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Astronomers Announce 5-Planet System

Posted by kdawson on from the looking-for-something-rockier dept.

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.'"

4 of 145 comments (clear)

  1. more planets to come! by wizardforce · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
    --
    Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
    1. Re:more planets to come! by cperciva · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

      --
      Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
  2. Curb your enthusiasm by QuantumG · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    --
    How we know is more important than what we know.
  3. SETI, and contact them? by newgalactic · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.