Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
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.
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?
Randomly snagged that book off the shelf at the library last week and read it. Great book, but then for a week or so, my dreams were twinged with doomsday scenario planning... Good times though.
Gravity Sucks
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
Maybe we're just looking in a universe based funhouse mirror.....we are really seeing ourselves from some other time (future or past).
Layne
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.
how do we know we not the scaled experiment?
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one