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Platinum Rhymer
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Platinum Rhymer
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Joined: 20 Jul 2003
Posts: 10
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 Posted: 7/21/2003, 9:53 pm Post subject: A Solar System Resembling Ours |
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A Solar System Resembling Ours
Astronomers looking for planetary systems that resemble our own solar system have found the most similar formation so far. British astronomers, working with Australian and American colleagues, have discovered a planet like Jupiter in orbit round a nearby star that is very like our own Sun. Among the hundred found so far, this system is the one most similar to our Solar System. The planet's orbit is like that of Jupiter in our own Solar System, especially as it is nearly circular and there are no bigger planets closer in to its star.
"This planet is going round in a nearly circular orbit three-fifths the size of our own Jupiter. This is the closest we have yet got to a real Solar System-like planet, and advances our search for systems that are even more like our own," said UK team leader Hugh Jones of Liverpool John Moores University.
The planet was discovered using the 3.9-metre Anglo-Australian Telescope [AAT] in New South Wales, Australia. The discovery, which is part of a large search for solar systems that resemble our own, will be announced today (Thursday, July 3rd 2003) by Hugh Jones (Liverpool John Moores University) at a conference on "Extrasolar Planets: Today and Tomorrow" in Paris, France.
"It is the exquisite precision of our measurements that lets us search for these Jupiters - they are harder to find than the more exotic planets found so far. Perhaps most stars will be shown to have planets like our own Solar System", said Dr Alan Penny, from the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory.
The new planet, which has a mass about twice that of Jupiter, circles its star (HD70642) about every six years. HD70642 can be found in the constellation Puppis and is about 90 light years away from Earth. The planet is 3.3 times further from its star as the Earth is from the Sun (about halfway between Mars and Jupiter if it were in our own system).
The long-term goal of this programme is the detection of true analogues to the Solar System: planetary systems with giant planets in long circular orbits and small rocky planets on shorter circular orbits. This discovery of a -Jupiter- like gas giant planet around a nearby star is a step toward this goal. The discovery of other such planets and planetary satellites within the next decade will help astronomers assess the Solar System's place in the galaxy and whether planetary systems like our own are common or rare.
Prior to the discovery of extrasolar planets, planetary systems were generally predicted to be similar to the Solar System - giant planets orbiting beyond 4 Earth-Sun distances in circular orbits, and terrestrial mass planets in inner orbits. The danger of using theoretical ideas to extrapolate from just one example - our own Solar System - has been shown by the extrasolar planetary systems now known to exist which have very different properties. Planetary systems are much more diverse than ever imagined.
However these new planets have only been found around one-tenth of stars where they were looked for. It is possible that the harder-to-find very Solar System-like planets do exist around most stars.
The vast majority of the presently known extrasolar planets lie in elliptical orbits, which would preclude the existence of habitable terrestrial planets. Previously, the only gas giant found to orbit beyond 3 Earth-Sun distances in a near circular orbit was the outer planet of the 47 Ursa Majoris system - a system which also includes an inner gas giant at 2 Earth-Sun distances (unlike the Solar System). This discovery of a 3.3 Earth-Sun distance planet in a near circular orbit around a Sun-like star bears the closest likeness to our Solar System found to date and demonstrates our searches are precise enough to find Jupiter- like planets in Jupiter-like orbit.
To find evidence of planets, the astronomers use a high- precision technique developed by Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institute of Washington and Geoff Marcy of the University of California at Berkeley to measure how much a star "wobbles" in space as it is affected by a planet's gravity. As an unseen planet orbits a distant star, the gravitational pull causes the star to move back and forth in space. That wobble can be detected by the 'Doppler shifting' it causes in the star's light. This discovery demonstrates that the long term precision of the team's technique is 3 metres per second (7mph) making the Anglo-Australian Planet Search at least as precise as any of the many planet search projects underway.
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Wedge231
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| Posted: 7/22/2003, 7:42 pm Post subject: |
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As a kid, I used to be into stuff like that. I guess we know why I watch Star Wars and Star Trek...
Right now, I usually need some concrete proof to believe anything.
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catman421
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Joined: 23 Apr 2003
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Location: Bangor, Maine
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| Posted: 7/22/2003, 8:30 pm Post subject: |
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I'll believe there are aliens when one of two things happen. 1) Man shakes hands with aliens (or something similar) OR 2) Man blasted to bits by aliens. Thus far neither has happened. Therefore, I cannot say there are, but I would not be surprised if there was life out somewhere.
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Platinum Rhymer
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defska17
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Joined: 01 Apr 2001
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Location: So. Cal (near San Diego)
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| Posted: 7/27/2003, 12:44 am Post subject: |
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Yes, I definitely believe that there is intelligent life out there. I have no reason not to. The way that life came to be on this planet was so natural that it would seem foolish to assume that Earth is the only place in the entire universe where it happened.
As for that nibiru thing. Obviously an ancient myth. Not to say that there isn't something beyond our solar system, a planet X, but that nibiru story was just that, a story:
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| It is populated with a reptilian super-race governed by an elite aristocracy known as "the Nefilim". The general population is known as "Anunnaki" (Sumerian) or "Anakim" (Old Testament). At the time of this event, the Planet Nibiru was being ruled by Emperor Alalu and Empress Lilitu. |
hmmm...no
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Platinum Rhymer
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| Posted: 7/27/2003, 11:41 pm Post subject: |
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yeah that planet x is full of crap
but check this: MULTIVERSE
The universe as we know it just got more complicated
The universe is bigger than we think. This seems to be a cosmic truth. Times change, theories evolve, astronomers see new things in their telescopes—and the universe always turns out to be vaster and more mind-boggling than anyone suspected. The most dazzling new theory holds that our universe isn't just big, it's one of many. It's like a bubble in a huge vat of beer, and every other bubble is another universe. (We like this image for some reason.)
Our concept of the universe used to be tidier. Ancient Egyptians thought the sky was held up by mountains at the corners of the Earth, and the stars were not so far away. But in the 17th century the telescope shattered that notion. Through the lens, the stars were countless, and space had depth. Stars were suns, rendered faint only by great distance. Then, in 1923, Edwin Hubble proved that mysterious, wispy things called nebulae are actually galaxies, or "island universes," outside our own.
New telescopes have since revealed ever more galaxies, and we've grown accustomed to living in Carl Sagan's cosmos, with billions and billions of galaxies, each utterly lousy with stars. But Sagan may have been underestimating.
A satellite called the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe recently captured a glimpse of the residual radiation from the young universe, when there were no galaxies, only perturbations in a seething, expanding cosmos. The data give a precise age to the universe: 13.7 billion years, plus or minus 200 million years. Perhaps more significantly, the data support the idea of cosmic inflation, a variant of the big bang. The inflationary theory states that very early in the expansion the cosmos suddenly inflated, becoming unimaginably vast in a fraction of a second.
If inflation is correct, the universe really is more than a million trillion trillion trillion times larger than the already enormous visible cosmos. It's practically infinite in scale. You have to speak like a child to convey the idea—it's basically a gazillion times larger than we thought. And there's more: One variation of the inflation theory suggests that our universe is a calm bubble, a kind of "no inflation zone" within an infinitely large, chaotic, eternally inflating "multiverse," and that this multiverse contains countless bubble universes, some of which almost surely contain intelligent observers trying to make sense of their own crazy cosmos.
The problem is, a multiverse is a hard theory to prove. "Is this science? Not yet," warns cosmologist Michael Turner of the University of Chicago. "We can't test it."
But here's the most alarming part about living in a multiverse. If the cosmos is more or less infinite in scale, then statistical probabilities dictate that somewhere there's a planet identical to Earth, containing creatures identical to us, leading identical lives.
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