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Nearby Solar System Looks Like Home
sciencehabit writes "Gliese 581 is a red dwarf star just 21 light-years from Earth that boasts a number of planets. Now astronomers are reporting another feature that earthlings would find familiar: a ring of dust far from the star which resembles the Edgeworth-Kuiper belt, a zone of objects, each much smaller than Earth, that lies beyond Neptune's orbit and includes Pluto. The newfound debris disk is about as large as the Edgeworth-Kuiper belt, even though Gliese 581 is small and all of its known planets lie closer to their sun than Earth does to ours. The scientists speculate that the little red star harbors a more remote planet whose gravity stirs up the belt's small objects, causing them to collide and spew the dust that Herschel has discerned."
The summary is the whole article. Also, not that much like us.
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I wonder, if the inner planets of some other systems follow that hypothesis as closely as in the case of the Solar System. Is there any data already about that?
The scientists speculate that the little red star harbors a more remote planet whose gravity stirs up the belt's small objects, causing them to collide and spew the dust that Herschel has discerned.
This seems plausible if the frost line hypothesis is correct. In that case you would always expect to have gas giants stirring up matter on the edge of a solar system. The problem is that many gas giants have been found very close to stars and inside the frost line (the Hot Jupiters). Until there is a good explanation for the Hot Jupiters, I don't think we can just blindly expect to find gas giants beyond the frost lines stirring up asteroids.
Anyone free this weekend for a trip?
I don't see speculation anywhere in the scientific method.
You don't? Perhaps you should reflect on the meaning of the word "hypothesis."
"...however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire"
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You completely disregard the possibility of planets being demolished for an intergalactic superhighway bypas.
Hivemind harvest in progress..
...this is a statistically important discovery. This is a nearby solar system that is remarkably similar to our own. Find a few more like these (and we're well on our way in that department) and you'll have compelling evidence that solar systems like ours are very common. And this, in turn, suggests that habitable worlds are common.
This would leave the Fermi paradox without one of its better possible explanations: that habitable worlds are exceedingly rare.
It also means that human colonies in other solar systems may be more plausible than it currently seems.
Great warrior...hrmph! Wars not make one great.
As others have pointed out, a hypothesis is just speculation that looks good enough to take seriously. My experience is that scientist speculate continuously and wildly. Of course, most such speculations get shot down before they get further than lunchtime gossip. It is when a speculation stands up to quite a lot of lunchtimes that scientists begin to take it seriously and start working on it as a hypothesis. But a speculation is just a baby hypothesis.
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