While it is possible, it would probably be extremely unlikely. The odds are pretty slim for a planet to be stripped from one star and then captured again by another star. Space is just too damn empty, on average there is only 1 star per cubic parsec and the orbit of earth is 1/206625 pc.
Interactions with other giant planets in the system are probably the most likely explanation as they talk about in the article. Three-body interactions can have pretty crazy outcomes, astrophysically and for life in general:)
That is one of the most ridiculous statements I have ever heard. It's a completely invalid comparison. The planet was already known to have a transiting exoplanet so it's not like it was dumb luck. As someone pointed out this verifies that everything on the spacecraft is working properly. To date, lots of transiting exoplanets have been found and it's not luck, it's statistics that tell us there will be more.
The best theoretical resolution at 100 microns will be 7.2 arcseconds, limited by the size of the main mirror. Hubble can do 0.05 arcseconds at 0.5 microns (visible light). This may not seem all that impressive, but it about 4 times better than previous far-infrared observatories. And the instruments on-board are significantly more advanced than anything ever used for far-infrared astronomy.
Yes, they were taken with one of the main instruments, PACS. PACS has been switched on since shortly after launch. Yes, the cover was only just opened, but this was one of the objects they viewed shortly after the cover was opened. M51 was chosen because they could directly compare it with Spitzer Space telescope images taken at similar wavelengths.
Considering that this image was taken while the main mirrors were still quite warm and not down to operating temperatures, this observatory is going to do great things once fully operational.
Sounds nice but it would not work for a few reason.
1. The orbits are very different, Hubble is higher and at a different inclination.
2. The sharp images need excellent stability of the spacecraft. Hubble's resolution of 0.1" is the equivalent to spotting a dime 40 miles away. Astronauts and all the equipment running on the ISS would cause lots ot stability problems for sharp imaging.
The problem with this idea is that you will have to send people to put it together. And you still need to launch all the pieces.
So you'll have combined cost launching the pieces and people. Whereas building it on earth, you have all the engineers to put it together and then put it up all in one shot.
Until there is a manufacturing base out in space which probably will not happen for a long long long time, you still have to design and test everything on the ground. This is because you can't afford to launch a faultly part, this is true if you are sending the whole thing up or putting it up in pieces.
You have the basics right. But it gets complicated because anything in the light path between the star light going into the telescope until it hits the detector is going to contribute to the point spread function, or point response function. Which is basically the diffraction pattern made by a point source on the focal plane. Hubble's PSF can be a bit more complex because of the corrective optics in each instrument.
You are right that we could do this 10 years ago, but we probably have a much better model for the point spread function now than we did then.
The inclination of the ISS orbit is too great with respect to the plane of the solar system. If I remember right it's inclined by 56 degrees to allow the Russian rockets easier access.
With this orbit it's essentially useless for a "dry dock" since too much energy would have to be expended in changing the inclination to match the solar system.
One major problem that the author ignores is cosmic rays. In Low Earth Orbit, the ISS is protected from cosmic rays and the solar wind by the Van Allen belts. If you move it out to the moon it won't have this protection any more and the occupants would be exposed to high energy particls much more so than in low earth orbit. I'm not sure of the level of shielding on the ISS but it's probably insufficient to protect the crew.
One thing not mentioned at all in the article is that not much money is spent on SETI. The budget is in millions of dollars, for some reason people have a skewed view, thinking that SETI is costing billions of dollars. SETI does a lot with very little. Also, the new Allen Telescope Array is multi-purpose. It will be used for science as well as searching for ET.
I think one reader asked the question why things which don't directly impact society at all are funded. Science in its purest form is the search for truth. The quest for knowledge has been a constant in our culture for thousands of years. While the effect on everyday life is sometimes imperceptible, in the long term science has changed our entire world view several times over.
The writers of this article forget that space is mostly empty. It's obvious that something escaping our solar system will come within a few light years of a star. On average there is about one star per 3 light years cubed (1 star per cubic parsec). Even if the rocket stage passed very close to a star, the likelihood of impacting a planet is very slim since a solar system is again, mostly empty space.
For those of you that don't know, Hubble still has two working instruments, the Wide Field Planetary Camera (WFPC2) and NICMOS. Both instruments are very capable of still doing good science. In fact, until 2002 the beautiful images we see were mostly from WFPC2, ACS wasn't installed until the last servicing mission. NICMOS is a near-infrared camera and still works fine. I would assume that repairing ACS would be a big priority now since its camera provided the best scientific data.
For those of you questioning whether or not Hubble should be serviced or just wait for James Webb, you ought to know that Hubble and James Webb will not cover the same wavelengths. Hubble covers UV, visible, and near-infrared. James Webb will cover Near to mid-infrared. James Webb can't do all the science that Hubble can and vice versa. However, ground-based adaptive optics imaging are hoped to be able to provide image quality as good as Hubble by the time it is ready to be retired sometime in the next decade. Also, because of the atmosphere, from the ground, we cannot observe all the infrared wavelengths that James Webb will be able to.
If you had done your research on this before speaking, you would find that except for one or two exceptions, all extrasolar planets have been indirectly discovered. They were discovered by using spectroscopy over a sometimes long period of time,depending on the planet's orbit. The shift in the spectral lines over time allows observers to calculate the radial velocity of a star with respect to the center of mass of the planetary system. This information in turn infers that there is a planet orbiting the star and certain characteristics such as mass of the planet, eccentricity of the orbit, and distance from the star. www.howstuffworks.com has a very simple description of extrasolar planet searching.
Also, the Spitzer space telescope has directly confirmed the existence of already known planets that were discovered using the indirect method. It is possible with the Spitzer telescope rather than Hubble because stars put out much less light in the infrared than in the visible wavelengths.
I've been using RAID 5 with a 3 18 GB SCSI drive setup for about 6 months now, it works very fast and reliably.
The best advice I can give is to make sure each drive has its own channel if you are on standard ATA, you didn't specify SATA or regular ATA. If you're using SATA then all the drives get their own channel by design. If you have more than one IDE device on a channel in a RAID, performance will suffer because IDE can't write to both devices on the channel simultaneously.
In a quote from AMD's CEO taken from http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=15605: "And he said that next year its dual chip Opteron-whatever will "shock the hell" out of everyone because it will be pin compatible, hardware compatible and otherwise compatible with existing motherboards."
So I'm reasonably sure that current Opteron/Socket 940 users will be able to use Dual-core chips as long as the bios supports it.
Hmmmmm, the US doesn't like outside nations trying to impose thier values on us. Maybe our gov't will get a clue and quit doing that to other countries now, but I think not, americans are far too arrogant.
All the code is coded for DX8 and DX9. It would probably be very difficult for programmers that don't know the code inside and out to rewrite the DirectX engine code to OpenGL.
All these allegations that SCO has been making really sounds like McCarthyism. If I recall correctly from history, nothing conclusive was found from the McCarthy hearings and I trust nothing will be from these hearings.
The Windows version didn't work right for some reason, maybe because it was running in windows. The Linux version is GREAT, in fact the rendering is faster than it was in windows. I'm looking forward to the full version.
I was wondering if anyone has upgraded from 7.1. I happy with my install now but would like some of the new features such as KDE 2.0. I was wondering how pain(less/ful) the upgrade process is.
I have gotten 3D acceleration to work properly with the Matrox G400 but some games lock it up or won't run with Xfree86 4.0.1. Unreal Tournament locks it up and so does Heavy Gear 2. Quake 3 runs pretty much rock solid with good frame rates.
Slashdot Mirror
While it is possible, it would probably be extremely unlikely. The odds are pretty slim for a planet to be stripped from one star and then captured again by another star. Space is just too damn empty, on average there is only 1 star per cubic parsec and the orbit of earth is 1/206625 pc.
Interactions with other giant planets in the system are probably the most likely explanation as they talk about in the article. Three-body interactions can have pretty crazy outcomes, astrophysically and for life in general :)
That is one of the most ridiculous statements I have ever heard. It's a completely invalid comparison. The planet was already known to have a transiting exoplanet so it's not like it was dumb luck. As someone pointed out this verifies that everything on the spacecraft is working properly. To date, lots of transiting exoplanets have been found and it's not luck, it's statistics that tell us there will be more.
The best theoretical resolution at 100 microns will be 7.2 arcseconds, limited by the size of the main mirror. Hubble can do 0.05 arcseconds at 0.5 microns (visible light). This may not seem all that impressive, but it about 4 times better than previous far-infrared observatories. And the instruments on-board are significantly more advanced than anything ever used for far-infrared astronomy.
Yes, they were taken with one of the main instruments, PACS. PACS has been switched on since shortly after launch. Yes, the cover was only just opened, but this was one of the objects they viewed shortly after the cover was opened. M51 was chosen because they could directly compare it with Spitzer Space telescope images taken at similar wavelengths.
http://herschel.esac.esa.int/SneakPreview.shtml
Considering that this image was taken while the main mirrors were still quite warm and not down to operating temperatures, this observatory is going to do great things once fully operational.
Sounds nice but it would not work for a few reason.
1. The orbits are very different, Hubble is higher and at a different inclination.
2. The sharp images need excellent stability of the spacecraft. Hubble's resolution of 0.1" is the equivalent to spotting a dime 40 miles away. Astronauts and all the equipment running on the ISS would cause lots ot stability problems for sharp imaging.
The problem with this idea is that you will have to send people to put it together. And you still need to launch all the pieces.
So you'll have combined cost launching the pieces and people. Whereas building it on earth, you have all the engineers to put it together and then put it up all in one shot.
Until there is a manufacturing base out in space which probably will not happen for a long long long time, you still have to design and test everything on the ground. This is because you can't afford to launch a faultly part, this is true if you are sending the whole thing up or putting it up in pieces.
You have the basics right. But it gets complicated because anything in the light path between the star light going into the telescope until it hits the detector is going to contribute to the point spread function, or point response function. Which is basically the diffraction pattern made by a point source on the focal plane. Hubble's PSF can be a bit more complex because of the corrective optics in each instrument.
You are right that we could do this 10 years ago, but we probably have a much better model for the point spread function now than we did then.
Well, it was observed with multiple telescopes, so it's not an artifact. The full paper can be found here: http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0809/0809.1648v1.pdf
The inclination of the ISS orbit is too great with respect to the plane of the solar system. If I remember right it's inclined by 56 degrees to allow the Russian rockets easier access.
With this orbit it's essentially useless for a "dry dock" since too much energy would have to be expended in changing the inclination to match the solar system.
One major problem that the author ignores is cosmic rays. In Low Earth Orbit, the ISS is protected from cosmic rays and the solar wind by the Van Allen belts. If you move it out to the moon it won't have this protection any more and the occupants would be exposed to high energy particls much more so than in low earth orbit. I'm not sure of the level of shielding on the ISS but it's probably insufficient to protect the crew.
One thing not mentioned at all in the article is that not much money is spent on SETI. The budget is in millions of dollars, for some reason people have a skewed view, thinking that SETI is costing billions of dollars. SETI does a lot with very little. Also, the new Allen Telescope Array is multi-purpose. It will be used for science as well as searching for ET.
I think one reader asked the question why things which don't directly impact society at all are funded. Science in its purest form is the search for truth. The quest for knowledge has been a constant in our culture for thousands of years. While the effect on everyday life is sometimes imperceptible, in the long term science has changed our entire world view several times over.
The writers of this article forget that space is mostly empty. It's obvious that something escaping our solar system will come within a few light years of a star. On average there is about one star per 3 light years cubed (1 star per cubic parsec). Even if the rocket stage passed very close to a star, the likelihood of impacting a planet is very slim since a solar system is again, mostly empty space.
For those of you that don't know, Hubble still has two working instruments, the Wide Field Planetary Camera (WFPC2) and NICMOS. Both instruments are very capable of still doing good science. In fact, until 2002 the beautiful images we see were mostly from WFPC2, ACS wasn't installed until the last servicing mission. NICMOS is a near-infrared camera and still works fine. I would assume that repairing ACS would be a big priority now since its camera provided the best scientific data.
For those of you questioning whether or not Hubble should be serviced or just wait for James Webb, you ought to know that Hubble and James Webb will not cover the same wavelengths. Hubble covers UV, visible, and near-infrared. James Webb will cover Near to mid-infrared. James Webb can't do all the science that Hubble can and vice versa. However, ground-based adaptive optics imaging are hoped to be able to provide image quality as good as Hubble by the time it is ready to be retired sometime in the next decade. Also, because of the atmosphere, from the ground, we cannot observe all the infrared wavelengths that James Webb will be able to.
If you had done your research on this before speaking, you would find that except for one or two exceptions, all extrasolar planets have been indirectly discovered. They were discovered by using spectroscopy over a sometimes long period of time,depending on the planet's orbit. The shift in the spectral lines over time allows observers to calculate the radial velocity of a star with respect to the center of mass of the planetary system. This information in turn infers that there is a planet orbiting the star and certain characteristics such as mass of the planet, eccentricity of the orbit, and distance from the star. www.howstuffworks.com has a very simple description of extrasolar planet searching.
Also, the Spitzer space telescope has directly confirmed the existence of already known planets that were discovered using the indirect method. It is possible with the Spitzer telescope rather than Hubble because stars put out much less light in the infrared than in the visible wavelengths.
I've been using RAID 5 with a 3 18 GB SCSI drive setup for about 6 months now, it works very fast and reliably.
The best advice I can give is to make sure each drive has its own channel if you are on standard ATA, you didn't specify SATA or regular ATA. If you're using SATA then all the drives get their own channel by design. If you have more than one IDE device on a channel in a RAID, performance will suffer because IDE can't write to both devices on the channel simultaneously.
I have a cabin on Blaisdell lake about 20 miles from the ELF station. Hopefully this means fishing will get better!
In a quote from AMD's CEO taken from http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=15605: "And he said that next year its dual chip Opteron-whatever will "shock the hell" out of everyone because it will be pin compatible, hardware compatible and otherwise compatible with existing motherboards."
So I'm reasonably sure that current Opteron/Socket 940 users will be able to use Dual-core chips as long as the bios supports it.
With China not going to the moon, is NASA's new program going to be scrapped since there aren't really politics involved anymore?
Hmmmmm, the US doesn't like outside nations trying to impose thier values on us. Maybe our gov't will get a clue and quit doing that to other countries now, but I think not, americans are far too arrogant.
All the code is coded for DX8 and DX9. It would probably be very difficult for programmers that don't know the code inside and out to rewrite the DirectX engine code to OpenGL.
All these allegations that SCO has been making really sounds like McCarthyism. If I recall correctly from history, nothing conclusive was found from the McCarthy hearings and I trust nothing will be from these hearings.
The Windows version didn't work right for some reason, maybe because it was running in windows. The Linux version is GREAT, in fact the rendering is faster than it was in windows. I'm looking forward to the full version.
I was wondering if anyone has upgraded from 7.1. I happy with my install now but would like some of the new features such as KDE 2.0. I was wondering how pain(less/ful) the upgrade process is.
I have gotten 3D acceleration to work properly with the Matrox G400 but some games lock it up or won't run with Xfree86 4.0.1. Unreal Tournament locks it up and so does Heavy Gear 2. Quake 3 runs pretty much rock solid with good frame rates.