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Fomalhaut's Exoplanets Have Orbits That Defy Theory
astroengine writes "Astronomers believe they have found a second distant planet around Fomalhaut, a bright young neighbor star, and that the far-out world — like its sister planet — is shepherding and shaping the star's ring of dust. If confirmed, theorists have some work to do explaining how the planet, believed to be a few times bigger than Mars, ended up 155 times as far away from its parent star as Earth is to the sun. 'We're learning a lot about planets that are close to their stars, but that is not the full picture. We also want to know about systems where planets are very far out. By considering near-, far- and mid-range, we can get a complete picture of planet formation,' University of Florida astronomer Aaron Boley said."
There was another fascinating bit of news about Fomalhaut a few days ago: "ESA’s Herschel Space Observatory has studied the dusty belt around the nearby star Fomalhaut. The dust appears to be coming from collisions that destroy up to thousands of icy comets every day."
So... what is the theory that its defying? Don't see that part in the summary or in a skimming of the article. All I see is them saying we don't know enough about this yet to even have a theory.
More facts, theories expand.
Love it.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
They're just a little higher on the Kardashev scale than astronomers can imagine.
Meh, I've read about stuff like this since I was a kid.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Astrophysics seems to be an entertaining field - a surprise every other week. Sure beats particle physics.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Since it formed very early on, it's most likely a proto-planet rather than a mature planet. Planetary theory is only designed for mature planets, because statistics doesn't apply to extremely small numbers and extremely small numbers is exactly what you have when dealing with proto-planets. Ergo, the theory cannot be applied sensibly, ergo there is no theory that can be described as being defied.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The only solution is to send researchers there and see if their dead girlfriends start showing up.
It's that small because it used to be big. The Ringworld Engineers had to strip it for mass. All that scrith didn't just come from nowhere, you know.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cthugha
Clearly, this is the explanation. ;)
When I first read the bit about what the planets are doing, my immediate thought was "mining." That's not the interesting part, just a thought I had.
The interesting part: what if I was right, and we carried right on with attempting to jam this observation into our understanding of the universe? What if we saw lots of mining ops, or beacons? (Seems to me they'd be indistinguishable from wacky pulsars unless they were doing some silly "trying to make first contact" trick.) What if we wound up with all manner of complex theories about how things behave in deep space that seem to have nothing to do with the real world? What if we got stuck here because of it?
It feels like something one of the old-school hard-SF authors would've done a short story about at some point. Any recommendations?
Given an infinite universe, should we not expect to see/find just about anything and everything? If it is even remotely possible, then it will be there... somewhere. :-)
So, they are estimating that the number of comets destroyed daily by collisions is somewhere between 0 and 999,999. A little vague, don't you think?
Would this mean that Einstein theories are also wrong? They have challenged his theories for years after taking them to heart!! Off topic something that always bothered me.. If You were to travel back in time, would you actually make it or die off trying? Since you are going back in time would you experience teenage, childhood life then turn into a stem cell and disappear, remembering that the time you are trying to reach maybe a time in which you were never born? Or would you some how defy this and make it safely? I hope they are able to find this out (i will be dead by then) but if I was to be alive I would wonder what the outcome would be. Would time travel be possible? Or are there several earths (or earth like planets) out there that are all experiencing the different phases we have seen, or things that happened to this planet that may have happen to other earth like planets, scientists have guessed over?
Maybe when the Earth was sucking up debris early on it had an orbit much further from the Sun. It seems logical that hitting dust would slow the planet down, and thru the conservation of angular momentum cause it to move further inward toward the Sun. This could be happening around Fomalhaut as well.
Send Kelvin, Snaut, and Sartorius over there on the double.