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50 New Exoplanets Found, Billions More Await

Posted by Soulskill on from the billions-and-billions dept.

The Bad Astronomer writes "Astronomers using a sensitive spectrograph have just announced the existence of 50 more planets orbiting nearby Sun-like stars. The important things to note: 1) Sixteen of them are super-Earths, and 2) 40% of all Sun-like stars appear to have at least one planet with less mass than Saturn."

3 of 208 comments (clear)

  1. Great Super Earths. by jellomizer · · Score: 4, Funny

    That is the last thing I want to hear. All full of Life forms that are use to gravity much greater then what we are use full. If they beat us to space they will land on earth being smarter and stronger then us. I like the Old Grays small stature and wimpy. Sure they may have massive mental powers but I can really whack them hard with a big stick.

    --
    If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
    1. Re:Great Super Earths. by vlm · · Score: 4, Funny

      ... the increase in gravity isn't all that much: "For example, a planet with 5 times Earth’s mass but twice the radius ...

      So, they're saying its kind of like the difference in average weight between shopping at Target vs Walmart? I guess thats OK then.

      --
      "Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
  2. about HARPS by ThorGod · · Score: 4, Informative

    This is likely to be informative:

    "HARPS is the ESO facility for the measurement of radial velocities with the highest accuracy currently available. It is fibre-fed by the Cassegrain focus of the 3.6m telescope in La Silla.
    The instrument is built to obtain very high long term radial velocity accuracy (on the order of 1 m/s). To achieve this goal, HARPS is designed as an echelle spectrograph fed by a pair of fibres and optimised for mechanical stability. It is contained in a vacuum vessel to avoid spectral drift due to temperature and air pressure variations. One of the two fibres collects the star light, while the second is used to either record simultaneously a Th-Ar reference spectrum or the background sky. The two HARPS fibres (object + sky or Th-Ar) have an aperture on the sky of 1"; this produces a resolving power of 115,000 in the spectrograph. Both fibres are equipped with an image scrambler to provide a uniform spectrograph pupil illumination, independent of pointing decentering."

    1.) It's an optical telescope.
    2.) It's on the face of the earth (I find this amazing.)

    I got the impression from Frank Drake's book that astronomy was 'best done' by satellite radio telescope.

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    PS: I don't reply to ACs.