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Richest Planetary System Discovered With 7 Planets
eldavojohn writes "The European Southern Observatory has announced that with the aid of their 190 HARPS measurements they have found the solar system with the most planets yet. Furthermore they claim 'This remarkable discovery also highlights the fact that we are now entering a new era in exoplanet research: the study of complex planetary systems and not just of individual planets. Studies of planetary motions in the new system reveal complex gravitational interactions between the planets and give us insights into the long-term evolution of the system.' The star is HD 10180, located 127 light-years away in the southern constellation of Hydrus, that boasts at least five planets (with two more expected) that have the equivalent of our own Titius–Bode law (their orbits follow a regular pattern). Their survey of stars also helped reinforce the correlation 'between the mass of a planetary system and the mass and chemical content of its host star. All very massive planetary systems are found around massive and metal-rich stars, while the four lowest-mass systems are found around lower-mass and metal-poor stars.' While we won't be making a 127 light-year journey anytime soon, the list of candidates for systems of interest grows longer."
For everyone here who has seen a lot of science fiction movies or lived in a trailer park where hillbilly meth-heads are routinely abducted by little green men, you might want to keep in mind that 127 light years is a very long way--an almost unimaginable distance, in fact. Most people have absolutely no appreciation for interstellar distances in general (when I was a wee lad, for example, I thought that the next solar system began right at the edge of our own). Let's put it this way: our fastest craft take about 9 years or so to go from the Earth to Pluto. At that same speed, it would take about 125,000 years to reach our next door neighbor (Proxima Centauri). And that's a mere 4.2 light years away (right in our cosmic back yard).
So if you're planning a visit to this newly discovered system, you'd better pack for about a 4-million-year trip, one way.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Yeah, we've got a full two more planets than...oh wait...
[tears up]
I know of a solar system that has 8 planets. Used to have 9.
SpyDock: Scientific Python in a Docker container
All of that stuff's actually still here, except for the couple tons of metal that we sent to other planets.
Our planet will shake us off easily and life will simply continue. There'll always be prokaryotes, cockroaches and RIAA lawyers to reboot evolution. This planet has actually seen a whole lot worse than what we're doing to it.
Learn from the mistakes of others. There isn't enough time to make them all yourself.
Does anyone else remember playing Master of Orion, and finding a planet, where the info-box says "Ultra rich, heavy-G".
I always thought that sounded like a nickname for a gangsta rapper.
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
4 years ago today we lost her... anniversarys are hard.
I am a v1ral sig. Plse c0py me and h3lp me spread. Thank y0u?
I'm right with you on basically everything else you said, but I'd still like to suggest that in modern usage, "its" should be used for the possessive. Yes, it breaks the "rule" that you put an apostrophe for the possessive. It's a standard and useful convention that resolves ambiguity, and I can see essentially no benefit to allowing "it's" for the possessive other than shutting up pretentious douches on forums - which, don't get me wrong, is a noble pursuit.
I don't see why the rule of "its vs. it's" is any more baseless than the rule I'm inferring from your argument, "an s added to indicate the possessive is always [either allowed to or required] to have an apostrophe prepended". I have, at least, the OED backing me up on this.
If you go back far enough, you can find very strange spelling, grammar, words, and even letters in the English language, but that doesn't have much bearing on what's easy to understand today.
Also, insisting that flammable is not a word is a little odd. It's in lots of dictionaries, has latin roots semi-independent of the roots of inflammable, and came into English in the 19th century. Thus, it fits the prescriptivist view as well as the descriptivist one. Yes, inflammable is slightly older.
I would enjoy a world very much where people stopped getting pissy about starting a sentence with "and" or "because", or splitting infinitives, or other things that are perfectly valid, commonly used, and don't hurt much of anything.