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32 Exoplanets Discovered By Chilean Telescope
the4thdimension writes "An article on CNN notes that 32 exoplanets have been discovered using a new Chilean telescope. The telescope is capable of detecting movements of 2.1mph (comparable to a slow walking pace). These 32 new planets give the telescope a total of 75 planets it has discovered, out of the 400 discovered using all methods employed by astronomers. This places the HARPS system as the world's foremost exoplanet hunter."
Um, just how long is the trip to the nearest habitable exoplanet again?
If it's less than my remaining life expectancy, get me a ticket.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
That's all we need. More planets.
I want to know how many Jovian-mass-equivalents' worth they've got in their backlog.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
the instrument detects movements as small as 3.5 km/hr (2.1 mph), a slow walking pace
So let me get this straight: If this thing were observing a star system 50 light years away, that's 4.7x10^14 kilometres ... and this thing can detect relative movements as small as 3.5km/hr?
Consider me impressed.
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
It's amazing that such a small shift in spectrum line displacement can be detected. It doesn't make intuitive sense that a mere walking pace will produce a detectable shift. That's precision stuff. It's amazing what astronomy technology has been able to do with indirect information.
Table-ized A.I.
Well, the "new Chilenean telescope" the summary is referring to is actually the 3.6m telescope of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile, which started operation in 1976...
and here is the link to the ESO Press Release
http://www.eso.org/sci/facilities/lasilla/instruments/harps/overview.html
The speed is the radial velocity, aka how fast it comes closer and goes further. And it's of the order of 1 m/s, which got converted to car speed. Analogy anyone?
ID: the nose did not occur naturally, how would we wear glasses otherwise? (apologies to Voltaire)
I guess it could be possible to isolate certain frequencies in the oscillation to filter out solar storms and such which would easily affect its diameter at a rate faster than walking speed. But you'd have to watch it for centuries to gather enough data. At least. Geez, doing the trig (like 10^-22 radians per second) my intuition tells me you'd have to be watching that star for billions of years..
Its not going to happen. planets orbit stars, we don't have a single example of a start with a billion planets. The one system we have (almost) sufficiently mapped has 8 planets and a handful of smaller rocks of note. Some of the other systems we have identified could have more planets than that, but we don't have the ability to detect smaller/farther planets at the moment.
That "walking pace" stat could be very impressive if it were given with the proper qualification information.
For example, if it could detect an object moving at that pace over the course of a year at 1 light year away... I would probably not be as impressed if it could do it from 50 light years in a matter of minutes.
Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
More details can be found in the Press Release of the European Southern Observatory. They have been using a new instrument called HARPS on the "old" ESO 3.6m telescope, which has ben around since 1976.
This is a telescope operating in Chile, it is only partially funded by the Chileans.
Funded by
Deep within the structure of the telescope, someone asked "does anyone know if this spider is poisonous?"
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Naah. Sure they may begin to discover more and more planets, but at a certain point the number of planets around each star begins to decrease
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
---
Extra Solar Planets Feed @ Feed Distiller
we don't have a single example of a start with a billion planets
Just change the definition of the word "planet", and you're done!
Right now the ratio between stars to planets in the milky way is about 1 billion to 1.
That's a ridiculous statistic. By that measure, the ratio between Diet Coke drinkers and humans is 3.5 billion to 1, because my wife and I are the only people in my group of friends who drink the stuff, and there are 7 billion people on the planet.
And yet somehow the Coca Cola company keeps making it, just for us...
A better statistic is the ratio of the number of planets discovered and the NUMBER OF STARS SEARCHED FOR PLANETS. As of 2003, this fraction was at least 10%, and given observational limits may prove to be as high as 100% -- it could well be that ALL sunlike stars have planets.
http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0306524
The larger question is, how many of these are enemy planets? I'm going to say at least half, if not more.
are any of these 32 new planets at all interesting?
Define interesting.
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
"An article on CNN describes that 32 exoplanets have been discovered using a new Chilean telescope. The telescope is capable of detecting movement 2.1mph (comparable to a slow walking pace)."
Not "Space Organization." It's not directly related to the European Space Agency.
Clearly the parent poster was commenting that the ratio is currently stars/planets > 1 (more stars than planets) and he was wondering if the ratio would invert stars/planets 1 (more planets than stars). If we continue to find planets at some point we may find that 90% of the stars we CAN see well enough have more than 1 planet and it would be a safe bet at that point to say that there are more planets than stars.
I don't think he was suggesting that each star could ever have more than a billion planets. Sorry if you were just being sarcastic or trolling and I didn't get it.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
Interesting: engaging or exciting and holding the attention or curiosity.
Sure. Some of these may be "interesting" to a limited set of people, but for the most part they are about the same as the other couple of hundred planets already discovered.
There's a lot of planets out there. They were expecting to find a bunch of them. This is not news.
I'm pretty sure if there were interesting planets in the 32 they are announcing, they would have pointed them out.
Did it find pluto back? I heard we lost Pluto a while back.
This is interesting: planet inside habitable zone, perhaps with liquid water
let the flamewars begin.
Has anyone seen anything about what percentage of the total stars in the galaxy could have planets, or even of those how many would have rocky planets? I have seen estimates that anywhere between 20% and maybe as high as 60% of sun-like stars could have rocky planets, but then I cannot find an estimate for what kind proportion of stars are sun-like (although Wikipedia indicated that 7.6% of main sequence stars fall into the same spectral category as the sun, but then how many stars are in their man sequence?). I have also read things about how many stars have been found with planets, and how many have been looked at, but I would assume that they are using some bias about what stars to look at in order to save time and work.
No, no — the line is "Oh my god, it's full of planets!"
Its not going to happen. planets orbit stars
So what would you call a rocky body the size and shape of (say) Earth or Mars that doesn't orbit a star? The IAU's inane mal-definition aside[*], I suspect most people would call it a planet (possibly with the qualifier "rogue" tacked on). I don't think we have much idea how many such bodies exist, but it's not beyond the bounds of reason to think that there's are many, many times as many as there are stars.
[*] I don't really give a rats ass how they classify Pluto--it's clearly a different type of body, and I'd be happy if they called it a Megacomet instead of a Planet, but the IAU's definition is still idiotic: there's no classification for bodies which don't orbit a primary, just to start with, and we can't tell if exoplanets are planets or not without going there, and most damning of all, they define Mercury as being more like Jupiter than it is like Ceres, which is simply brain-dead.
it could well be that ALL sunlike stars have planets.
We are collecting data points like mad and its not looking good for extraterrestrial life. If ET life existed we would be seeing evidence of it along with the planets right now. Either oxygen spectra from atmosphere or evidence of engineering elsewhere in the galaxy. If life exists it may not use similar metabolic processes to us and it may not be intelligent.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Do they have stargates on them?
We are collecting data points like mad and its not looking good for extraterrestrial life.
This news is all about revising a term in the Drake Equation upward. That can't make ET life less likely.
As for spectra, the vast majority of planetary IDs give no information about the planets apart from their orbits and masses. And as far as I know, the few spectra we have are for Jupiters, not terrestrial planets.
So your dreams of bug-eyed-monsters are as alive as they ever were.
One day winter, one day spring, one day summer, ooh no time for autumn
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
We are collecting data points like mad and its not looking good for extraterrestrial life. If ET life existed we would be seeing evidence of it along with the planets right now.
Those data points are a drop in the ocean considering the size of the galaxy we're taking them from. Factor in the size of the universe with a few hundreds of billion galaxies, and add to that the age of the universe vs the time-window in which the data points have been collected.
Our data points are as good as we can get right now and provide us with interesting insights, particularly on planetary systems formation, but they're utterly insignificant in the context of ET life, intelligent or not.
This post is awesome.
The Galaxy is well mixed. Stars within 100 light years of us should be a good model for other stars at a similar distance from the galactic centre around the disc.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Cold?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
"While that's out of the question, an unmanned nuke-powered probe could possibly survey such a system in one life-time if sufficiently funded".
Nope. To reach the nearest solar system within a lifetime (80 years) and brake to it, you would have to have an acceleration, deceleration and speed such as it make the 4 light year distance within 80 years. Let us imagine this is a 1 kg probe, accelerating at a reasonable 1g constantly, go toward the system, then decelerate at 1g constantly. To make those 4 LY in less than 80 years, you will need to have at least a speed of 5% light speed (5% light speed, so 1 LY take 20 years, 4 LY take 80 years). 5% light speed is 1,5e7 meter.second-1. So you will need to accelerate at 1g over : 1,5e7seconds or over 1/2 year and decelerate over 1/2 years. I will spare you the number of megajoule needed for this, and the fact the reactor will add weight, and so the calculation is far more complex, I am pretty sure we haven't anything technology wise to reach such acceleration over such time.
From the above you can see that before your probe can survey such a system, it will take much much more than a life time to even REACH the nearest system. And that was a very small probe.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
The planets we see are mostly Very Big Rocks, or gas giants. It'll take a while to see smaller, more earthlike planets.
It doesn't take time, just someone to fork over a couple of billion dollars. The technology already exists, it's just that no one wants to spend the money to actually get it to space.
300000 km.s-1 speed of light, 15000 km s-1 is 5% of it, so 1,5 e7 m.s-1 at 1g , or 1 meter s-2, you need 1.5e7 seconds, divided by 3600 this is 4166 hours, divided by 24 this is 176 days. Where am I off by a factor 10 ?
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
I'll likely die before the average life expectancy for people born before the year 2000 and still alive is over 150 years.
Yes, for my grandchildren's grandchildren's grandchildren, 1000+ year lifetimes for their conciousnesses may be a possibility, but not for me.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
which will never happen as long as LEADER can buy votes with a PROJECT. hey, after PAST PROBLEM the PARTY needed a fresh new face on how to get people dependent on a government program so that running for office on the platform of discontinuing that program is political suicide. so we get the mess known as PROJECT that will collapse under its own weight, and soon, if it is not reformed, yet no one has the balls to reform it because it would mark the end of his or her career in politics. nice going. why you guys think PROJECT will be any different when these people have already shown their true colors is amazing to me. it's like that definition of insanity, you keep doing the same thing expecting a different result, because THIS time you're all hopeful and THIS time you want change blah blah blah... idiots.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Neither trolling nor sarcastic. I tend to take things very very literally. Often to literally, as perhaps the case here.
Bored people are boring.
The point is that they are discovering more planets all the time. The "couple of hundred" you speak of is actually over 400 to date, and the number increases every time we apply a new piece of technology towards looking. And they did point out the more interesting ones - 4 of the new planets discovered are less than +6 earth masses. As we create better technology with greater and greater resolution, we will find the ones that are interesting (or earth sized anyway, all new planets are interesting unless your sole purpose is to find a new MacD). If you are not interested in the process of doing so, STFU and go do something else. We should be concentrating on looking more closely at the nearest systems for new planets, rather than looking further and further away. As we get more observant, we may find a decent planet within reaching distance. But you'll still be bored I expect - see first sentence.
Ideally we should be working on a way to take advantage of ANY planet we find, not just the ones like earth. It would be a waste to ignore the larger planets.
How is that worse than the space station ?
I was so concentrated on the time calculation I forgot to check the most glaring error : wrong constant :P. It does not change the reasonment tough.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
True but the rarer a phenomenon is the bigger the sample size you need to quantify it.
Suppose we could tell whether or not there is life in a hundred thousand star systems (I don't think we are anywhere near that yet) and the chance of a star system developing life is one in 10 million. We would be far from alone in the universe and yet we would also be unlikely to spot one of the other star systems with life.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register