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Kepler Finds Bizarre Systems
RedEaredSlider writes "The Kepler Space Telescope has run across some truly bizarre solar systems. Among the candidates: a system with full-on planets orbiting in a Trojan configuration, one with planets that all orbit their planets in less than 10 days, and one in which resonances between small and large worlds essentially keep the thing together."
>one with planets that all orbit their planets in less than 10 days
Yeah, that is bizarre.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Any Klemperer rosettes?
planets orbiting in a Trojan configuration
See! I knew it would finally happen to those Mac guys who think they'll never get a ........
Oh, wait.
We're going to find so many alternatives to what we thought was normal solar system behavior. Perhaps we should have named the spacecraft Kinsey instead of Kepler.
Have gnu, will travel.
Whedon was right? Hundreds of worlds?
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/List_of_Firefly_planets_and_moons
I was having trouble imagining the 8:6:4:3 resonance pattern, so I dug out this very cool visualisation: http://www.princeton.edu/~rvdb/WebGL/KOI-730.html (needs a WebGL-capable browser, for some reason FF 4 doesn't work though).
Yo Dawg, I heard you like orbits, so I put a planet on your planet so you can orbit while you orbit!
We are not sure if the Solar System is typical or not. With 1200 planet candidates so far and a possibility of 10x more in the next few years, kepler should build a statistical database of what is typical and atypical. They systematically watching a fixed region of space of 155K stars for planetary transits. This region of he galaxy does have a bias toward our type of Suns. And the technique is biased toward large, fast, close-in planets.
10 days around our Sun:
2.43 million miles per hour
365 days around hour Sun:
66.6 thousand miles per hour
Purdy quick either way I'd say.
NASA, you guys have it pointed backwards.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
... one with planets that all orbit their planets in less than 10 days
Yo Dawg... I heard you like planets. So we put a planet in your planets so you can orbit while you are resonating!
The solar systems are bizarre only from a subjective viewpoint of considering our solar system normal. It could be that a solar system with near circular orbits and with small, rocky planets near the star and gas giants further away is actually unlikely and bizarre.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
For some reason I was reminded of Asimov's "Nightfall". It's sounding just a little less far-fetched now.
I think that we will find that all solar systems are strange, including our own. It appears that planetary formation is a fairly chaotic process.
The way I figure it, the more bizarre the better. We learn a lot more from the systems that challenge our conventional definitions than ones that tend to fit what we already think we know.
What good is the article without pictures? (Well, an artist's conception doesn't really count.)
TFA states "The Kepler Space Telescope observes stars to see if they show a planetary body transiting in front of them. Thus far it has discovered more than 1,200 planets and candidates. It has found the first evidence of a rocky body, and seen the first multi-planet systems."
Even the first ever detected planets were in a multi planet system (albeit around a pulsar, certainly not somewhere you'd necessarily expect to find intact planets) PSR B1257 and Gliese 581 was found to have six planets before Kepler was even launched.
Still a great telescope and a great project. Hopefully its results will get the out of mothballs.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
But that's no moon, that's an unusual solar system.
No.
Although Mercury is not tidally locked to the Sun, its rotational period is tidally coupled to its orbital period. Mercury rotates one and a half times during each orbit. Because of this 3:2 resonance, a day on Mercury (sun rise to sun rise) is 176 Earth days long.
http://www.solarviews.com/eng/mercury.htm
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Probably not. These are not models of complicated things (like solar system formation). These are models to explain periodicities seen in light curves due to transiting planets., so it's just a matter of figuring out periods and amplitudes. A complicated case might be mis-interpreted, but there is no way that a simple case (i.e., one planet) will appear complicated (i.e., lots).
You can call them planetary systems or even star/stellar systems if you refer to their stars, but they are definitely not "solar" systems since they are... well... extrasolar!
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
Forget the horrible summary.
I set the comment slider to 2.5 (what the heck does that mean, anyway?). At this threshold, I'm supposed to see four comments. Instead, there's only one.
Can someone please fix this?
Yes, I know I'm off topic, but where is this on topic? I'm finding /. less readable with the new style, which breaks the usability of the site. Therefore, I just go to /. less frequently. :-(
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
That is that many revolutions of the galaxy since condensation. So any parental object or cloud may be long lost. Maybe not: astronomers are a clever bunch.
The Kepler statistics so far have constrained a "minimal radius" of orbit. There is a big decline below that. I presume the planets are either eroded by the super-hot corona, or tidally broken in too close an orbit.
The Italian astronomer Schiaparelli concluded, based on observations in 1882/83, that Mercury was tidally locked (albeit with a large libration), and thus had an 88 day rotation period. This was in all of the textbooks, and many science fiction stories, for about 80 years. In 1965 radar observations of the planet showed that this conclusion was wrong. The leading versus trailing edge Doppler shift in the radar data showed immediately that the rotation period was 59 days, although Gordon Pettengill told me once that they didn't believe it at first, assuming the old optical period had to be correct and there had to be some sort of error with the radar data.
In the case of Mercury, the period of rotation of the planet, and its synodic period with Earth, means that every other observing opportunity shows the same side of Mercury to the Earth. Ground based Mercury observations are notoriously hard, and Schiaparelli must have seen the same features (his famous "figure 5") on multiple observations, and concluded that the planet was tidally locked, ignoring any discordant observations from the "in between" observations. I can't find a link, but Sky and Telescope for March has an article on Schiaparelli which goes into this in detail.
I just checked my Bible, and there's nothing in there about any of this.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
The post consists of one sentence with 53 words! You can't expect him to look at all of those words before posting!
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
I'm surprised this isn't getting more coverage. This is one of the biggest advancements in astronomy we've seen in years.
That's no syphilis ...
If you look at the profile of the original submitter, he's fairly new to Slashdot and has submitted many dozens of articles, but the ONLY SOURCE he has ever referenced has been IBTimes. I believe there's one or two more like him. IOW, they're being paid by IBTimes to do this.
Given the indirectness of the method, I'm worried that these discoveries might someday go the way of the Martian Canals.
Wow... I'll bet you can bend forks with that mind just as easily, huh?
"one with planets that all orbit their planets"
My, that IS excitingly confusing news.
The idea of evolving past economics sounds like a nice idea, but I doubt it'll ever happen. Economics is, at its heart, all about the exchange of resources: You have something I want, I have something you want, so we make a trade, and right there's economics. So, unless someone comes up with some kind of infinite resource that can provide all needs to everyone, there will always be a need for exchange of some sort.
If the submitter is in the employ of IBTimes he should probably get a better grasp of the English language before posting any more stories for them.