Slashdot Mirror


More Than Half of Kepler's Giant Exoplanets Were False Positives

StartsWithABang writes: By surveying an area of the sky containing over 150,000 stars visible to it, the Kepler satellite monitored each one over a multi-year period looking for periodic changes in brightness. Thousands of planetary candidates emerged via the transit method, where periodic dips of 3% or less were noted with regularity. However, a follow-up study has come out on the giant exoplanets, finding that over 50% of them aren't giant planets after all, but wound up being eclipsing binary stars. Perhaps our lone star Solar System is the oddity, after all.

2 of 88 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Giant science lever set to "Republican" no doub by tarpitcod · · Score: 5, Funny

    The "Giant science lever" settings guide.

    Republican - Cite crappy statistics.

    Democrat - Cite the fact the launch vehicle was Government funded.

    Socialist - Cite the fact that the mission is peaceful and Government funded.

    Libertarian - Cite the fact that you can choose if you want to read the article or not.

    Capitalist - Cite the fact that the planets are new markets just waiting for buy refrigerators and huge untapped market.

    Old Slashdot - Cite the fact that the featured article is kinda crappy, has crappy thinking, and that in your day you could have figured this out on an HP-35 quicker and more accurately, but you have used your HP-35 as a controller for a Beowulf cluster of MIPS processors you desoldered from old crappy routers.

    New Slashdot - Cite the fact that citing facts is a micro-aggression against everyone else who might disagree with any of the facts, and complain that MIPS is unfairly represented and RPN is an elitist system hardly better than the slide-rules which killed trees that it replaced. Start the reply with "TLDR - Micro-aggressions from old calculator RPN using nerds harmful to community cohesiveness."

  2. Re:Confirmation bias by GrumpySteen · · Score: 4, Funny

    Any sufficiently advanced troll is indistinguishable from an idiot.