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First Image of a Planet Orbiting a Sun-Like Star
Several readers including houbou and DigitumDei sent links to what may be the first-ever image of a planet orbiting a sun-like star (research paper). The giant planet, the mass of 8 Jupiters, orbits its star at 330 AU, or 11 times the distance to Neptune's orbit. If the imaged object does turn out to be a planet — and it's not certain it is — then theories of planet formation may have to be adjusted. "The bulk of the material from which planets might form is significantly closer to the parent star... The outermost parts of such disks wouldn't contain enough material to assemble a Jupiter-mass planet at the distance from the star... at which the Toronto team found the faint object."
Damn you, Google Star View! There IS such a thing as privacy, you know!
...and yet where's the second pic to prove that it orbits?
The Toronto people are just confused as to why the planet isn't orbiting around them.
O .
If the imaged object does turn out to be a planet â" and it's not certain it is â" then theories of planet formation may have to be adjusted.
Whereas if this thing that is bigger than 8 Jupiters turns out to be something other than a planet, we may have some other theories to adjust. But I, for one, welcome our giant space traveling overlords!
I've seen plenty of pictures of Earth.
... that's no moon ...
StoneCypher is Full of BS
One can forgive the town that produced Rush for being a trifle arrogant.
Ridiculous! That picture is completely distorted! What paper are you looking at?
It was a lot more like this:
`O
As you can see from the nearly egg-like shape as the centrifugal forces compress the equator.
And if you observe that the planet orbits below the elliptical, you will have to agree that the planet was a rogue that was captured long after the star's formation.
If you look closely you can clearly see that it's just the USS Enterprise (NCC-1701-D) in "outer orbit" doing a routing scientific study. Nothing to see here, move along.
umm... IMO it should be called dwarfoid.
"Do you even know who I am?"
"Weren't you one of the Little Rascals?"
Assume I was drunk when I posted this.
And in the early 21st century, observations at the LHC and a new binocular radio telescope show conclusively that several assumed constants (Hubble constant, gravitational constant, age of universe, etc) were actually way off, and the stars are all really etched into a dome circling the earth about 300 miles up.
They built the Dyson sphere around the planet but _not_ around the star to capture all its energy? Someone needs to grab the picture of this and caption it "Ur doin it rong!"
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