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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?
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.
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
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.
Amateur astronomers contribute a great deal to the field. It's not necessary to have access to expensive research equipment to make useful observations of interest to the scientific community. Many comets have been discovered by amateurs, for example.
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.
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.
Because her brother Rodney needed help with the maths.
What if Tetris was invented by Nazis?
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.
Of course it is "like ours".
Astronomers are struggling with models of solar system formation which could explain the formation of our solar system. AFIK all extrasolar systems to date are so extreme that the models don't even start to work. This is the first system where the planetary distribution is comparable to ours. Remember the rocky dwarfs in our solar system represent an infinitesimal component of the mass. Don't attach too much significance to the rocks just because we happen to live on one.
The science is understanding the formation of planetary systems in which this one is very much like ours.
The science (fantasy/fiction) is discovering earth like planets themselves. I would also bet that when we get to finding earth like planets the gas giant distribution should be sol like.
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?
Yes it is, but it only costs about $27 million.
Being a graduate student at one of the universities involved, i did some modeling on this event (although we weren't quite up with the game, so our findings weren't used in the report).
The term 'lensing' is a bit of a misnomer, as that implies that you're looking at the source star; which is essentially a giant flashlight that allows us to probe the lens for information about it's planets.
The lens star acts to bend the light from the source, creating multiple and distorted images of it (which are too close together to resolve). Observing the sky from earth, these multiple images have the effect of increasing the net flux measured (in laymans terms, the star gets brighter).
When the lens star has planets (especially, as in this case, one close to what as known as the 'einstein ring') it causes large perturbations to the (otherwise fairly simple) lightcurve. With appropriate mathematical models and massive amounts of computing power, the parameters that give the best fitting theoretical lightcurve can be found.
Combining this with external information and a good dose of physical and statistical insight, it is possible to say to a reasonable degree of confidence (usually never 100%) that you have found such and such a system.
In reality, the astronomers who measure the data are only a very small part of the overall picture, but the media find a much better story in "amateur astronomer finds extrasolar planets" than "scientists use computer grid to minimize 10 dimensional chi^2 hypersurface" so they get all the attention.
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.
The closer star is the one with the planets. The one 21000 years provided the light however, the closer one acted like the lens. You can read this article for more information. Basically, the perfect alignment of the two stars produces a magnification of the furthermost stars light. If the intensity of the outer star is plot against time, the graph will show a hump when the stars aligned. If there is a planet around the "lens" star that is pretty far away, the planet will cause a deviation in the light intensity curve when it aligns with the stars. Thus, the planet acted as another lens in the system further magnifying the light from the furthermost star.
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
I for one look forward to reading his rebuttal in the the journal of science.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
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.