Astronomers Announce 5-Planet System

An anonymous reader writes "Astronomers have detected a record-breaking 5th planet orbiting the star 55 Cancri, 41 light years distant. This planet orbits within the 'habitable zone,' where water could presumably exist, but it's probably another gas giant like Saturn, so any liquid water would have to be on a moon. There's still a big gap between this planet and the outermost planet where no planets have been detected yet, so there could yet be a rocky planet in the system. The lead researcher said he's optimistic that 'continued observations will reveal a rocky planet within five years.'"

Comments

more planets to come!

[wizardforce]

55 Cancri has produced "a rat's nest of radial velocity data," Fischer said. "We probably still don't have all the planets. We are pulling out one thread at a time, disentangling all these orbits, and it has taken a lot more data and time than we predicted.

by the sounds of it, the wobble on this thing is just a mess- probably a lot like what our solar system's wobble looks like from the outside.

Re:more planets to come!

[cperciva]

The gas giants are more massive, but also much further away. Saturn is 95x more massive than the Earth, but it's 9.5x further away from the Sun, so its tug on the Sun (mass/distance^2) is only marginally more than the Earth's -- and is less than that of Venus, which is 0.8 Earth masses but only 0.72 AU away from the Sun.

An astronomer from 55 Cancri would probably detect Jupiter (mass/distance^2 = 11.7 Earths/AU^2), Venus (1.56 Earths/AU^2), Saturn (1.04), Earth (1.00), and possibly Mercury (0.367), while Mars (0.046), Uranus (0.039), and Neptune (0.019) would almost certainly go unnoticed.

Re:more planets to come!

[MtViewGuy]

I think we will find a lot rocky-crust planets orbiting other stars by 2025 thanks to the Terrestrial Planet Finder space telescope array that will probably be fully operational after 2016. They should concentrate on every star like our Sun within 100 light years of our Solar System in its search.

Curb your enthusiasm

[QuantumG]

Imagine astronomers found a whole lot of earth like planets.
Imagine they even found one that seemed to have artificial satellites.
After years of observing and improving our telescopes, imagine we managed to image the planet itself and saw a civilization much like our own.
Glorious times we live in huh?

Imagine after much observation we found lots of these civilized neighbors out there in the black.
Imagine we tried to send them signals and waited the many years for a reply.
What if none came?
After hundreds of years of knowing we were not alone we came to the inescapable realization that just communicating with other intelligent beings in our galaxy is so hard and takes so long that it may never be achieved.

Wormholes and warp drives and ark ships.. what if it is all an unattainable dream?

Thankfully, I like to dream.

Re:Curb your enthusiasm

[4D6963]

Here's exactly the kind of comment I hate whenever we're talking about something dealing more or less with extraterrestrial life, it's how we go from very down-to-Earth claims such as "here's what we know about exoplanets" to "here's what we might find out a few years from now" to "teh extraterrians they wont care about us cause were so inferior omg!". I know extraterrestrial life is an exciting topic, but because they're so little to satisfy ourselves with people are so quick to wildly speculate that they forget that the next important and exciting steps are to find a planet where conditions for life as we know it is there and then to detect biological activity on a planet, and at this stage we're most likely talking about bacterial forms of life and such.

But you people don't care, you'd rather push your imagination to its limits to the point you'd find it disappointing if we found an alien civilisation but that they wouldn't communicate with us in a satisfactory manner. It's like people only care about what would the alien Britney Spears be like, what would aliens think about us, or what their technology must be like, that kind of stuff.

SETI, and contact them?

[newgalactic]

I already assume SETI takes finds like these into account when listening. However, is there a program around who's not intent to just listen? What if we developed a database of systems most likely to contain life, and we started a program to send the top candidates high powered radio signals. Far fetched, but maybe it'll produce some results in 100 years.

How far has our reach extended?

[newgalactic]

Does anyone know how far our strongest radio signals have gone in the galaxy? I'm thinking of the movie Contact, where they stated that the opening of the 1936 Olympics in Berlin produced the first signal with a strength capable of being detected at greater distances. Is this true? And if it is, how far has that signal gone so far?

Re:MORE cuts!?!?

[Cecil]

I've read that article, it's good, but it is still "life not quite as we know it" rather than "life nothing like what we know". As a counterexample, what about an AI? An AI has basically no requirements as far as chemistry are concerned. While it's laughably implausible to imagine an electronic AI "evolving" out of nothingness the way biological organisms did it's still -- by my definition -- "life" and there's no reason we couldn't find it "living" on any planet on our solar system or indeed any we've discovered so far. I find it hard to believe that these are the only two types of life that are physically possible, so I imagine that there may yet be some interesting things to discover out there.

Re:MORE cuts!?!?

[qmaqdk]

"...is in orbit around the Sun..."? Then technically, what they found is not a planet.