Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: LordPomposity on October 16, 2012, 07:21:01 pm
-
European astronomers have discovered a planet with about the mass of the Earth orbiting a star in the Alpha Centauri system — the nearest to Earth. It is also the lightest exoplanet ever discovered around a star like the Sun. The planet was detected using the HARPS instrument on the 3.6-metre telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile. The results will appear online in the journal Nature on 17 October 2012.
http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1241/
Now where's FlamingMamba? :p
-
This was embargoed until just a few minutes ago, I actually think people are freaking out right now about who broke the embargo.
'All stars have planets' continues to bear out!
-
Let's conquer it and wipe out all non-human sentient life on it just to make sure there won't be any Na'vi.
Nuking the site from orbit is sadly not acceptable because it does not allow colonization.
-
Embargoed? I'm afraid I don't comprehend...
-
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=035cpHEowS4
That is all.
-
Embargoed? I'm afraid I don't comprehend...
When news organizations are issued a statement from, say, a scientific laboratory, it's often issued with an embargo statement: 'don't report on this until such and such time today' to guarantee that everyone gets a fair chance to report on it.
-
Let's conquer it and wipe out all non-human sentient life on it just to make sure there won't be any Na'vi.
Meanwhile on said Alpha Centauri planet:
"Centauri astronomers have discovered a planet with about the mass of Alpha Centauri orbiting a star in the Sol system — the nearest to Alpha Centauri"
"Let's conquer it and wipe out all non-Centauri sentient life on it just to make sure there won't be any Na'vi."
-
Well in that case we'll just have to make common cause with our hatred of space elves. I propose we at HLP do our bit by having Spoon shot. Sorry Spoon, them's the breaks.
-
What? No, space elves are great. Catpeople are the problem.
-
Well in that case we'll just have to make common cause with our hatred of space elves. I propose we at HLP do our bit by having Spoon shot. Sorry Spoon, them's the breaks.
(http://i.somethingawful.com/forumsystem/emoticons/emot-frog.gif)
-
We can't let infighting tear us apart! What if we compromise and target all humanoids with pointy ears? That way we also get rid of the Vulcans!
Also I don't have any personal quarrel with Spoon! It's for the good of humanity, there's no other way.
-
I don't know but I've been told,
Deirdre's got a Network Node.
Likes to press the on-off switch,
Dig that crazy Gaian witch!
-
I don't know but I've been told,
Deirdre's got a Network Node.
Likes to press the on-off switch,
Dig that crazy Gaian witch!
Goddamn it Redsniper, I was going to make the Alpha Centauri reference but noooooooo!
-
Unless the planet has some funky heat shield, it's too close to harbor life... unless Tholians. :nervous:
Also, your nonsense about eradicating space elves is just as foolish wishing to eradicate Vasudans, we'd loose so much culturally!
-
I don't know but I've been told,
Deirdre's got a Network Node.
Likes to press the on-off switch,
Dig that crazy Gaian witch!
Goddamn it Redsniper, I was going to make the Alpha Centauri reference but noooooooo!
ironbeer got you both!~
-
We can't let infighting tear us apart! What if we compromise and target all humanoids with pointy ears? That way we also get rid of the Vulcans!
Also I don't have any personal quarrel with Spoon! It's for the good of humanity, there's no other way.
I don't think you quite understand but he's the Goddamn Spoonzer Elite. About the only thing xenos scum soil themselves in fear of more is The E. He's a cold metal menace and I'd take my chances against any extraterrestrial threat backed by the dread armor of the one known as Spoon...
-
wow another fireball that we cant get to. let me know when we find a habitable planet that we cant get to.
-
If you threw yourself into a fireball that you can get to, I'm sure nobody would mind.
-
Don't make me start having to enforce the niceness rules again.
-
This is absolutely amazing!
Grats to the portuguese who were part of the discovery!
(yeah and all the others as well lol)
-
wow another fireball that we cant get to. let me know when we find a habitable planet that we cant get to.
Here you go, have a bunch of them.٭ (http://phl.upr.edu/projects/habitable-exoplanets-catalog)
٭ potentially habitable as determined by ESI (http://phl.upr.edu/projects/earth-similarity-index-esi); obviously we don't know everything about them yet
-
I propose we at HLP do our bit by having Spoon shot.
If you threw yourself into a fireball that you can get to, I'm sure nobody would mind.
:wtf:
Wtf is your problem, man?
-
I sense a DarthWang among us.
-
All right, let's not try to solve the issue by all dogpiling on Phantom after I've told him to stop either.
-
Hey now, I'm no happier with having Spoon shot than anyone else. I just recognise that we may have no choice if we want humanity to survive.
-
I for one welcome our new Cyrvan overlords.
-
QUISLING!
-
(http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41nw8gtE7zL._SL500_AA300_.jpg)
So Anti-Communist space elves, eh?
-
This awesome thread is getting ****ted up pretty quick.
(http://s1102.photobucket.com/albums/g449/Ironcitadel99/parkourcreed.gif)
Toodles.
-
I for one welcome our new Cyrvan overlords slaves.
fixed!
-
Here's a gif for you Iron Beer! Made it myself for teh internetz.
But enough nonsense, let's get this back on topic (if it's still relevant?)
[attachment deleted by a basterd]
-
It never ceases to amaze me just how sensitive the measurements for exo-planet discoveries have become. To detect this planet they had to measure an induced radial velocity on the star of 0.51m/s. That's less than half of the average human's walking speed!
Not to mention all the data reduction and removing unwanted signals from the other star and so forth. Truly an amazing accomplishment. :)
-
It never ceases to amaze me just how sensitive the measurements for exo-planet discoveries have become. To detect this planet they had to measure an induced radial velocity on the star of 0.51m/s. That's less than half of the average human's walking speed!
Not to mention all the data reduction and removing unwanted signals from the other star and so forth. Truly an amazing accomplishment. :)
Indeed! :yes:
The planet may be burning hot, but there optimistic hope that there's another Earth-like planet out there. (Like Gliese and Kepplar, etc) :)
-
I wonder, for a planet so (relatively) close to our own star system, what kind of- How big would a telescope have to be in order to detect an earth-sized planet by direct observation in the Alpha Centauri system?
I'm just thinking. This is awesome and all, but that planet is obviously roasty-toasty in a way that Venus could only dream about. That close to its primary, I wonder if it would even have an atmosphere at all, or if would have been boiled away by a) heat and b) blasted off by the solar wind? This is an awesome find and I do not want to diminish that in any way, but the technique used to detect this planet was pushed damn close to the limit. If there were an earth-sized planet in the habitable zone, would there be a way to detect it other than direct observation?
Also wondering if having Alpha Centauri A so nearby could serve the same function as Jupiter does in our own system for clearing out potential meteors, or is the separation too great?
-
As a technical challenge it's probably not huge. We've imaged planets much further away than this. Might be difficult to mask both stars of the binary so they don't wash it out, but that's really the only problem I can see.
-
It'll be interesting to see if it can be colonized sufficiently and can be terraformed to our advantage. Oh and if there's mindworms. I don't feel like getting a horrible death from those things. :P
Whatever the case, the chance we'll find a really good second home planet seems to be getting bigger, the more they can detect earth-like planets. Too bad we lack subspace or other more-than-FTL to get there in any sensible amount of time it seems.
-
It'll be interesting to see if it can be colonized sufficiently and can be terraformed to our advantage.
can be terraformed to our advantage.
can be terraformed???
Umm... did you miss the bit where it says that it is roughly ten times closer to its primary than Mercury and has an orbital period (year) shorter than 78 hours? Or perhaps the bit where it says the surface temperature is at least 1500K, well above the ignition temperature for most organic compounds?
Unless you have figured out a way to move Earth-sized masses into orbits roughly 1 AU (close enough!) higher without destroying them utterly in the process, there are probably better candidates for terraforming. :p
-
I'm no astronomer but I bet if we study this new planet a bunch we can make Mars jealous enough to put out a magnetic field.
-
Now there is an interesting question. How does one go about producing a planetary magnetic field on a planet that has no intrinsic one of its own?
-
drill down to the core and drop a giant ****ing magnet down the hole.
-
inb4 melty molten galaxy
The planet is in no way habitable... but can we mine the **** out of it?
-
This planet is in no way habitable but.... can we mine the **** out of it?
No more than we can mine Mercury. Which is a shame, since that place is rich in radioactives, precious metals, huge lumps of base metals, just sitting on the surface in giant nodules. Plus it's way closer than Io.
-
drill down to the core and drop a giant ****ing magnet down the hole.
Yeah, Star Trek logic.
-
I wonder, for a planet so (relatively) close to our own star system, what kind of- How big would a telescope have to be in order to detect an earth-sized planet by direct observation in the Alpha Centauri system?
NGTM-1R is pretty much correct. In terms of angular resolution it is within our ability, but by far the biggest problem is the enormous contrast between the star(s) and planet(s).
Back of the envelope calculation:
This planet is 0.04AU from its star, and the star is 1.34pc away. The separation angle is thus tan-1(1.94x10-7pc/1.34pc) or 0.03 arcseconds.
The resolving power of a circular aperture is given by sin(Θ) = 1.22λ/D where λ is wavelength and D is diameter of aperture. For .03 arcseconds, and viewing in visible light (say 530nm for green), that requires a diameter of about 4.5 meters. There are numerous optical telescopes larger than this, the largest I believe is LBT at about 12 meters.
Better yet is if you consider a hypothetical planet around Alpha Centauri with an orbital distance of 1AU (that's not necessarily the best place for habitability in this case, but whatever). The point is this would be separable from the star with a telescope only 7 inches across! I could achieve this with my 8" scope in my backyard! Right? Well, actually no, because we have to consider how bright is the planet relative to the star. Stars are pretty damn bright and trying to pick out the planets next to them is like trying to spot the feeble glow of a firefly right next to a bigass searchlight.
Let's consider again a hypothetical planet orbiting 1AU from Alpha Centauri B. The contrast between the planet and its star is just the ratio of their luminosities. In visible light the luminosity of the planet is the solar flux at the planet times the planet's cross sectional area. We can write this as
(http://i.imgur.com/h0XIX.png)
where rp is planet radius and a is its orbital distance.
Crunch the numbers and the contrast for an earth-size planet at 1AU from its star is about 4.5x10-10. 45 billion times fainter!
ed: Also that's a best-case scenario where the planet is seen in full phase and has 100% reflectivity. In reality it'd be even worse. The contrast problem can be overcome by a number of methods though, such as observing in infrared wavelengths, or observing hotter and larger planets, and using an occulting disk to block out the star's glare.
I'm just thinking. This is awesome and all, but that planet is obviously roasty-toasty in a way that Venus could only dream about. That close to its primary, I wonder if it would even have an atmosphere at all, or if would have been boiled away by a) heat and b) blasted off by the solar wind?
With earth's mass and 1500°C it probably cannot retain an atmosphere with nitrogen, water vapor, or other such volatiles. I'm not completely sure, but I think that might even be hot enough to form a fabled 'silicate atmosphere', where the atmosphere is literally vaporized rock. :eek2:
This is an awesome find and I do not want to diminish that in any way, but the technique used to detect this planet was pushed damn close to the limit. If there were an earth-sized planet in the habitable zone, would there be a way to detect it other than direct observation?
Yes, but it would be much easier in the case of star systems with transiting planets, as the gravitational perturbations from undiscovered planets will cause tiny variations in the transit times of the planets we already found. This is the same principle that allowed us to accurately predict the existence and location of Neptune. :)
Also wondering if having Alpha Centauri A so nearby could serve the same function as Jupiter does in our own system for clearing out potential meteors, or is the separation too great?
Nah, it's too far away. Also if it could clear out miscellaneous asteroids then it would disturb the orbits of the outer planets as well. At best it could affect the orbits of stuff waaay out in the Oort Cloud; I think I recall a paper discussing the possibility of comets getting transferred between star systems in this manner.
-
drill down to the core and drop a giant ****ing magnet down the hole.
Yeah, Star Trek logic.
drill down to the core and plant nukes in it. :P
-
This planet is in no way habitable but.... can we mine the **** out of it?
No more than we can mine Mercury. Which is a shame, since that place is rich in radioactives, precious metals, huge lumps of base metals, just sitting on the surface in giant nodules. Plus it's way closer than Io.
Who says we can't mine Mercury? All you have to do is stay on the night side. Roving mining stations a la Nkllon, anyone?
And @ watsisname and NGTM-1R, thanks! Very cool information.
-
drill down to the core and drop a giant ****ing magnet down the hole.
Yeah, Star Trek logic.
drill down to the core and plant nukes in it. :P
BLUE MATTER.
Blue matter creates magnets. Red Matter creates black holes. Green matter creates bunnies.
-
Green matter creates bunnies.
From what I've heard, green matter creates cravings for chocolate bars and Doritos. :P
-
:blah: + :pimp: = omnomnom (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxaHE7p99yg#t=2m03s)