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 cuts!?!?

[Nerdposeur]

When I first saw this headline, I gasped. They already eliminated Pluto - what ELSE could they disqualify!?

Re:MORE cuts!?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

When I first saw this headline, I gasped. They already eliminated Pluto - what ELSE could they disqualify!? Well it turns out that Neptune was just a smudge on the lens, Mercury was just a big piece of garbage and Jupiter was just Rosie O'Donnell's long-lost sister.

More news

[Skiron]

"The lead researcher said he's optimistic that 'continued observations will reveal a rocky planet within five years.'" Sylvester Stallone commented on this breaking news; "Eh?"

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!

[MMatessa]

The java program to analyze wobble data is called Systemic and can be found at http://www.oklo.org/.

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:What Record?

[evwah]

assuming systems with more than said number of planets are common, or even exist (other than ours). scientists take nothing for granted. well they aren't supposed to anyway. that makes this newsworthy.

Think positively

[imsabbel]

At least after we send our greeting, it will take 2 or 3 generations for the extermination fleet to arrive....

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.

Re:SETI, and contact them?

[gad_zuki!]

Inherent self-preservation instinct of any successful race will dictate that no one will begin transmitting like crazy to suspect systems. Its too much of a risk. Only idealists with a lot of faith in both humanity and alienity would be willing to take such a risk. The problem here is idealists are usually poor and can't afford to the equipment and energy to do what you propose. Not to mention, I imagine that the people who would even attempt such a thing are pretty credulous to begin with and would just conclude that aliens are here already and point to fuzzy videotapes and tall-tales of area 51 as proof.

Re:SETI, and contact them?

[jamstar7]

Upside, they're now watching the original Star Trek in its first run.

Downside, they're judging us all by William Shatner.

Re:What Record?

[meringuoid]

That shouldn't be too hard considering we're probably missing over half of the extrasolar planets with our current detection threshold.

To a very, very close approximation, we're missing all the extrasolar planets. We've yet to discover a single one outside our own Galaxy :-)

Re:How far has our reach extended?

[ChrisA90278]

Let's set, radio travels at the speed of light. In one year light travels (get's out calculator.) one light year. If there are any people there listening to Earth they are hearing what we heard in 1956.

When did we first build powerful transmitters? Comercial radio started in the 1920's so almost 90 years ago. Higher frequency VHF got beg after the war in the lat 40's when TV got popular.

Could they hear it? Only if they have invested in VERY sensitive receivers MUCH more sensitive then anything we have. Our current receivers could only hear a signal if it were from a very powerful beacon aimed right at us.

We do not currently have a system then could detect our own signals if they were coming from another star.