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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.
They can search for things because the candidates show a difference which suggests you should look closer.
How the hell can you search for nothing to then use that to help you find something?
The false positives can be pared down with closer looks. There is no way in hell you can look at all of the stars, determine they don't have planets, and then use that to find the stars which might have planets.
The ONLY way forward on that is by finding anything which might be a positive, false or otherwise, and then exclude things which were false.
But you sure as hell can't look at every star, rule them out as having planets, and then use that list to find the ones which do have planets -- that's completely backwards.
I'm pretty sure if there was a better way to be looking, they'd be doing it.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
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."
More importantly, they found something using the technique. The technique worked.
That they then looked closer and said "wow, not a planet, but another star" doesn't mean anything other than we're getting remarkably good at identifying candidates and then figuring out what they actually are.
I'd say it's a great success, because they're actually finding things to look closer at. If some of those turn out to be not planets, but still actual things, then the technique is working just fine.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.