot through your monitor in 8 seconds.
It's not obese, it's just big boned!
Flappinbooger isn't my real name
Well, science doesn't deal in proof, it deals in evidence
Well, it depends on who we're talking about. As I said, "creationists" generally use a somewhat less subtle approach, more easily identifiable as logically fallacious equivocation. One minute they'll tell you "it's just a theory," and the next, invoke the second "LAW" of thermodynamics to refute evolution -- for some reason, they almost never see fit to remind us that the entire scientific model of thermodynamics (or any other well-subscribed, religiously inoffensive science) is also "just a theory."
Intelligent Design is all about casting doubt on evolution and people who understand ID usually don't make the "just a theory" equivocation argument, but as I said, many attempt to create an impression that ID is scientific -- a genuine theory of science, just like evolution (only better, more correct!) The problem is that ID, scientifically speaking, hasn't earned the right to be called a theory, the same way the theory of evolution has. It'd be more accurate to say it's a conjecture. Those aspects of ID that haven't been effectively refuted by evidence or rational examination are sometimes impossible to produce evidence against, because of how they've defined their belief in such a way that it cannot be falsified, which is another reason (besides the dearth of supporting evidence) that it's not a valid scientific theory. ID lacks predictive power, a requisite quality for any good scientific theory. It's pretty clear now that ID hasn't been arrived at or verified through honest application of the scientific method.
Intelligent Design could be correct. Heck, even young Earth creationism could be correct
That's funny, because in this day and age, I'm more worried about a populace that treats divine dictates handed down from a priesthood as having more weight and credibility than well-tested scientific theories.
The real danger lies with a scientifically illiterate public, who are unable to distinguish junk science and pseudo-science from the real thing -- or those who behave as if some kind of superstition is just as good, right and reliable as science (if it's not in fact what they consciously believe).
What about the ones who do present valid arguments for intelligent design?
The fictional ones, you mean?
"All that is necessary for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke
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.
I actually attended seminary and graduated. I spent a decade of my life studying philosophy and theology. I had many talented professors with degrees from Oxford, Princeton, name it. Not one ever advocated a literal six day age for the earth or creation. All were extremely careful to give ALL possible explanations including fully embracing evolution. They were also careful to say that hard science is not theology. Theology is an endeavor to understand, as best as possible, God or the concept of God. You do not even have to believe in God to study theology (some of my teachers were atheists). Theology is a relational study. It is a liberal art. Some people decide to apply the bible as hard science, but I've never known an educated theologian who did this.
Understanding an argument means understanding the other side, and I really think you don't.
To quote Lewis, "I was an atheist and as a former atheist I must say that you are not one. You are a god-hater, and a god-hater is not necessarily an atheist." (paraphrased)
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill