Slashdot Mirror
Mysterious Planet May Be Cruising For a Bruising
sciencehabit writes "Something is orbiting the bright star Fomalhaut in the constellation known as the Southern Fish, but no one knows exactly what it is. New observations carried out last year with the Hubble Space Telescope confirm that the mysterious object, known as Fomalhaut b, is traveling on a highly elongated path, but they haven't convincingly nailed down its true nature. But if it is a planet, as one team of astronomers thinks, we may be in for some celestial fireworks in 2032, when Fomalhaut b starts to plough through a broad belt of debris that surrounds the star and icy comets within the belt smash into the planet's atmosphere."
Meanwhile, astronomers recently announced the discovery of the most Earth-like exoplanet yet seen, which orbits a G-type star, has a radius 1.5 times that of Earth and a year of about 242 days.
_Everything_ has already happened by the time you've seen it. So what?
Sorry, Formalhaut is in this galaxy. We have yet to find a similar occurrence in a galaxy far away.
As someone who name his computers after stars of importance in Frontier Elite II I approve of all stories about Formalhaut.
Minkowski spacetime does not work that way. There is no "already" in relativity.
By definition, a planet has cleared its orbit of material. If it's colliding with a belt of debris, it obviously hasn't done so.
Have I mentioned yet how unnatural I think this new definition of a planet is? Its primary purpose seems to be to exclude Pluto and other Kuiper Belt objects from planetary status. Size, mass, and composition are all irrelevant and it's now the orbit of the object (and other objects!) that matter. As this article demonstrates, this new definition conflicts with common understanding of the term. The astronomers should have invented a new term to describe this orbital requirement instead of perverting an existing one.