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Study Concludes "Planet" Was Just Stellar Spots
Kligat writes "Back in January, it was reported that the youngest planet ever to be discovered, about ten times the mass of Jupiter, was orbiting the eight- to ten-million-year-old star TW Hydrae. Now a Spanish research team has concluded that TW Hydrae b doesn't exist, and that cold spots on the star's surface actually produced the dip in brightness instead of a transiting planet. Not as cool as if a planet had actually been there, but refutations are science, too, right?"
And I had just bought real estate there too! Think they'll give me my money back if I ask nicely?
Talk about a not-so-real estate bubble.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
This is all part of the process of science.
People are trying to figure out the unknown, and don't always get it right the first time.
The popular press may spin it differently for the layman, but this is how science works.
Then it's not science.... ?
No sig today...
Interesting that they should investigate this, I wonder whether this could implicate other planets discovered or if this was clearly questionable from the beginning.
I record my sleeptalking
but could this mean that OUR planet is just a stellar spot?
There goes my vision of meeting a 3-breasted green space-babe who likes D&D. As Elton J. would say, it's just the clouds in my eyes.
Table-ized A.I.
... the tour bus was not scheduled to start for some years, so I guess I am not too terribly upset.
Frankly, I think the CS'ers (Cold Spotters) are just trying to debunk established scientific facts with fantastic claims that are based in conjecture. All of us Transitional Planetists need to make sure these clowns don't teach this shit in our schools!
This is where I sit back and watch the establishment piss themselves to mod me down first.
I doubt it, because most other measurements were based upon the apparent wobbling of the parent star, not direct observation. This one, AFAIK, was tied to an attempt to "see" the planet transition across the parent star. Actually, I was of the frame of mind to think this is almost as exciting (if not more so) than a planetary discovery. If we can detect "cold spots" on an alien star, there's all sorts of fascinating implications.
From the article:
Impressive! There's a lot we may be able to learn about our own sun by monitoring the daily happenings of other stars. Things like the frequency of solar maximums, sunspots, and so forth on other stars comparing them with our own would be one such course of study.
He who has no
That's -LIFE-. People take their best shot at mastering the unknown, namely, the future, and if they get it right, they are heros, and if they get it wrong, they are goats. Baseball players, bankers, drillers, salesman, farmers, all either have to guess the future correctly, or, they pay the price... hell, we all have to, or we pay the price. Why should scientists be treated any differently?
This is my sig.
The exo-planet scientists are bumbling their way into obscurity. The public does not understand science. They don't understand small discoveries. They don't understand "backwards" discoveries like this one. Currently there is some interest in inferring that planets may exist around other stars, but it is quickly becoming a passing interest and the media attention is quickly turning from awe to skepticism (and not the good kind of skepticism required for science). It's like the 60s when inference of planetary atmospheres using starlight was proposed.. the interest was strong but no-one actually did the experiment for so long that when probes were proposed to go and directly measure the atmosphere of Venus the results of starlight interferometry were completely ignored.. and that was in the scientific community, which has a much longer attention span than the mainstream.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I wish science would stick to black and white, "we know this" and "we don't know this". Stop this "we think this and that, have no real clue, but are going to pat ourselves on the back for pretending to know something we don't".
There's very little that science can actually prove. For example, it is impossible to prove that the sun will rise tomorrow without extra-logical or metaphysical assumptions. Sure, we can appeal to Newtonian physics, but that doesn't avoid the problem, since Newtonian physics were developed through observation and abstraction. That is, Newtonian physics is a theory, and demonstrably not fact.
After all, I am strangely colored.
Well, refutation *is* the foundation of science, after all.
Amusingly, Ludwig von Mises' younger brother Richard was a real scientist with significant contributions in engineering and probability/statistics.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
Our Lord God, in all his wisdom, would never allow another planet, not in the 5,000 years since creation itself has He ever done anything so looney.
Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto. Oh, wait... not Pluto. :)
Maybe the extraterrestrial Richter is lying to Cohagen again...
Because TECH is not SCIENCE. These appear to be somewhat intersecting sets at best.
Furthermore, Computer Science is in its pure state much more akin to a branch of mathematics than anything remotely resembling a Science.
It's not hard at all to understand how you would up in IT with an anti-scientific mind. It's also not terribly hard to understand why a bunch of IT folk shaved their heads and committed mass suicide to attempt to hitch a ride on a comet given there isn't sufficient science to suggest that might actually work.
Sometimes I wonder if programming to many isn't more closely related to magic than science. And indeed, there are many aspects of IT work that seem much more art than science.
I had no idea those damn Democrats were so interested in propping up false extra-solar planets.
If that's one thing I love about science, is that; you better be right, because there are 50 other people out there working on your project to prove its a fallacy.
(Didn't Galileo about get put to death for proving some overbearing theology was wrong?) =(
Inseparably so! You can't have science or Scientific Method without falsifiability; anything else would just be... a religion.
I know, I know... the question was just rhetorical preaching to the choir, but the answer bears repeating nonetheless. There's still a few billion humans who haven't grokked it yet. 8-/
Throwing a log on the fire, the Electric Universe people believe that "red-shift" in a galaxy is the result of one cluster being pushed out as a plasma ejection from a larger galaxy, one blue-shifts as it is pushed closer to us, and one red-shifts as it travels away, and that redshifting is not doppler-effect related.
Gravity Universe people use red-shift as the basis of measuring the age of the universe, the Big Bang, tthe need for dark energy, etc etc. That, plus luminocity, is the basis of estimating the age/distance from us.
It would be interesting if the EU people were right, and we just had an 80 year interlude of bad astronomy.
...it's just a bunch of astros as obsessed with sensational headlines as everyone else.
R.I.P.
Science Reporting With Proper Perspective
(i.e. "Dip in brightness that MAY have been caused by an orbiting planet, but more likely was caused by one of the following more common phenomenon:...")
January, 2008
In all seriousness, though, reporting true science to the masses...just doesn't work. The masses (myself included) simply cannot understand the complexity of the data/system/science well enough to receive it properly. So "Reporting of Science with Proper Perspective" can't have died...because it never existed.
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.
Your post fundamentally disturbs me... and for a number of reasons.
I say this every time a science post like this is posted: modern science is a joke. What I hate the most is the very concept of theories.
Theories are pretty much entirely what science is about - so, if you have a problem with theories, you have a problem with ALL science, not just "modern science"
The idea that some half-assed guess gets passed around as an acceptable explanation until proven otherwise just strikes a nerve with me. I wish science would stick to black and white, "we know this" and "we don't know this".
Science has never been "black and white" and never will be. If you want that level of certainty, you'll find religion a few doors down the hall.
Theories are also not "half-assed guesses" - they're "best guesses" based on the results of experimentation (note that in some sciences direct experimentation isn't possible, so instead, precise modelling from the available evidence can also be used - this includes most of astronomy and historical things such as large timescale geology and evolution (both geology and evolution on short time scale, we've got experimental science already)).
If you walk in to the room, and I look at you, I can form a hypothesis, almost immediately, based on visual evidence, that you are human. If I then ran some tests based on my hypothesis and they agreed that with the hypothesis, then I'd have a working theory that you're human. I'd probably be right, however I can never know for sure - maybe you're an alien that just happens to be "human enough" that all of the tests I did would pass you as human. Now, I will work on the idea that you're human based on this theory. If however, a few weeks later, I get access to a new kind of DNA test, and for some reason decide to test you again, and find out you're NOT human, then the scientific method has NOT failed. I've determined you're not human, but I ALSO know with a lot more certainty how close to human you are (enough to pass all my initial tests).
That can relate back to the topic at hand by saying that we now know a lot more about HOW spots on a distant sun can LOOK like planets.
Stop this "we think this and that, have no real clue, but are going to pat ourselves on the back for pretending to know something we don't".
I wonder if perhaps you're just not familiar with what makes a theory compared to a hypothesis. Self-congratulations because of a hypothesis, would be bad, but self-congratulations because of a theory are definitely in order if it's interesting enough.
Science doesn't claim to know anything. Scientists will happily pat themselves on the back for a new theory, but anyone who then calls it "fact" is being intellectually dishonest (or perhaps just lazy, which is actually fine if they're not doing it in information that they're actively disseminating). Imagine, after my discovery that you're an alien, I throw a bit of a party because my theory now points to there being alien life on Earth. That party is pretty well justified I think, and some self-congratulation is definitely in order (if I'd thrown a party just after you walked in for looking at you and saying, "yep, that's probably a human" (or even, "yep, that's a probably an alien"), that'd be pretty stupid as I hadn't done any tests to try to confirm it). Then however, a few weeks after that, it turns out that some humans can have the strange DNA traits I found in you. I've gone from thinking you're human, to thinking you're an alien, to it turning out you're probably human after all. I'll say, "oops, looks like my theory was incomplete - sorry for the false alarm everyone!" and that should be fine. Even though I found out you're not an alien, I now know more about what I'm looking for next time, and also I've just learned something new about humans, so it's still a good thing. At this point, I assume you're human, even though I've changed my mi
My book about LSD and Self-Discovery
Also on facebook as: DroppingAcidDaleBewan
Scientist 1: "OMG! There's a tear in the cosmic fabric of space-time! It's swallowing galaxies, heading right for us, and we're all going to DIE!"
Scientist 2: "Would you chill out? It was just a hair on the eyepiece. Look again."
Scientist 1: "Oh. Right. Well, that's enough science for this morning. I think I'm going to break for lunch, now..."
How many other 'facts' about things in the universe might merely be tainted observations?
Likely, several. But that doesn't lessen the value of the work at all. If something appears to work in a particular way, it probably does. If it turns out it doesn't, then the last body of evidence isn't just "thrown away" - it's just tweaked a little more - the previous assumptions, even if wrong, can still serve a useful purpose for explaining things.
Right now, we're pretty certain that there's a black hole at the centre of most (or maybe all) galaxies. We might be wrong. There might be a large, as yet unknown, type of gravity source there that is NOT a black hole. If that turns out to be the case though, it's not a bad thing for science - since every model so far works nicely with a black hole in that position, it will continue to work with a black hole in that position even if there isn't one. Just as Newtonian physics is wrong, but still serves as a very useful set of mathematics for most situations.
So many times I read the most fantastical things astronmers have discovered a billion light-years away, and I think, how do they really know that? When there's that much distance, couldn't there be something out there fooling with their observation?
Yes, there could - which is why we do lots of experiments regarding the kinds of things which may mess up observations as well. Could there be other things? Absolutely. Could that mean we're wrong about a lot of stuff we're observing? Yes, it could. Would that be catastrophic to science? Not at all - we'd have a lot of new things to study! We can build up a very accurate but completely incorrect model of the universe and as long as it's valid from our frame of reference, it can be useful for doing things.
Imagine if it turns out that MOND is probably correct - it doesn't automatically mean all the research in to dark matter has been wasted - a lot of that research could be used as "test cases" for MOND, to help "prove" it. If any of our information about dark matter gave results that could NOT be explained by MOND, we'd have to concede that either the observations are wrong (and then explain how), or that MOND is wrong. Either way, we enhance our understanding, which is good.
and I don't believe it is just the public mis-interpreting something that the scientists said was 'probable'. A lot of these guys pass off their discoveries as facts.
Anyone who does so is being dishonest - that's a problem of the people explaining the science, not of the science itself. That said though, if anyone ever tells me something is "fact", I take it to mean, "all current evidence points towards this being the case and we can't imagine any realistic way that this could not be the case". So, even if some scientists are being dishonest and saying something is fact, then it's STILL the public's misunderstanding of science that is at least partly to blame if they get all upset when new data points to a different answer. I myself am dishonest in this exact way whenever I tell someone that "gravity pulls you down towards the earth", or "We evolved from simpler life over a LONG period of time". I am presenting these theories as facts, because any alternative is completely inconceivable to me, and it's just quicker than explaining, "Given all the available evidence, it appears as if, from your reference frame, gravity will pull you towards the earth". For less well entrenched theories, I tend to avoid such strong statements, and prefer the "longer" explanation, but the meaning should be considered pretty much the same. If clarification is needed, then you should ask how strong the evidence is that points to this theory being correct.
My book about LSD and Self-Discovery
Also on facebook as: DroppingAcidDaleBewan
Also, for whatever it's worth, there have been rumors floating around since the original announcement that several groups have photometric data showing the variations in stellar flux due to these spots. The period of this variability was supposed to be consistent to the "planet's" period, a very strong argument that it was a rotation/spot effect.
Microsoft delenda est!
Well, as everyone knows there are no 'facts' in science unless it's an in-your-face thing like "water is wet" or "the temperature of the sun is xyz kelvin".
Hypothesis and Theory make up everything.
-- This space for lease, low setup fee, inquire within!
Yea, how dare they downgrade something from "exists" to "doesn't exist".
I mean, seriously, I've a good mind to go there and tell them: I don't exist, you insensitive clods!
I hate printers.
Karl Popper would be proud...
What I want to know is this: At what point in the history of Slashdot did it become necessary to explain and defend the fundamental philosophies of science?
Seems this place has suffered along with digg when every 12 year old and their Wii were granted internet acess...?
Unfortunately, I couldn't agree more... it was with a heavy heart that I wrote that post. :-(
My book about LSD and Self-Discovery
Also on facebook as: DroppingAcidDaleBewan
All we are is dust in the wind.
Wrong room. Religion is down the hall.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
... that we can pick up the "sun spots" of stars that are lightyears away.
the "12 year old" has a five digit slashdot ID, which is even more disheartening
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
how do they really know that?
How do we know there are such things as negative numbers? Cuz 5 - 8 has to equal something. Then we find a use for the newly invented "negatives", and find that it just works. What about imaginary numbers? The new negatives have to have a 'square root', and the square root of -1 has to equal something. And so on. Eventually, the preponderance of what works with 'negatives' and 'imaginaries' and all that other stuff leads to acceptance.
I don't believe it is just the public mis-interpreting something that the scientists said was 'probable'. A lot of these guys pass off their discoveries as facts.
Please give an example.
A few years back, a scientist produced findings on meteorite ALH94001 that suggested life on Mars. I watched the press release live, since he was the friend of a friend and was tipped it was coming up.
A publication involved in peer-reviewing the article about it was going to break embargo and release early, forcing Dr. McKay to release before he was ready.
Throughout the press release, he kept saying, "This rock passes all current tests for proving the existence of microfossils in earth rocks. It may be life, or we may have to change or add to the tests". Over and over; he said he was using new equipment that could see things better than before, and differently than before; he said he was putting his findings out there so that other scientists could improve the science. He was careful not to tout it as "fact".
Of course, that's not what the non-scientific media heard or reported. As a result of ALH94001, tests were improved, new things were learned about microfossilization, formation of nanoscale structures, etc.
Realize that science is an economy where the currency is reputation, not cash. It cannot be sold or transferred to another; it can be lost forever; it is seldom lost and regained. Every scientist knows that brightest minds in her/his field will be microanalyzing his/her work. This keeps one humble.
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.
Refutations are one of the MOST important parts of science. Proving something incorrect is far more useful than suggesting that something might be correct.
I had no idea those damn Republicans were so interested in propping up false extra-solar planets.
it's economics!
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
I'm sorry I posted and can't mod you up. Anyone from the Philly area should understand this. Great analogy.
Thank you. And the best part is, the Phillies came back last night to win the game, so Charlie Manuel is a good manager with a clear sense of the game. Had they lost, we'd be listening to WIP arguing over whether or not he should be fired. Just imagine if they had a WIP about science. It would be a pretty fun show, actually.
This is my sig.
> but refutations are science, too, right?
Absolutely. And it is precisely that which distinguishes it from religion.
Under what circumstances can ID be refuted?
Before you design for reuse, make sure to design it for use.
R U sayin' that observation creates objects, or just artifacts in the data? Anyway, at that distance, how can one tell the difference between planetary bodies transiting their local solar discs, and the flicker caused by nearby cloaked Klingon warships?
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
A most effective way to describe science would be as the process in which the smartest people on the planet have been proven wrong.
I see no reason to think thats going to change anytime soon.
Re: "Not as cool as if a planet had actually been there, but refutations are science, too, right?"
Actually, refutations are MORE important than findings.
The degree in which we can trust science from a particular field is directly coorilated to how freely one scientist can dispute the findings of another. The REAL value comes from propping up the refuters.
Viva la scienctific-principal :Me
1. Actually, no, Galileo only got house arrest, and not as much for "proving some overbearing theology wrong" as for flaming an absolute monarch. There had been closed minded popes and cardinals, but Pope Urban VIII was not one of them. Before becoming a pope, he had actually defended Galileo and opposed other church officials like Bellarmine. And as a pope he actually encouraged Galileo to write his book, and only asked that he presents both models, both his new and his old one, and shows what his model explains that the other didn't.
What Galileo did... was a lot more like flaming. He took the Pope's words, distorted them, and put him in the mouth of a bumbling idiot of a character called, basically, The Stupid. That was the defender of the old model.
The pope didn't take lightly to public ridicule, and did a bit of an abuse of justice to show Galileo who's boss. He suddenly made the helliocentric model the official church position (where he had been very neutral before) just so he could prosecute Galileo and put the offending book on the index of forbidden books. But make no mistake, it wasn't about science vs religion, it was just a troll personally flaming an absolute monarch and getting smacked upside the head for it.
At any rate, Galileo got just a house arrest at his own mansion for his efforts. Hardly the worst possible fate. Other people routinely got executed for lesser offenses against secular monarchs.
2. I think the one you're talking about is Giordano Bruno. That one got burned at the stake all right. However, even there the waters are muddier.
For a start, Giordano Bruno had a _lot_ of accusations of heresy against him, with heliocentrism being by far the least important. Other stuff like preaching that Mary wasn't a virgin, or eastern-style reincarnation (including into animals), plus a few assorted things about Mass, Jesus and the Trinity. The Church couldn't care much less about heliocentrism, but when you start preaching that everything in the new testament is a lie, they started to care. A lot.
Furthermore, Giordano Bruno was a monk. The Church took policing its internal ranks very seriously. (And honestly, it had all the reasons to, since any excesses of one of its members got used as examples of what's wrong with the church as a whole.) Things you could have gotten away with as some lay person, became very serious offenses as a member of the clergy.
Not saying that it makes it "right". Just saying that there's more to it that "science vs religion." I don't think that Giordano's views on reincarnation qualified as "science", for example. Whatever "science" was in his position, seemed to have been more incidental than the fundament of it all. He was tried and executed for plain old heresy.
Again, I'm not saying that the power to try people for heresy is good or right. But let's treat it as the excess of totalitarian power that it was, rather than some grand science-vs-religion battle.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The "Endless September", Mk 2.
Should we, perhaps, call this the Endless August? Where the World Wide Web faded into the "net"?
-- Ancient (IBM 1620 and Atari 400) Programmer
The start of Eternal September was easy to pin down; on the other hand, the current popularization of the internet has been a long, continuous fall in sophistication. It's just like history: you can't pin down when Rome decayed, but you know that in 100 AD it was strong and sophisticated, and in 400 AD, it was weak and insipid.
Evolution
People are trying to figure out the unknown, and don't always get it right the first time.
Unless, of course, the subject is evolution. Then its Gospel Truth(TM). Before you think this a troll, know that I could care less one way or another whether evolution is "true" or not. Personally, I don't believe it conflicts with my theist leanings.
But there are people who believe evolution somehow proves God doesn't exist. For these people, any part of the scientific process which questions their dear theory is somehow suspect. They're going to find something to prop up their biases, and - unfortunately for science - evolutionary theory becomes the victim. They attempt to extend evolution from a qualified explanation to a provable tenet. Regardless of the strength of the evidence, evolution will never be proven in the philosophical sense, and attempting to graft science into a philosophical debate is fruitless at best.
To anyone familiar with the scientific method, these things are to be expected. We know that science is neither proven nor true - at least not in the mathematical or philosophical sense. Yet, the larger population often lacks the ability to discriminate between a tentative explanation which may be refined or disproved with the discovery of additional evidence and something that is provably correct. When science speaks, they listen.
Unless, of course, they're the fundamentalist type, in which case they treat all science with suspicion. Not because the claims of science are false, but because they can't understand the difference between an eternal truth (like the resurrection of Jesus) and a qualified statement.
And this is really what the debate about evolution, and the role of science in our society is about. It's not about the scientific method; it's about culture. It's about whose authority (Church or Academia) is accepted by the public at large. Yes, we know science is self-correcting; yes, we know that it has limits, and is frequently wrong. That's not the point. The point is the average person wants to find an authority in whom they can trust. For some people, that authority is their pastor. For others, it is the scientific establishment. For others, it is their parents/politicians/etc... It is these people who need to be convinced that - while the experts might know more than them - they are still expected to think and exercise independent judgment. So many don't, and that is the real root of the problem of science's public image. It is not for the intellectually lazy.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
On the other hand, if you replace his use of "science" with "astrophysics" he might just be on to something.
The error is entirely your own. How's that for black and white, you clown?
What I hate the most ...
So personal!
What I hate the most is the very concept of theories. The idea that some half-assed guess gets passed around as an acceptable explanation until proven otherwise just strikes a nerve with me. I wish science would stick to black and white, "we know this" and "we don't know this".
You either understand the difference between a hypothesis and a theory and don't whine about scientists' fallibility, or you're not qualified to comment on science at all and as a result when you do comment, you whine like a fool.
Stop this "we think this and that, have no real clue, but are going to pat ourselves on the back for pretending to know something we don't".
Unless you are a fellow astronomer, and have a better model for the very radial-velocity variation around TW Hya here under discussion, but your superior hypothesis and research have not been published due to some personal bias, you have no complaint about those scientists that are investigating that phenomenon nor that their success is as yet incomplete. If you're not curious enough about whether it's a planet or a cold spot on the sun to contribute to the research, and if you're not appreciative enough of the scientific process to at least cheer for the researchers, just go away.
Sports fans often cheer for each goal scored, and almost never whine in the middle of a contest that it isn't won yet. Boxing and races may be exceptions, so let's keep this sports analogy to (timed) ball games. People attend ball games only to support of one of the two teams, not to bitch and moan about ball games being a waste of other people's time because those of us who hold that opinion have the option to not attend, so we simply don't waste our own time on ball games. Such is the extent of one's right to "hate" any endeavor in which we are disinterested: non-participation. And neither I nor any of the authors show up at brothels or johns' homes to heckle you about your career. Be a good sport and kindly show the same respect for professional scientists that we show to professions we don't enjoy or appreciate. You obviously don't appreciate science so just go away, and stay there. Yes, I promise to do the same when your program begins, Jerry Springer.
"I can't imagine how things could get any worse!" (some guy) "That could just be failure of imaginatioÂn on your p