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Potential 'Avatar' Gas Giant Exoplanet Discovered
Luminary Crush writes "A gas giant of approximately 1.5 Mj (Jupiter Mass) was discovered on October 22nd around the binary star system HD 176051B. It's not known with certainty which component of the binary system the planet is in orbit around at this point as both stars in HD 176051B are relatively Sol-sized (1.07 and .71 solar masses). Named 176051B b, this new exoplanet orbits within the star system's habitable zone, and if mapped onto our solar system with relative distance from our Sun it would place the large planet between Earth and Mars. While it's unlikely that such a gas giant could host life as we know it (though it's hypothesized), the location of the big planet opens up the intriguing idea of the realization of some of science fiction's famously habitable moons, Pandora and Endor. Look no further than our own solar system to see moons with the potential ingredients for life — just add heat."
TFA claims "15.99 (± 0.13) pc" which is what, like one and a little Kessel Runs in the 'Falcon.
So, it's a much farther distance (50 ly), has a binary system (instead of a triple system), and the planet is bigger than Jupiter (instead of smaller).
How is this related to Polyphemus from Avatar more, than, say, Bespin? ... come to think of it, both Avatar and this discovery are both overhyped. Objection withdrawn.
What size does a planet have to be to become a star? Is it 3 x Jupiter?
1.5 Jupiter Masses = 2.8479 * 10^27 kg, in case anyone was wondering.
Look no further than our own solar system to see moons with the potential ingredients for life -- just add heat.
That's a rather big "just", since gas giants require cold to form. They're made of hydrogen and helium, which simply doesn't "stick" to a small proto-planet if the temperature is anywhere near the melting point of water. Of course, you could heat the environment of an already-existing gas giant, but how would that happen?
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
So if we launch all of our nukes now, how long would they take to get there? Goddamn furries.
If intelligent life evolved out of a moon ecosystem where the main source of heat was tectonic stress, and the main liquid was methane or ammonia, you can bet they'd kick our ass.
-- thinkyhead software and media
in a fusion powered orion, it falls far short of the 50 year rule; 500 years with current technology. If we found a plentiful antimatter source, we could cut this to about 60 years.
"People don't want to learn linux" hasn't been a valid excuse since '03.
Note, if we get an efficient engine that can keep accelerating (no "idle flight" period), it would be 60-70 years for earth-based observers, but much shorter for the crew. The speed limit of 1c is relevant to surrounding universe, but from the spaceship crew standpoints, the engine power - acceleration - speed - distance - travel time relation behaves in mostly newtonian way. If they expend power needed to travel at 10c according to newtonian mechanics, it will take (in their perception) 1/10 the time of travel at 1c to get there.
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Navi = tall
Ewoks = small and furry
Navi + Ewoks = Wookiees?
We both said a lot of things that you are going to regret.
The Cosmos Series had a very good explanation of floaters and sinkers and some predators etc... /huh huh huh floaters.
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At least some of us might get a quite decent image (puns, et al) - many nearby systems should be close enough for some good interferometer with a way of canceling-out the starshine; even JWST might give something not bad, for nearest systems, especially with some starshade added, flying in front of it in unison.
But yeah, people raised on too much on scifi travels will be disappointed either way...
One that hath name thou can not otter
If we found a plentiful antimatter source, and built something never yet produced but only really theorised (i.e. an antimatter-based propulsion of any kind), and make it into a fairly compact but reliable propulsion system, of which one example is bought and attached to a particular extra-solar-capable chassis (of which the only two ever produced were made in the 70's and are currently used to transport a couple of LP's in a random direction that we have no control over any longer), etc. etc. etc.
As with anything to do with extra-solar propulsion, we won't see it for many, many decades and when we do, almost all our extra-solar attempts will be embarrassingly overtaken by the next-decade's attempt that will go faster (and the original mission will either have to keep going to somewhere that will be already colonised / studied even if it takes several generations, or turn back and spend their entire lives and those of their grandchildren trying to get back to Earth, or have to "merge" with the new attempt and thus have spent all their lives in a tin can when they could have just sat on Earth).
The best solution, if we were to put all our efforts to getting to any such system (which seems unlikely and extraordinarily risky), would be something based on the "water-in-the-desert" method. Go a bit of the way. Leave a small cache of supplies / fuel / resources. Return. Go again, but a tiny bit further, and leave more stuff. Go again and leave more stuff. When we have sufficient stuff cached, make a SECOND cache and so on.
In spacecraft terms, that means making something that can get to the moon easily. When we have that as an ordinary operational service, we can make trips to the next planet ready. When we have regular trips to all the planets, we can start veering slightly out of the solar system. When we have that ready, we can actually aim for the next best system by firing our best ships at it. They *will* get overtaken, but we can overtake them with an almost-empty ship with better technology, absorb their knowledge/resources and continue on the journey. Then the next ship will overtake that, pick them all up, melt down the old ship for repair-metal and continue. Eventually the people would get to some other system but we can't *ever* expect to just shoot something at the stars and expect it to work.
This isn't the Moon (a mere ten-times the Equator's distance, and your average reindeer can travel the distance of the equator about 2-3 times during his life, your car should be able to do about four-equators-worth of travel easily before it finally dies (all of mine have), etc.). This is another solar system (the NEAREST of which is 4.37 light years, which is 1,033,339,810 (and a bit) equators. A BILLION equators. And that's the NEAREST damn thing, and quite boring really.
50 years is way, way, way, optimistic for even a probe to another systems (hell, we've only "recently" done it with a probe out of the solar system at all, or a probe on another planet) - such a propulsion system would basically solve every energy need on Earth, so it's not a "small" development. To be honest, even 100, or 150, or 200 years, is being optimistic. Sometimes optimism pays off but we're not even just talking about doing something which we haven't done, at all, anywhere, in over 40 years - set foot on something that you could, theoretically, drive to within a few years in an ordinary car if you could pave a road there. We're talking about improving the entire accomplishments of all space travel by several (possibly dozen) orders of magnitude in only 2, 3 or 4 times the entire history of space travel itself (i.e. somewhere so far away that parts of a car would probably have destroyed themselves through their own radioactive half-life before it got even close).
If we could do that with cars, extrapolating from the 60's, then we'd all be driving 1000mph cars that get 500mpg (actually, probably a LOT more than that).
It's not *impossible*, it's just silver-suits and three-course-meal
Note, if we get an efficient engine that can keep accelerating (no "idle flight" period), it would be 60-70 years for earth-based observers, but much shorter for the crew. The speed limit of 1c is relevant to surrounding universe, but from the spaceship crew standpoints, the engine power - acceleration - speed - distance - travel time relation behaves in mostly newtonian way. If they expend power needed to travel at 10c according to newtonian mechanics, it will take (in their perception) 1/10 the time of travel at 1c to get there.
Ok... Now I understand why we haven't traveled to the stars yet.
We must overestimate the power needed, so that we can underestimate the time required.
This is opposite from all engineering projects on earth, where the final design is underpowered and delayed.
Or a little less than a typical Kessel Run.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
Navi + Ewok + ??
This post contains no rudeness or derision of any kind. All arguments are friendly. Terms and exclusions may apply.
I am an author of the paper in which this discovery was reported. You can find a copy of the paper here.
While the planet probably is near the habitable zone, this isn't the first time a giant planet has been found in the habitable zone of a star, and while it could have moons, there isn't any reason to speculate more about this planet than any of the others.
However, this planet is important for two other reasons:
1. It was the first planet discovered using a technique called "astrometry", which is measuring the positions of stars in the sky, as the move up/down and left/right in reaction to a planet orbiting it. This technique has the potential to find earthlike planets in the habitable zones of nearby stars.
2. It is found in a binary system and the second star is close enough that its gravity would have impacted planet formation. The leading theory of planet formation, called "core accretion", requires millions of year for planets to form, as dust in a disk around the star collides together and clings electrostatically (similar to the way dustballs collect on a hardwood floor). Eventually the dustballs grow large enough to be considered rocks, those collide and grow bigger, etc. But the second star's gravity would cause the dust to be swept out of the system in just thousands of years, far too little time for core accretion to occur. Thus, we need a different mechanism to explain planet formation in this system. This isn't the only such binary, but it this study does offer more controlled statistics of how frequently such binaries host planets, and these facts combined show that some had to form in the binary itself---the chances of a binary interacting with another star (that originally hosted the planet), leading to an exchange where the binary picks up the star, are much too small to explain the high rate observed.
Also, here is another press story covering the discovery (by the way, stars have multiple names---don't be confused that this article calls it "HR 7162" and the other one refers to "HD 176051"---they really are the same system). The third figure on the right hand panel is particularly useful.
Any questions? I'll try to answer responses to this post.
I'm not even so sure about overtaking; even our extrasolar spacecraft from the 70's could have been noticeably faster (using instead of medium launcher something like, say, Saturn V with NERVA upper stage and, on the probe, nuclear reactor with ion thruster) - it just didn't make sense for the primary mission (would limit flyby times), it would be quite a bit more expensive.
It's not just the tech that keeps us firmly on Earth now. And in the future - despite our wishes, it might very well be that the best practical thing allowed by this Universe is some variant of nuclear propulsion (or for small unmanned - starwisps for example; still at best around an order of magnitude less than c, anyway), all our data so far certainly strongly suggests it. And technologically, if we really wanted to, we can have capabilities for interstellar probe decently soon.
But as you say, it would require basically whole GDP of the planet for the next few generations.
(BTW you assume too big of a final hop in the "cache / gradual" approach, IMHO - there are many more outposts and local resource sources possible along the way, in the Oort cloud; estimations put their number maybe even at one trillion; I guess that's how our colonization will in the end look like, very gradual over the course of millennia - and with some groups eventually hitching a ride in an Oort cloud of another close-passing star. Maybe some embryo colonization ships, at most - one every few decades shouldn't put too much of a strain on the system)
One that hath name thou can not otter
how many libraries-of-congress-burned-per-second would the energy requirement for that be?
Even if we had Bussard ramscoops it still takes a while to get anywhere. I am assuming that you can't accelerate much faster than 10m per second squared without it being too hard on the crew. Of course once you get close to c the time is slowed down for the crew, but it will take a year to get up to those speeds.
Yes, but the "nice 1g" (wow, artificial gravity problem solved!) gives us about 1 light year/year^2 acceleration. That is, gain/loss of 1c per year.
About 4 years to Proxima Centauri. 50 light years in mere 7 "subjective" years. 40 years of crew life would give 800 light years of travel distance. About 1000 parsecs in a lifetime.
Sure, we would still need engines that can provide sustained 1g. We're nowhere near that. We have rocket monstrosities that are barely survivable at 8g and more for minutes a time, and tiny farts of ~1N that can work for many years a time. Nothing in between. I believe a pure sustained fusion rocket might be capable of reaching Centauri stars, but that's still a long way away.
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It's not known with certainty which component of the binary system the planet is in orbit around at this point as both stars in HD 176051B are relatively Sol-sized (1.07 and .71 solar masses).
Orbits do not work that way. The planet is orbiting around the center of gravity of the binary star/planet system. Since this is a binary star, this very well might be a point in empty space.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
If they expend power needed to travel at 10c according to newtonian mechanics, it will take (in their perception) 1/10 the time of travel at 1c to get there.
I don't quite understand what you mean here, it makes little sense talking about newtonian mechanics when the speed is near 1c. If travelling at 1c the Universe will be infintesimally short to the traveller (due to length contraction), and thus wherever he goes he will be there in no-time.
My understanding is that the moons of Jupiter are not human-habitable with any current technology on account of fierce charged particle radiation from the strong magnetic fields. Do I have this right, or does this only apply to Io, which is in one of the radiation belts?
Exactly. And if he travels very close to c the universe will be very short and thus wherever he goes he will be there in a very short time. Thus relativity makes it possible to reach any point in a finite universe in human-scale time (but go fast enough and each proton you hit will be as massive as a star).
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I'm sure a bunch of hater scientists will discover there was a Fern Gully planet found 2 decades before.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
This post is probably going to get modded as a troll... it's certanly got all the earmarks of it, but all I can say is that this is still my sincere belief on the matter. I see absolutely no point to the exercise to finding habitable exoplanets. At all.
What good does it do to know that habitable exoplanets are out there? Can we send people there? And even if we did, in the enormous time that it takes them to reach their destination, would the descendants of the original crew even be the sort of people who might actually want to engage in such a mission? What if, when they get there, they find out it's a bust? We've sentenced generations of people to death in the blacknesss of space, with absolutely *NO* means of ever getting back within their lifetime. We could hypothetically also just send a probe, but again, the sheer magnitude of time that would elapse before a probe actually reached the destination could make it unlikely that any people are actually still listening for the probe to send back any data.
As I see it, scouting around the galaxy for exoplanets that can possibly host life when we don't have the technology to send anything there within a time frame that is reasonable for the purposes of what would have to be just an experiment, is one of the hugest wastes of time and resources that I can imagine.
Now I've heard the arguments that living only on this planet, we *do* have all of our eggs in one basket, and it wouldn't take very much to wipe us out. These arguments are not wholly lost on me, but I can't see sending people to a place so far away that meaningful communication is not just impossible because of limitations on technology, but impossible because of physical constraints on the operation of the universe itself, is going to help matters... the time scales involved are so insanely large that it's unlikely in the extreme that anyone on earth around the time of its predicted arrival would even know or care if the vessel actually reached its destination at the scheduled time. We could not have any comfort that we might endure beyond a global catastrophe because there would be no way to ever know. That said, of course... it's not impossible for people to receive comfort from believing in things that aren't necessarily true, but that's not very scientifically valid is it? It's hardly any sort of real solution to the problem that we are likely to all be wiped out if we stay here when we subject parts of our population to even greater risks just by propelling them off this rock at the greatest velocities that are physically achievable by technology that we have with not even the slightest hope of ever returning.
Now that said, if we could find a way to extend productive and healthy human life to be at least a couple of orders of magnitude larger than how long we have it currently, well then, sending people to other stars might become a viable thing to do. Or, even more unlikely (IMO), if we find a way to break the speed limit that the universe has imposed on absolutely every single thing that exists, then I could see finding habitable exoplanets possibly being something of promise... and of hope. Until then, however, I'm afraid I really just don't see the point.
Okay... I'm done. Mod away.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Go figure ...
Yes, but achieving precisely 1c would require infinite energy. We don't have that much. But if you double the energy, the perceived travel time will be reduced according to old Newtonian equations. So what if it's in fact the distance that got shortened, instead of speed being increased, ds/dt. You spent enough energy to travel at 2c according to Newton, and in your frame of reference you will get there in half the time as if you were traveling at 1c.
It may be moot for Earth people (50 light years is still 50 years of flight no matter how much energy they pump into the engines), but it means no need for hibernation/cryogenics for the travelers (who will perceive the 50 years as 7 years of ship time).
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The galaxy is really, really, really big. There are lot's and lot's of stars. Really. There are a whole slew of them.
Finding as much interesting stuff as we possibly can now, will help tremendously when we finally have the technology to send probes in a reasonable time.
And developing new techniques for searching for interesting stuff is important as well.
If we listened to you, in 100 years or so when we can send something somewhere, we would just have to cross out fingers, close our eyes, and point somewhere in the sky when picking where to go.
What good does it do to know that habitable exoplanets are out there? Can we send people there? And even if we did ... (rest of depressing post)
Tiger got to hunt
Bird got to fly
Man got to sit and wonder - why, why, why?
Tiger got to sleep
Bird got to land
Man got to tell himself - he understand.
(Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.)
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
They just needed to use neutron bombs on those Navi and mine the stuff in peace....
Damned blue people always getting in the way of progress, first it was the Smurfs and now these Navi things!
Nuke them from orbit, its the only way to be sure!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yavin ...I mean, in the litany of famous gas-giants, this one certainly rates. Not much else could get between the rebels and the first Death Star.
would you not have to start decelerating about halfway there?
I believe a pure sustained fusion rocket might be capable of reaching Centauri stars
The fusion drive is probably the easy part. What to do about hitting a grain of sand at .5c seems to be the harder one.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Looking back at historical examples of human migration on vast scales, the typical amount of time that somebody relocated from say one continent to another was usually on the scale of months, to perhaps a year or two. A trip from Germany or Poland to California in the 1850's took approximately about a year, including travel by ship to one of the eastern US ports, and then overland on foot or wagon.
I note this because that is about the current level of technology in terms of travel to various destinations around the Solar System at the moment, and one of the reasons why I think it is going to be comparatively trivial to make the trip to locations of that nature. Interstellar distances are going to take a leap of logic to move out that far and even with "exotic" but physically possible (Relativity equations don't keep you from making the trip as you suggest) modes of travel. At least right now, if you make a trip to Mars you can cut your losses and return to the Earth even using a Hohmann transfer orbit doing a minimal delta-v flight in a lifetime.... you can do several trips of that nature, much less something with more exotic propulsion like a nuclear rocket engine or something else similar.
Somebody making a trip to Alpha Centauri might be able to make a return trip... if they really care to. But by the time they return home nearly everybody that they cared for would be dead from old age including newborn infants they might have known before they left.
As you have suggested here, it is something possible and within 800 lightyears I'm fairly certain that we might be able to find a place at least as habitable as Mars that would be worth the trip out there to build homes and make a life. My question is.... why would we?
Life would have to be getting pretty ugly here in the Solar System for somebody to be that motivated to travel those kinds of distances.
The 'rule' so to speak isn't for the crew's time experience; it's designed to make sure that its not passed by a faster ship while its still on the way there. I had honestly forgotten, but yeah flying at 90% the speed of light, the crew would only be experiencing a fraction of the time as observed from earth; but again, you don't want to get passed by a faster ship.
"People don't want to learn linux" hasn't been a valid excuse since '03.
Yes, these calculations include that.
4 light years to Proxima, top speed of 2c at halfway point, averaged speed 1c, 4 years to get there. It would be much shorter for a speedy fly-by, accelerating all the time.
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There are 6 billion people. Do you really believe none could be found desperate/crazy/naive enough to want to go there?
btw, Centauri at 1g roundtrip would take 8 traveler's years and only ~12 earth years. Not quite as bad.
Still, with E=mc^2, to get 1kg to 2c equivalent you need to burn 2kg of matter in a nuclear fusion entirely. Plus whatever is needed to bring last of that fuel near the 2c... rocket fuel equations apply. That's why Proxima may be still within reach, further places - not quite.
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I believe if much faster travel is invented during the flight time, a ship will be sent to pick up all the travellers and bring them to destination quickly...
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I'm having a dilemma on whether this should get modded 'Informative'.
Divide a cake by zero. Is it still a cake?
Looking back at historical examples of human migration on vast scales,
Who has ever seriously proposed moving vast numbers of humans between the planets, let alone the stars? Seriously, move a minimal number and breed up a new population at the far end - the work is unskilled and the workforce are generally willing to do overtime.
A trip from Germany or Poland to California in the 1850's took approximately about a year, including travel by ship to one of the eastern US ports, and then overland on foot or wagon.
As a point of fact, I suspect that the trip more often (mode or median ; pick either) took closer to a generation, with people travelling to get onto a boat, using the boat, getting off the boat, settling in the city or in the East somewhere (because they need to make money, approximately now!), finding that was horrible, then moving on to try the lands out West in the next generation.
Not many fleeing a shitty situation in Europe would have been in a situation to sit around and save enough additional money for a wagon and homesteading supplies before leaving the country they're fleeing. As soon as they'd got the boat fare plus a small amount of "travel cash" (maybe as jewellery, not cash, but WTF) then they'd be away.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"