The Exoplanets That Never Were

StartsWithABang writes In 1992, scientists discovered the first planets orbiting a star other than our Sun. The pulsar PSR B1257+12 was discovered to have its own planetary system, and since then, exoplanet discoveries have exploded. But before that, in 1963, decades of research led to the much-anticipated publication and announcement of an exoplanet discovered around Barnard's star, the second-closest star system to Earth. Unfortunately, it turned out to be spurious, and it took years to uncover, an amazing story which is only now fully coming to light.

Comments

Happy Hump Day from The Golden Girls!

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you for being a friend
Traveled down the road and back again
Your heart is true, you're a pal and a cosmonaut.

And if you threw a party
Invited everyone you knew
You would see the biggest gift would be from me
And the card attached would say, thank you for being a friend.

Re: Happy Hump Day from The Golden Girls!

[Anonymous Coward]

I want my waifu Liru dakimakura so much. I'm traveling and far from home.

Re: Happy Hump Day from The Golden Girls!

[Anonymous Coward]

I go hard in the mothafucking paint nigga

POTUS declared war on ISIL

[Anonymous Coward]

Says, "we will [decapitate] ISIL".

Sounds fair. But will it play on CNN? I want to see this happen like everyone else and can't wait.

Re:POTUS declared war on ISIL

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh, you KNOW that he armed these guys and his cover was blown, right?

Re:POTUS declared war on ISIL

[Anonymous Coward]

We'll try to do it all with air strikes, accidentally kill one or two civilians who were in the wrong place at the wrong time, there'll be an international outcry, and we'll quietly back down and fervently hope those scary ISIL guys will stay over there until we get someone else in the White House in a couple of years.

Re:POTUS declared war on ISIL

[wiredlogic]

Playing both sides sells more guns from the corpor... people that matter.

Re:POTUS declared war on ISIL

[wiredlogic]

More like accidentally kill 100,000 civilians and threaten to cut off anyone in the press corps who dares to bring it up.

Re:POTUS declared war on ISIL

[Anonymous Coward]

Bombing a wedding will do that...

Re:POTUS declared war on ISIL

[thunderclap]

More like accidentally kill 100,000 civilians and threaten to cut off anyone in the press corps who dares to bring it up.

there is a 100k civilians left in Syria? I thought assad killed almost anyone not actively fighting for or against him.

Re:POTUS declared war on ISIL

[thunderclap]

Not like we haven't before.

So close, and yet so far away.

[rmdingler]

You know, we're right on the verge of possessing the technology of an advanced, universe exploring, sentient life form.

Keep that in mind for perspective when the next beheading video hits the internet.

Re:So close, and yet so far away.

[operagost]

Technological advances don't imply moral advances.

Re:So close, and yet so far away.

[thunderclap]

Yea, and yet those evil people in Taiji keep killing them. Its our job to protect the dolphins so can explore the universe. We certainly aren't.

Red dwarfs form from so little matter

[jfdavis668]

I'm not surprised that there are no planets. Red dwarfs form from very small amounts of matter, and don't have the luminosity or stellar wind to stop the in-fall of matter into the central star. I don't doubt they can form, the same way double stars form, but the odds are lower. Just a lot less initial material to start with.

Re:Red dwarfs form from so little matter

[radtea]

I'm not surprised that there are no planets.

Given that we've discovered planets everywhere we never expected planets to be, being "not surprised" at not finding planets is pretty weird. The damned things are everywhere!

Re:Red dwarfs form from so little matter

[erice]

I'm not surprised that there are no planets. Red dwarfs form from very small amounts of matter, and don't have the luminosity or stellar wind to stop the in-fall of matter into the central star. I don't doubt they can form, the same way double stars form, but the odds are lower. Just a lot less initial material to start with.

What a strange statement.

1) The star in question was a pulsar, not a red dwarf.
2) Red dwarfs while small for stars are still much bigger than planets.
3) Exoplanets have been found around red dwarfs
4) Pulsars are the remains of large stars.

Re:Red dwarfs form from so little matter

[Teresita]

Exoplanets are everywhere and the astronomers keep jacking up all our classic science fiction novels set in the neighborhood by revealing the actual layout of the systems...

Re:Red dwarfs form from so little matter

[Trogre]

The star in question is Barnard's Star, a red dwarf.

Pulsar PSR B1257+12 was credited in the summary as an example at the start of the modern explosion in discovering extrasolar planets, not the one that was mistakenly thought to have planets.

Re:Red dwarfs form from so little matter

[able1234au]

Given that Red Dwarves (Dwarfs?) are like large jupiters and jupiter has moons, why would a Red Dwarf not have moon-like objects? Whether we call them planets or moons is just a matter of classification.

Re:Red dwarfs form from so little matter

[Anonymous Coward]

Given that Red Dwarves (Dwarfs?)

Both are usable in that case.
One can argue that "Dwarfs" is more correct, while "Dwarves" have been around for awhile it wasn't really much in use until Tolkien popularized it.
On the other hand, using "Dwarfs" as a noun leads to a situation where a word can mean both a noun and a verb. Consistently using "Dwarves" in the noun case removes that ambiguity.

Re:Red dwarfs form from so little matter

[jfdavis668]

In the case of Jupiter, the original gas cloud is falling toward the Sun. Once the Sun becomes a protostar, the solar wind and light pressure pushes the infalling gas back out, away from the Sun, and toward Jupiter. A red dwarf generates far less wind and light pressure, and there is less stuff to start with. It doesn't mean that planets can't form, it just lowers the probability.

Re:Red dwarfs form from so little matter

[thunderclap]

If we ignited Jupiter, what would happen to the moons orbiting it? Hmm, they would be consumed. That's why red dwarves (hi ho!) have no planets around them.

Re:Red dwarfs form from so little matter

[x_t0ken_407]

But there are examples of exoplanets orbiting Red Dwarfs. Google is your friend.

Re: Red dwarfs form from so little matter

[Anonymous Coward]

No necessarily. Not all moons are close. A Red Dwarf is many times the size of Jupiter and so their moons would be further out.

Re: Red dwarfs form from so little matter

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought that some material would be from been blown back and some would be accelerated as the I falling material spun up the disk. Eventually there is enough material with orbital speed and clumping up so it would not infall. There should be some models out there.

Great, more ammunition for the xians

[Anonymous Coward]

They don't believe in other planets, and now this will "prove" to them that it is all a scam. That is the way of their kind. They not only ignore science, they actively hate it and work against it. Again, a scumbag lying scientist is making our job even harder. Too bad he is dead so we can't put him in prison for this crime.

Amazing story

[manu0601]

I am not sure "amazing story" is something else than marketing here :-)

Most Compelling Reason to Doubt "Consensus"

[fygment]

Science is full of stories like this.
Someone presents a result that catches the imagination. They achieve "great scientific stature".
Someone else quesions the result. They are pilloried while the "consensus" sides with the person of "great scientific stature".
But if there is persistence, sometimes the person of "great scientific stature", and by extension, the "consensus" is proven wrong.

The lesson: "consensus" is meaningless in science. It is desctructive, politically-driven artifact that inhibits the discovery of truth.

Sad fact: Stories like this have happened over and over and over again in science. And we never learn.
Other sad fact: Almost nobody in this forum will recognize the import of this article.

Re:Most Compelling Reason to Doubt "Consensus"

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't know shit. When the results were announced people thought they were flawed. In a few years this was proven definitively.

Your favorite hobby horse of climate science, though, has held up after 200 years of study. Also, it had to overcome the null hypothesis, that humans can't affect the climate. You just haven't bothered to find out what the actual science is, because you're convinced that no one can know it. You are intellectually dishonest. Climate science is not that hard. The concept of AGW comes from a very small set of unequivocally proven facts, mostly the absorption spectrum of carbon dioxide.

You just want to believe that you know something the rest of us don't. Your complete ignorance of science does not help this. If you really want to troll, you have to be more subtle about it. First, accept the general principles of AGW: that a higher partial pressure of CO2 extends the opaque region further into space, effectively trapping heat, and that the increase in CO2 is due to human industry. There is an overwhelming amount of evidence (not consensus) for these things, and the first part is simple enough that you can probably test it yourself experimentally. The trolling part (or the "real" skepticism, if you prefer) comes from suggesting that tail-wagging-the-dog feedbacks with the H2O cycle are net negative. This is on the edge of plausibility, because while a tabletop experimental setup would show a positive feedback (at STP), the Earth as a whole is more complicated, and your claim that the models are inaccurate is more persuasive. More specifically, you can point to studies which show that e.g. increased cloud formation will increase the Earth's albedo enough to offset the CO2-induced warming. Another good one would be Arctic glaciation as a result of the Gulf Stream shutting down, although that may still leave you the issues of [a] climate change, and [b] the fundamental theory still being correct, in that the atmosphere as a whole would retain more energy. Another good troll is that the lower atmosphere is already opaque to IR and that increased CO2 will have no (additional) effect. This is true, but irrelevant, but not many people are aware of it, so you can catch those slimy lieberals and make them look dumb. Take that! Where is your 'science' now?!

Ahem. It's not enough to just say "You're wrong! You can't prove anything!" without accounting for the observations (that CO2 absorbs OLR). Doing that means there's millions of laymen who can tell you you're an idiot. Proposing a subtle flaw (and being explicit about it) means that there's far fewer people who can refute your arguments. If you continue to research and refine your arguments, you will eventually be doing real science, or at least actual scientific skepticism. Just trolling is fine too, but don't settle for this sort of second-rate stuff.

Re:Most Compelling Reason to Doubt "Consensus"

[operagost]

ANNNNNND of course you're modded Flamebait.

I guess you hit a nerve.