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Scientists Find Solar System Like Ours
mlimber writes "The NYTimes has up a story about the discovery of a solar system that is analogous to ours. Of the 250 or so exoplanets found thus far, 'few of them are in systems that even faintly resemble our own. In many cases, giant Jupiter-like planets are whizzing around inside the orbit of Mercury,' whereas in this new system, 'a planet about two-thirds of the mass of Jupiter and another about 90 percent of the mass of Saturn are orbiting a reddish star about half the mass of the Sun, at about half the distances that Jupiter and Saturn circle our own Sun.' The researchers used gravitational microlensing to detect the planets, and two of the lead authors of the paper to be published in Science are amateur astronomers, one of whom describes herself as 'an ordinary New Zealand mother.'"
A world populated by 3 foot tall humans! How cute!
I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask where they're goin' and hook up with 'em later.
Will children of aliens born in this system react when they leave the red sun of OGLE-2006-BLG-109L, and grow up with the Yellow sun of Earth?
(/me gets a whisper in the ear...)
Umm, err, ahh, I gotta go now.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Because it's relative in scale to us, the star is half the size of our sun. The large gas giants are about half as far away from the star, as ours are to our star, etc., etc..
I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask where they're goin' and hook up with 'em later.
it's a reflection in the lense
How does an ordinary mother from New Zealand get her hands on a microwavey optical device thingy?
The same applies here. We're seeing a sun that's roughly half the size of our Sun with at least two planets roughly the size of some our gas giants that are orbiting it at half the distance. Since previously we've only seen stuff that would be impossible in our solar system, this is the closest we've come to it.
Now, no one is saying it's identical. The two large planets could be the only things in the system, or there could be some small rocky worlds closer in that we can't see yet. The fact that two planets that we can detect are similar in scale to two of ours could infer that there are other planets similar in scale to our own in orbits similar to our own.
There could be a Mars-size planet in orbit more like that of Venus, but because the sun is smaller and cooler it might actually be temperate like Earth. Out of what we've seen so far, this is the best hope for finding Earth-like life, or a possible colonization opportunity for humans.
"Life's short and hard, like a body building elf." -- The Bloodhound Gang
Seems to me it is the star that is 21,000 light years away that would have the planets, not the one that is 5000 light years away. The lensing effect is provided by the intermediate star. Unless I'm mistaken they need a new (or any) science editor at The Times.
It's actually very similar to ours, except the planets are all out of order and all the people there have, for some unknown reason, goatees.
I know its a stretch, but to call an identified solar system 'like ours', implies WAY to many things. The least of which an 'earth-like' planet.
Unless you have identified a planet in this Star's habitable zone, one whose Gravity is such that Molecular forces don't become moot, THIS is just another planetary system.
Move along people. Nothing to see here, but add another planetary system to the list of those identified.
I Am Not An Astronomer, but I'm not sure direct, linear comparisons are valid in the context of energy/radiation propagation in a 3d space. Could anyone enlighten me here?
Yeah, that IS like ours then ...sorry! I forgot about scale etc etc /sarcasm
It's like five 5 larger and 5 times colder than Earth. Somebody is desparate to claim "like ours". They must be lonely and have a fetish for 3-breasted green space-babes, or something.
Table-ized A.I.
They have also found evidence of people half our size and half our intelligence. Scientists have named them the "Bush's".
A PC and a watch aren't very similar, but a PC and a laptop are, even if they're different scales. One could also assume, from knowing that they're somewhat similar, that the laptop might contain some of the same components such as an HDD, RAM and a modem/ethernet/wifi device.
The same applies here.
My god... it's full of laptops ?!I moderate "-1, Fool"
We've all known that mothers can see things no else has managed to prove.
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
They welcome their new terrestrial overlords.
For the perfect anti-Unix, write an OS that thinks it knows what you're doing better than you do and let it be wrong.
Our solar system's version of Mini-Me.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
We're here and alive because Jupiter is big enough and close enough to suck up most comets and asteroids that might wipe us out, but small enough and far enough out that it doesn't suck us up. Most of the extrasolar planetary systems we've seen to date fail the second qualification.
...and possibly the odd goatse....no, wait, somebody already did that!
This space is intentionally left blank
Perhaps even more important than the system they found is how they found it: through gravitational microlensing. The technique is quite general and powerful.
two of the lead authors of the paper to be published in Science are amateur astronomers
Thank goodness for areas of science where "amateurs" can still make significant contributions. The other ones that springs to mind are biology and Comp. Sci. Physics, chemistry etc are out of the league of most people (myself included) where the best we can do is learn what others have already done. To be published in Science is a wonderful achievement. Kudos to them.
If there is a solar system like ours, then it might mean there is a planet in it that supports a sentient life form. These life forms may have formed societies, and with that oppositional groups. And there are oppositional groups, there may be an imbalance of power present. To take it further, one side may resort to guerrilla warfare as a way of evening up the sides. And if they resort to guerrilla warfare, then they are clearly nothing but a bunch of damn jihadists.
When does the invasion start?
Insolation (sunshine intensity) decreases with the square of the distance to the star. However, the relationship between star volume/mass and its radiation are more complicated than that, and TFA doesn't go into details.
Funny, that's what Jovian scientists say about Terra. Well, except for the giant planet part.
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
then again, some models predict that it had little effect on the number of asteroid/comet impacts. The reason we see a lot of systems with large, close orbiting jovian [gas giants] worlds is because they are much easier to spot- that may change in a few years with better techniques/telescopes.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
There is only one Solar System
:)
For those who care, the "SOLar System" is named because of the system of stars around... (wait for it) Sol (the name of our Sun).
To find another Solar System would indicate that they've found that our Sun occipies two points in space and time and has another seperate group of stars associated with it.
What they've found is another "Star System" like ours.
I'm not posting to be petty, just for those that are interested.
As the distant star passes across the background, the way it is lensed reveals the structure of the nearby system.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
There's only one feature of our Solar System that's remotely interesting: Earth. Sure, the other planets are pretty, and may hold promise as sources for raw materials and-- much later-- targets for terraforming. But what makes our solar system "like ours" is Earth, period. The rest of the planets seem completely mundane.
When I read the headline, I was somewhat shocked-- "So they finally were able to resolve an exoplanet that was small, warm, rocky and bore the signature of water?" But no, it's Yet Another Exoplanet System With Big Gas Giants.
Yawn.
While this sort of thing may be of interest to the scientists and obsessive space fans who collect lists of exoplanets, as for me, wake me when they find an exo-Earth. I'm getting bored stiff of exo-Jupiters and exo-Saturns...
Or, in other words: GAS GIANTS ARE BORING.
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
Finding another solar system with Jupiter-like planets in circular orbits at decent distances from the parent star is big news. There has been speculation (and I would imagine it will continue) that our solar system with its roughly circular orbiting planets was rather anomalous, especially with most of the extrasolar planets discovered having mostly whacked out orbits (of course the method of detection favors this type of discovery to some extent). Highly elliptical orbits would lead to horrible seasonal variations, as well as potentially unstable orbits for multiple planets. Jupiter helps protect Earth and the inner planets from comets and asteroids. I would imagine that the likelihood that life exists in the universe has just gone up (specifically, n_e in the Drake equation).
It excites me greatly to know that before I die, rocky inner planets similar to ours will most likely be discovered!
A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous, got me?
the discovery of a solar system that is analogous to ours
So there's ANOTHER star out there named Sol?
I wonder if the $54 million laptop is in there...
I always find it interesting how many astronomical discoveries are based on years-old observations. It's incredible that we're collecting so much data that it takes this long to process it all, ask the right questions, make the right connections, double-check, cross-check, and confirm.
Actually, you're wrong. It's the same as Earth, except people wear hats on their feet and hamburgers eat people
Yes it is, but it only costs about $27 million.
Actually, the mass/luminosity relationship is (roughly) L~M^3.5. They never mention the exact size of the star, but if we assume it's half as massive as the sun it's luminosity is right around 9% of solar (I'm rounding a bit). Take into account you've got a factor of 4 increase in insolation by moving it to half the distance and you can see the inner planet gets something like 36% of the insolation of Jupiter. Granted, I completely made up the mass of the star, but it gives you an idea of what's going on.
And for the record I was an astronomer.
I seem to remember that most all the great electronic inventions of the last century were made by amateurs. You can argue that electronics is a subset of physics, but lets keep semantics out of this.
And it continues. Amateur radio operators continue to innovate and their work many times gets picked up by universities and corporations.
Current techniques & data are only able to detect exo-Jupiters and exo-Saturns. If an exo-Earth is out there, we don't have the ability to see it yet. We do know there probably isn't room for one in a system where the exo-Jupiter is right next to the star -- which is the kind of system we've been able to detect so far.
The system in question is unusual in that its structure matches ours: the gas giants are far enough out that there's actually room for a set of rocky inner planets. When we develop the ability to spot them, this will be on the list of places to look.
Computer programming is also very amateur friendly. Corporations that throw money into development only end up making similar copies of what already exists. The true innovation has always come from startups and no-names.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
So....then....in Soviet OGLE-2006-BLG-109L, hamburgers eat you?
[b.belong('us') for b in bases if b.owner() == 'you']
Oh yeah, that bell labs didn't create anything, same with Xerox, and don't get me started on IBM. Bunch of no nothing corporation that never spend a penny on RnD.
Idiot.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
From said article: Emphasis added.
In other words, the "lensing effect" of the nearer star doesn't behave, as you clearly imagine, like a cosmic telescope lens to make the distant star system more clearly visible to viewers on earth. Rather, its presence (and the presence of its attendant planets) is betrayed by the distortions they gravity introduces in the transmitted light as they pass between us and the more distant star.
SIERRA TANGO FOXTROT UNIFORM
Gravitational microlensing is bunk.
I studied at Auckland university physics dept and the HOD said that all that G.M'ers found where errors in the data that they ASSUMED were planets. The amount of microlensing attributable to a planet is indistinguishable from noise in the data...most of the blips we saw in the data were smaller than the error bars.
Debian FTW
Oh yeah, that bell labs didn't create anything, same with Xerox, and don't get me started on IBM. Bunch of no nothing corporation that never spend a penny on RnD.
That was when only Bell Labs, IBM and Xerox had computers. You know, pre -1980's?
As for idiot - fuck yourself.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I see this ASCII Art Goatse as a good thing. Its easy to spot and it means the moron can't post another stupid comment for 25 minutes.
And computers are sideways-endian.
Assume I was drunk when I posted this.
Maybe we're just looking in a universe based funhouse mirror.....we are really seeing ourselves from some other time (future or past).
Layne
I can't wait until astronomers find a planet with other planets and its star orbiting around it.
In that new solar system is another race of human beings who formed their own Imperium.
Earth aka Terra is in the Solomani Sphere, when we discovered the Imperium we attacked them and they counter attacked and then took over Terra and the Sol system and drove us further south on that map.
Anyone know about Traveller?
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Alan Parsons' Project World...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Alan Parsons is Dr. Evil?
A lot of things are suddenly starting to make sense...
Very interesting. With most people in this world carrying around more compute power in their laptop than existed in the world in 1975, and with free compilers and programming environments ubiquitous, there is really nothing stopping ordinary Mothers from New Zealand or anywhere else from becoming high-powered research scientists. Let's make that happen!
..
Kind of reminds me of those guys in the Netherlands who decided to produce and render a Star-Trek like feature film with a couple of home computers in their kitchen. AND THEY SUCCEEDED! They took most of the film of their captain kirk barking his orders from a kitchen chair, and composited in everything else they needed to make the film look real
It also suggests an intriguing line of research. Wikipedia has harnessed the power of mass thought for developing encyclopedias, dictionaries, etc. Fight-Aids-At-Home has harnessed home computing meshes for drug discovery. Can we "open up" the fields of scientific research again with a few publicly available pieces of infrastructure that any normal citizen could leverage? For example, perhaps a class library for gas nebula simulations, or other mind-amplifying tools to support intellectual pursuits in a wide range of fields?
How about a Researchtool-o-pedia project?
Is there a first time 50% discount because of which it is 27 million?
This is our future and just a mirror of it.
Astronomy is also a subset of physics.
So let me get this straight. You were once near a research program, but not actually a part of it, and the head of a department, but apparently not the head of the department doing the research, dismissed it out of hand, before the research was published, implying to you the data was noisy? Your ass just fell off. Let me hand it to you, so you can re-attach it.
Perhaps it didn't occur to you that in some cases you can pull signal out of noisy data by looking for regular repeating patterns? Or with maybe some other techniques you hadn't thought of? Maybe some technique described in the research paper, or its references?
Here's the thing. Getting signal from noise is hard, but often possible. As a species, we get better at it as time goes on. If signal could never be pulled from noise, radio, television, cell phones, and the internet wouldn't work. Heck, even without any fancy schmancy scientific instruments, we're pretty darn good at it. A big chuck of most brains (including yours) is devoted to the task. In fact, you couldn't use spoken words to communicate with somebody else in a bar where everybody else was talking, too. Seismographs couldn't detect earthquakes from the other side of the planet, because there are too many people having raucaus sex and too much truck traffic at any given time.
Take this signal, for examle, the pattern of posts dismissing something with a wave of the interjection "meh" when they clearly have no concept, amidst the general noise of Slashdot posts. If I see it once, I think it's just a random person, spouting off, maybe pre-caffeinated, maybe late at night, maybe not thinking it through, whatever it is. When I see "meh" many times, and every time it's from somebody who is seriously and totally lacking clue, then I wonder. Is this "meh" some sort of signal for someone who doesn't realize the limits of their own knowledge? Is there something about the "meh" meme which causes it to preferentially survive in a cesspool of incompletely formed thought, and die out amidst the frenzy of competition in a curious mind? Is "meh" a signal which indicates intellectual laziness? Perhaps it's related to the phenomenon of the unskilled being unable to correctly assess their skill? (This applies to all of us, in domains of our in-expertise. I'm not insulting you, merely pointing out that we all need to become more aware of the areas of our in-expertise, in order to avoid looking like idiots.)
Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments
(Also available in this HTML version if you prefer.)
Overconfidence
Your geek card is hereby suspended for the weekend, which you should devote to reading about signal processing and astronomy. You are also prohibited from using "meh" for one year.
The Fundamentals of Signal Analysis
Extrasolar Planets
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
At 5000 ly, I'd say "don't hold your breath for the latter".
I would bet my money that we're able to do useful planet-scale terraforming long, long before we can send anything, let alone a colony ship, to a star system 5000 ly away.
You really wonder about that? John Fanning Founding Chairman and CEO Napster Inc.
Oh great, a solar system like ours!? Considering we here on earth can't seem to keep our weapons pointed away from each other, what makes you think they're any different? They are bound to have weapons of mass destruction! Sounds like a storybook beginning to the first Intersolar War.
"The irony when tending a flock of sheep is the dogs you put in place to protect them are genetically mutated wolves"
Trying to market and sell their commercial products through promotion and contests.
Despicable. I don't know how they can sleep at night.
phew! I read first they all have "goatsees"... damn slashdot!
There is ONLY one Solar System in this Galaxy. Solar System means a star system with Sol as it star. Please, science writes learn basic science. Tim S
I've got no mod points, but if I did, you'd get them.
Freakin' win.
I would think the chances of inner rocky planets are low. It's not simply a matter of moving everything inwards as the size of the star decreases. There has to be enough material in the inner region to form planets out of. Resonances with the gas giant may have ejected much of the material out of this feeding zone, disrupting planet formation in the same way that Jupiter may have prevented planet formation in what is now the Asteroid Belt. There may be a similar asteroid belt in this new system. It's possible there could be a planet interior to that. Actually if the inner giant orbits at half Jupiter's distance, then the 4:1 resonance (inner edge of our Asteroid Belt) is at about 1 AU. So you might be able to fit a couple planets in there. However, any planet in the habitable zone of this star would be so close that it would probably get locked into synchronous rotation, causing additional problems.
There is a living example (or many depending on how you count it) of your suggestion. The National Center for Biological Information (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov) is paid for with a tiny fraction of the NIH budget and it provides bioinformatics tools, data and instruction without limitation to anyone with a web browser. Want to learn how the human genome projects were actually pulled off? (They made it up as they went along.) Want to test a theory about molecular evolution using the sequences of over 1,000 bacteria? Want to get a good guess of the function of a protein using only sequence data or predict the result of a genetic engineering experiment? Go ahead, it's already been paid for and the site contains more well-written information than you'll ever be able to read. It gives anonymous access to massive parallel computing resources (mostly encapsulated in the form of task-specific tools) and gives access to a huge amount of peer-reviewed literature free of charge. So, the parent makes a good suggestion. IF you want to see what such a tool set might look like, check it out.
Her brother Meredith needed help with the math.
There fixed it for you.
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
Does the composition of the star play a big role in its luminosity? Admittedly, I didn't know about the M^3.5 relationship, but my uncertainty about the effect of composition on luminosity was why I was being so vague. IANAA, and all that ;)
As you said though, it's also possible that there's nothing because the gas giants disrupted planetary formation. Even if that's what eventually find though, we at least have more data that shows another solar system like ours is a bit more possible. Afterall, the gas giants here are roughly the size of ours, so if you just increase the size of the star and the orbital distances then you'll still have a nearly scale model of Sol.
"Life's short and hard, like a body building elf." -- The Bloodhound Gang
.....All these laptops are yours except Europa, attempt no formatting there. Use them together, use them in pieces. ....suppose they'll run Linux? :P
Composition plays some role, but it does more to affect the apparent color than the luminosity. Like I said, that relationship is just a rule of thumb and it's really only linear for a certain range of masses. That relationship comes from assuming a basic composition that is true for most stars (mass dominated by H/He) and calculating what it takes to keep a star in hydrostatic equilibrium. Extremely small and extremely large stars start to deviate from that rule due to other effects becoming important. You'd never use that for an important calculation, but to get an idea of what you're looking at it's a good starting point.
Tell that to my wife, Last week she bought stemless glasses, a decanter, and a bunson burner that she thought "looked neat." I know she is making meth or rocketfuel somewhere but I can't prove it.
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
"It's actually very similar to ours, except the planets are all out of order and all the people there have, for some unknown reason, goatees."
At this point I'd point out they're malevolent via some sort of "goatee considered harmful" joke.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
Very interesting. Thanks much for the response. :)
I was going to write that, but I realised I didn't know how to spell Meredith.
What if Tetris was invented by Nazis?