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Astronomers Detect Planetary System Similar To Our Own
littlesparkvt writes "A team of astrophysicists at the German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft und- Raumfahrt; DLR), together with German and European colleagues, has discovered the most extensive exoplanetary system to date. Seven planets circle the star KOI-351 – more than in other known planetary systems. They are arranged in a similar fashion to the eight planets in the Solar System, with small rocky planets close to the parent star and gas giant planets at greater distances. Although the planetary system around KOI-351 is packed together more tightly, it provides an interesting comparison to our cosmic home."
All seven planets in the system are inside Earth orbit -- which may lead you to believe they're packed in tight. But one AU is 149,597,870,700m.
The interesting thing is that this means that several of the planets could be inside the habitability zone (KOI-351 is a class G, just like the Sun, and only slightly hotter).
Is that like working with a team of Canadians and also some North Americans?
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Title is a bit misleading. The star is pretty close (based on temp and size, but no spectral type), yes, but all the planets are WAAAAAAAAAAY too close to it to be anywhere near habitable. The ones farther out are Jupiter sized...
Two of the planets closer in are a bit bigger than earth, but at orbital periods of 58 and 8 days, they're a bit too hot for my taste.
tl;dr, the qualifier " packed together more tightly" is a little bit more important than what the summary suggests
Ab amazing example of Hodgkin's law of Parallel Planet Development. The parallel is almost too close, Captain.
"Slashdot commenter finds news story similar to others past"
And say HOWDY !! to the new neighbors !! It will only take ... a few ZILLION YEARS to get there !!
It's always intrigued me that planetary distances (if you include Ceres) follow so neatly to a logarithmic pattern. I wonder if this is something unusual in the solar system.
I had to read the article a couple times, but given that KOI-351 is 2.5k ly from here, I think we're looking at something like 25M years for the fastest intercept we could currently manage.
Even at lightspeed we wouldn't be trading letters anytime soon.
I don't read AC A human right
As near as I can tell, the only planet in this system that is within the habitable zone is KOI-351 b, a Jupiter sized planet. Based on that, it's easy to say: No life in that system! However, as a matter of speculation, what if the planet has a moon similar to Earth? To say that a planet may harbor life is one thing, but we should also consider that very large planets within a systems habitable zone may have Earth sized, life sustaining moons. If planetary discovery has taught us anything, it is that gas giants are likely more common than smaller rocky planets. If that is the case, it may very well turn out the the majority of Earth-sized life sustaining objects may orbit these larger planets, and that our own system is unusual in that our own planet is not orbiting such a thing.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
What I've never really seen discussed is that our methods of detection all rely on what are really rather astonishingly precise circumstances - ie that we as observers are exactly in the ecliptic of the target system.
This system was discovered by transit-dimming, others by spectral variability implying 'wobbling' of the stellar primary. Certainly the former doesn't work if the planet doesn't actually transit the target solar disk, and I don't believe the other works for even small angle-off observers either.
So what are the odds?
Even granting that we're all relatively within a galactic ecliptic, and that this presumably is at least a small factor in the bearing of all our ecliptics, that's a very long way from saying we're all sitting happily in some stellar flatland. Even our own very flat system, an outsider as close as the oort cloud would have to be *astonishingly* lucky to be in a spot where - essentially - more than one planet would eclipse the sun regularly from his/her/its viewing point. And we're doing it at distances hundreds of thousands of times further.
Given that we've already identified thousands of planets with our relatively crude methods, I can't imagine that theoretically we could expect better than a one in a thousand chance that a given target system would be 'arranged' to be something we could detect in the first place, regardless of how well-populated it is with stars?
-Styopa
*sigh* I guess we won't be checking those planets out any time soon.