Not quite. The telescopes are indeed strong enough to see the planet. In fact, you can look up in the sky and see a few of them with the naked eye. The problem is that the star is too damn bright in comparison. Also, due to atmospheric blurring effects, it is very hard to seperate the planet from the star as a light source.
Well, your interpretation is flawed. Gravity is not an instantaneous force, it propogates at the speed of light.
Also, gravitational effects would shift all of the absorption lines they see uniformly, whereas what is observed is a relative shift between different sets of lines in the same atoms, which requires changes in the fine structure constant.
While I'm glad that some good anime (case in point Cowboy Bebop) is getting some 'mainstream' play, there's a dark side to CN's airing of the shows:
1) The dubbing of most anime is crud. For shows like CB, you get a great feel for the characters when you can hear the original voice acting, since much more thought goes into voice acting selection for the original as opposed to the dub.
2) Again, using CB as an example: The editing. If you're gonna put a show in 'Adult Swim', then let it stay true to it's original release form. Bebop's had an entire episode yanked (for quite a silly reason) and a numbre of scenes cut. Granted, I don't want Cartoon Network to become a hentai crap-flood, but if you make the decision to put a show on, put the damn thing on as it was meant to be seen.
I bring up these points since often times it's quite easy to dismiss some really quality anime when you dont have the complete experience.
Dang, you beat me to it. Your point also reminds me of Cringley's article predicting the MS version of TCP/IP.
This, to me, may be the Achilles heal to a variety of the MS 'services' in the future. They trump the security for a while, everyone jumps onto Passport, and when the dang thing gets crakced big-time, heads may not roll, but they'll certainly wobble a bit.
To throw in a rampantly naive question from my end: Since I don't actually know much about security platform to platform, just how much emphasis on security goes into say BSD or Linux? Do the bulk of open source developers out there start with the frame of mind "How do I make a secure 'Program X'?" or is it "How do I make 'Program X' secure?"
1) The sodium bit: It's not that the planet's atmosphere is mostly sodium, it's just that sodium is rather easy to detect as compared to other elements (we use it to identify stars all the time). Also, given the spectral coverage of STIS (the spectrograph used to make the measurement), Na was probably the only strong line they could go for in one setting.
2) Why this is a big deal: Yes, we know there are gas giants elsewhere, but that's not the point. It's more of a proof of concept that we can measure the properties of an atmosphere of a planet outside the solar system. Plop a more sensitive instrument up there and you can go for smaller planets....and hopefully find signatures of methane and oxygen...boo-yah.
3) The unexpected bit (from the astronomers point of view) Hubble found it. Hubble's great and all, but spectra is not it's bread and butter. Most of us in the astro community were betting on Keck to find this first since a 10 meter on the ground with larger spectral coverage kicks the crap out of a 2.5 meter (Hubble)
Not to nitpick, but the anisotropies didn't lead to decoupling. Decoupling occured simply because the temperature of the universe fell low enough.
The anisotropies are important since they lead to structure formation, since if the universe were truly homogeneous and isotropic (FRW cosmology), structure wouldn't form, and we wouldn't have Stallman bashing M$FT.
The breakthrough in these observations is that the experiments measured the higher acoustic 'peaks' in the CMB, allowing for tighter bounds to be placed on various cosmological parameters (like the density of baryons, dark matter, etc.)
Slashdot Mirror
Baryons = normal matter, i.e. atoms. Punchline is that only 4% of the universe is made of stars.
Dark Matter = fudge factor we need to explain why galaxies rotate the way they do, and clusters of galaxies act the way they do.
Dark energy = even bigger fudge factor used to explain why, on large scales, the universe is not only expanding, but accelerating in it's expansion.
Not quite. The telescopes are indeed strong enough to see the planet. In fact, you can look up in the sky and see a few of them with the naked eye. The problem is that the star is too damn bright in comparison. Also, due to atmospheric blurring effects, it is very hard to seperate the planet from the star as a light source.
Hey, get back to fisting clowns ya freak!
Also, gravitational effects would shift all of the absorption lines they see uniformly, whereas what is observed is a relative shift between different sets of lines in the same atoms, which requires changes in the fine structure constant.
They're also gearing up to try some obs w/ the iodine cell in at Keck to really firm up the wavelength solutions.
VLT data would be best though, I agree.
While I'm glad that some good anime (case in point Cowboy Bebop) is getting some 'mainstream' play, there's a dark side to CN's airing of the shows:
1) The dubbing of most anime is crud. For shows like CB, you get a great feel for the characters when you can hear the original voice acting, since much more thought goes into voice acting selection for the original as opposed to the dub.
2) Again, using CB as an example: The editing. If you're gonna put a show in 'Adult Swim', then let it stay true to it's original release form. Bebop's had an entire episode yanked (for quite a silly reason) and a numbre of scenes cut. Granted, I don't want Cartoon Network to become a hentai crap-flood, but if you make the decision to put a show on, put the damn thing on as it was meant to be seen.
I bring up these points since often times it's quite easy to dismiss some really quality anime when you dont have the complete experience.
Dang, you beat me to it. Your point also reminds me of Cringley's article predicting the MS version of TCP/IP.
This, to me, may be the Achilles heal to a variety of the MS 'services' in the future. They trump the security for a while, everyone jumps onto Passport, and when the dang thing gets crakced big-time, heads may not roll, but they'll certainly wobble a bit.
To throw in a rampantly naive question from my end: Since I don't actually know much about security platform to platform, just how much emphasis on security goes into say BSD or Linux? Do the bulk of open source developers out there start with the frame of mind "How do I make a secure 'Program X'?" or is it "How do I make 'Program X' secure?"
1) The sodium bit: It's not that the planet's atmosphere is mostly sodium, it's just that sodium is rather easy to detect as compared to other elements (we use it to identify stars all the time). Also, given the spectral coverage of STIS (the spectrograph used to make the measurement), Na was probably the only strong line they could go for in one setting.
2) Why this is a big deal: Yes, we know there are gas giants elsewhere, but that's not the point. It's more of a proof of concept that we can measure the properties of an atmosphere of a planet outside the solar system. Plop a more sensitive instrument up there and you can go for smaller planets....and hopefully find signatures of methane and oxygen...boo-yah.
3) The unexpected bit (from the astronomers point of view) Hubble found it. Hubble's great and all, but spectra is not it's bread and butter. Most of us in the astro community were betting on Keck to find this first since a 10 meter on the ground with larger spectral coverage kicks the crap out of a 2.5 meter (Hubble)
Not to nitpick, but the anisotropies didn't lead to decoupling. Decoupling occured simply because the temperature of the universe fell low enough.
The anisotropies are important since they lead to structure formation, since if the universe were truly homogeneous and isotropic (FRW cosmology), structure wouldn't form, and we wouldn't have Stallman bashing M$FT.
The breakthrough in these observations is that the experiments measured the higher acoustic 'peaks' in the CMB, allowing for tighter bounds to be placed on various cosmological parameters (like the density of baryons, dark matter, etc.)