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.

Comments

Cruising for bruising?

[girlintraining]

Terrible headline aside, I can only hope this time NASA doesn't dub in canned laughter and slapstick noises as it crashes through the front lawn. The soundtrack during the rover touchdown was just terrible, and the reward for watching a bunch of dudes in starch-white shirts with ties and unkept hair was a crappy over-pixelated image of a leg. I mean, hey, if that's what puts the lotion on all the power to you, but I've been underwhelmed so far.

Re:Cruising for bruising?

[arisvega]

Terrible headline aside

Since there may be others that feel this way, in the case of exoplanets here is "the one", all-inclusive resource that even the professionals in the field make use of and cite.

(For the click-lazy:) "The Exoplanet Data Explorer is an interactive table and plotter for exploring and displaying data from the Exoplanet Orbit Database. The Exoplanet Orbit Database is a carefully constructed compilation of quality, spectroscopic orbital parameters of exoplanets orbiting normal stars from the peer-reviewed literature, and updates the Catalog of nearby exoplanets."

Access is granted to all data, and I (hopefully along with other slashdotters) am willing to "translate" from the scientific jargon if something sounds too specialized.

25 Ly away

[richardoz]

For the observable time of 2032, this means it already happened.

Re:25 Ly away

[Anonymous Coward]

_Everything_ has already happened by the time you've seen it. So what?

Re:25 Ly away

[Anonymous Coward]

Minkowski spacetime does not work that way. There is no "already" in relativity.

Re:25 Ly away

[Ol Biscuitbarrel]

_Everything_ has already happened by the time you've seen it. So what?

First post!

Re:25 Ly away

[magarity]

_Everything_ has already happened by the time you've seen it on Slashdot. So what?

Re:25 Ly away

[fredrated]

I knew a physics undergrad that had an existential crisis when he realized everything he sees happened in the past.

Re:25 Ly away

[girlintraining]

First post!

In about 25 years, someone will read this and maybe find it funny. :P

Re:25 Ly away

[arth1]

Minkowski spacetime does not work that way. There is no "already" in relativity.

Correct. I find that most people have a very hard time grasping that time is a local phenomenon, and that there is no universal clock that ticks for both us and distant space. We observe time everywhere as linear, so we think it is both linear and universal.

Words like "since" and "then" can only apply to our local time, and no time has passed "since" the light left the distant star - that "since" is only valid in our time frame, not outside our cone of causality.
Words like "light year" and "light minute" add to the confusion, because in our Newtonian frame of mind we then think that "the" time actually ticks when light goes from A to B, but there is no "the" time.

As Einstein said, "I came to realize that time itself is suspect".

Re:25 Ly away

[jxander]

I haven't had nearly enough coffee for this discussion.

Re:25 Ly away

[swalve]

Words like "since" and "then" can only apply to our local time, and no time has passed "since" the light left the distant star - that "since" is only valid in our time frame, not outside our cone of causality.

If no time passed since it left the star, why did it take so long to get here?

Re:25 Ly away

[the biologist]

No time has passed for the light since it left the star. Time has passed for the star since the light left it.

Re:25 Ly away

[arth1]

If no time passed since it left the star, why did it take so long to get here?

You're begging the question by presupposing "so long".

In what time frame "did it take so long"?
We know nothing about the remote time frame (and they know nothing about ours - the two are not linked).
In our time frame, the light just arrived.
In the light's time frame, no time passed, because it moved at the speed of light, i.e. with infinite time dilation.

A light year is a distance - how far something would hypothetically travel by Newtonian physics going at 299,792.458 km/s for a year. However, Newtonian physics aren't valid for relativistic speeds and distances. It becomes more and more inaccurate as speed increases (due to time dilation), and you cannot reverse it to extract the time from the distance. Because, whose time?

Re:25 Ly away

[arth1]

No time has passed for the light since it left the star. Time has passed for the star since the light left it.

(A) is true. (B) is true if you can define a time on the remote star after the light left the star. From here, we can't. What if a wandering black hole eats/ate the star or flings/flung it at near relativistic speeds? That would change their local time rate.

Re:25 Ly away

[EnsilZah]

Funny, I went to art school and I'm often frustrated by the fact that most of the stuff I see hasn't happened yet.

Re:25 Ly away

[arth1]

Well, if you applied common sense to the original question, instead of trying to get all philosophical, you'd be able to realize that the answer to "whose time" is very easy to figure out - the only one who'se time actually matters here is that of the observer, and the one asking the question. You know - the person for whom time is actually still passing.

In which case, what we see is happening now. Cause that's our time frame.
It did not happen 25 years ago, because that wouldn't be in our time frame.

Unless you're trying to imply that an observer at a star 25 lightyears away would be able to blink their laser pointer at us and have a real-time conversation without 25-year delays, then time does pass, and since time delays have already been shown to happen with such things as the mars rovers, yeah, time does pass from an absolute, observable perspective.

You can only say something about the round-trip time from that, not the actual time flow. You can observe that it took 50 years to get a reply, but that doesn't mean that the signal took 25 years one way. There is no universal time for those 25 years to pass in.
How long something takes one way is meaningless. When a signal gets either there or here, it always arrives now.

Think of it as a black box you put a letter in. It stays locked for 50 days, and then opens with a reply inside it. This is a repeatable observable thing. From that, you cannot say anything about how long delivery took, even if the person replying swears to replying immediately. You may try to game the system, by sending him a clock with a calendar, and ask him to tell you what time it was when he got it. But thing is, 50 days later when you get a reply, it will say that the time on the clock was the same as when he sent it. And even worse, the clock you got back is still showing the same date and time as when you sent it, just a few minutes delayed.

And this does not matter. You can always think about the remote events in your time frame. We see the birth of a remote galaxy as it happens, from our perspective. Which is the only one we have.

Re:25 Ly away

[ceoyoyo]

If you choose a frame of reference you can certainly say that things have happened "already," one thing happens "then" another does, and time has passed "since" an event. Relativity certainly does have an ordering of events (which we like to call causality). The preservation of causality was one of the motivations for relativity.

The OP is correct in stating that this event has "already" happened. It has (or probably has, if nothing intervened), from our particular point of view. His mistake was the smartass tone suggesting that's the ONLY point of view.

Your own position is just as suspect. There certainly is a "the" time, that ticks off 25 years as light goes from Formalhaut to here. It's the one that's indicated on your watch. Not ALL times count the same way, but some definitely do, including the one we're most attached to.

Re:25 Ly away

[icebike]

Plus One.

The GP sounds like a classical example of Poisonous People.

Re:25 Ly away

[Yoda222]

We can solve that by using UTC instead of local time.

Its a trap!

[gmuslera]

Thats no planet.

At least now we know around which star is Alderaan.

Re:Its a trap!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Its a trap!

[fredrated]

Have fun when you get there.

Re:Its a trap!

[CaptSlaq]

Thats no planet.

At least now we know around which star is Alderaan.

25 LY isn't far. We can send all the niggers, spics, baby boomers, political elite, lardasses, and other undesirables to this planet. Imagine how much better off the rest of us will be. Good riddance!

The hitchhikers guide has something to say about that very statement: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minor_The_Hitchhiker's_Guide_to_the_Galaxy_characters#Telephone_Sanitizer

It's not a moon...

[indybob]

It's the DEATH STAR!!!

Re:It's not a moon...

[CanEHdian]

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/secure-resources-and-funding-and-begin-construction-death-star-2016/wlfKzFkN

Secure resources and funding, and begin construction of a Death Star by 2016.

Thank you for taking the time to sign this petition. Due to recent leaks in the press, the Death Star project (previously classified project names included "Sphere of Phear", "Planet Death", "The Killing Ball", "Death Moon", "Giant Hurt Ball" and "Deathticle" has recently been partially declassified under the IEKINLAS provision.

Your administration has begun work on constructing a Death Star at the Formalhaut Space Dock facilities, and work is [CLASSIFIED]. We expect [CLASSIFIED] to mount an [CLASSIFIED] and when [CLASSIFIED] fully commited, it will be revealed that [CLASSIFIED].

Begs the question...

[Anonymous Coward]

With it's unprecedented ability to plow a path the planetary debris belt without losing suction, it must be a Dyson.... sphere.

It's not a planet

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:It's not a planet

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

You don't want "planet" to include all the crap that it would have to include in order to be self consistent and include Pluto. And frankly Pluto is obviously the "odd one out" when looking at the "9 planets". It's got by far the most eccentric orbit, is the smallest, and has very little to distinguish it from a big asteroid/comet. The only reason Pluto was considered a planet for so long was that it was discovered early enough that it was not yet apparent how many similar sized objects existed in the various debris fields in the solar system.

Re:It's not a planet

[wierd_w]

*devil's advocate (lame attempt)

Ok, so basically what you are saying is:

"One of these things is not like the others, but rather than actually give due dilligence to a truly thoughtful definition of what a planet is (and thus, what it isn't) that would apply amid the growing dataset of observed orbiting non-stellar objects, we will just pull something out of our asses because we don't want to let pluto into our arbitrarilly segregated "so definately a planet" club, because we don't want to admit such a dinky object, because if we did, then all that rabble would have to be entered too!"

Here's a better definition for planet.

A substellar mass that has achieved a stable, non-random orbit with a stellar mass, and engages in stable harmonic relationships with other orbiting substellar masses.

That would include pluto, due to its harmonic relationship with neptune, and its orderly orbit, even if that orbit is highly eccentric. It also enables objects like extrasolar hot jupiters to be planets, where arbitrary requirements for the shape of the orderly orbit would cause exclusion; many hot jupiters race in toward their parent stars and get roasted regularly due to highly eccentric orbits. Eccentricity is therefor not a quality to cause exclusion, since eccentric orbits are far more prevelent than nearly circular ones. This drives home the point about stable harmonic relationships with other orbiting masses. Crossing eccentric orbits can be harmonically stable.

So, basically, the GP's post about the definition being made specifically to exclude pluto for nebulous and arbitrary reasons is absolutely true, given that eccentrically orbiting extrasolar masses that cross each other's orbits at intervals are abundantly prevelent in the observed galaxy?

doomsday?

[backslashdot]

I realize the thing is 25 light years away, but surely a large number of people can be tricked into thinking we'll be affected by this somehow. I mean what if there is debris hurtling towards us at near the speed of light the probability of impact is may well be in the one in a googolplexibazillion range but it's still non zero. How many people can understand large numbers? Not many. I say a religion can be formed and money can be made off this.

Re:Life on Earth-like planet

[wonkey_monkey]

Cephalopods know they're not fish.

Meanwhile, Sometime in the past Near Fomalhaut b..

[sl4shd0rk]

K'Breel, speaker for the Council, released a statement:

"Gentle Citizens, today I stand before you proud as a gerlsh in the first heivtning, positively quirlly to bring you the news that our collection device near the Eye of Hoarfrost has nearly completed it's mission. Soon, very soon, we will have amassed the largest collection of Dihydrogen Monoxide in Matter state 3 since the dawn of T'zolar. Rest well Citizens knowing this operation marks the age of time we will finally rid Sector 42-Gamma of the evil blue planet"

A media operative, who asked K'breel for comment about several previous attempts, specifically the notorious Jupitorial 9-stone bungle, was tazed in the gelsac and evaporated. The J9S mission, nearly 20 ages old, is apparently still a sore spot with the council.