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Mysterious Planet May Be Cruising For a Bruising

Posted by Soulskill on from the mark-your-calendars dept.

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.

16 of 104 comments (clear)

  1. 25 Ly away by richardoz · · Score: 5, Informative

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

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    1. Re:25 Ly away by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

    2. Re:25 Ly away by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

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

    3. Re:25 Ly away by Ol+Biscuitbarrel · · Score: 5, Funny

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

      First post!

    4. Re:25 Ly away by magarity · · Score: 5, Funny

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

    5. Re:25 Ly away by fredrated · · Score: 4, Funny

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

    6. Re:25 Ly away by arth1 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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".

    7. Re:25 Ly away by jxander · · Score: 5, Funny

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

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    8. Re:25 Ly away by EnsilZah · · Score: 4, Funny

      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.

  2. Its a trap! by gmuslera · · Score: 4, Funny

    Thats no planet.

    At least now we know around which star is Alderaan.

    1. Re:Its a trap! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:Its a trap! by fredrated · · Score: 4, Funny

      Have fun when you get there.

  3. Begs the question... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

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

  4. It's not a planet by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:It's not a planet by wierd_w · · Score: 4, Interesting

      *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?

  5. Re:Cruising for bruising? by arisvega · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

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