SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
A exoplanet has been discovered (paywalled) that is called "LHS 1140b" and it's deemed a super earth. It lies in the Goldilocks zone where water is in an accessible fluid phase. The atmosphere, however, also plays a critical role, as can be demonstrated with the planet Venus. Seven exoplanets had been found two months ago orbiting TRAPPIST-1, but LHS 1140b is deemed exceptional. Jason Dittmann, an astronomer at Harvard University that lead the research group, says it's the most interesting exoplanet he has seen in the past decade. In contrast with the TRAPPIST-1 star, LHS 1140 spins slowly and does not emit much high-energy radiation, which may also help the likelihood of life on its planet.
The planet is circa 5*10^9 years old, 500*10^6 years older than Earth. The diameter is 40% larger, the mass 6.6 times that of Earth, and gravity is 3.4 times that of Earth.
The first exoplanet was discovered in 1995 and since then at least 2000 has been discovered.
Many more details are available in a research letter (pdf).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 22 2017, @04:51AM (10 children)
Life everywhere. We estimate there are millions of planets with intelligent life. We haven't begun to map them. Interesting?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 22 2017, @05:16AM (8 children)
Useless since we cannot meaningfully get to any of them in less than 1000's of years, even at light speed this one would be half a lifetime just to get there so if you started at birth..
Until we can get around light speed interstellar travel is mostly meaningless
(Score: 2) by melikamp on Saturday April 22 2017, @06:27AM (3 children)
Actually, close to light speed the time dilates so that it actually looks similar to the original Star Wars: the travel time of the speeding observer compresses into seconds if the speed is high enough. The universe ages by as many (light)years as you travel, but for you it feels like stepping into an elevator.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_dilation#Space_flight [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 22 2017, @11:09AM (2 children)
Actually, close to light speed the time dilates
Actually, who cares? Your spacecraft would be reduced to dust. Look up "relativity" sometime and how high speed impacts would destroy you and your spacecraft rather quickly.
Reality is conventional travel is completely impractical for interstellar distances.
(Score: 4, Funny) by art guerrilla on Saturday April 22 2017, @11:42AM (1 child)
uh duh: deflector shields and tractor beams avoid 100% of all collisions, i have it on good authority of a certain engineer on the USS Enterprise...
*snort* noobz...
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Saturday April 22 2017, @05:20PM
Tractor beam didn't stop the Bozeman, only decompressing the main shuttlebay did
(Score: 2) by Ramze on Saturday April 22 2017, @07:03AM (3 children)
Meaningfully within your lifetime, but perhaps it's meaningful on civilization time-scales. We can send a probe that might return data within a few hundred years. That may seem futile because you'll be dead when you get the reply, but it might be meaningful to those that are alive when the data arrives. It could significantly help astrophysicists with their understanding of how planets and solar systems form. It might change the world's religious beliefs if we find signs of life there. Maybe, if we're extremely lucky, we might even make contact with another civilization -- perhaps even one millions of years older than ours with technology beyond our understanding... and they might loan us a copy of their planetary database to peruse.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 22 2017, @07:18AM (2 children)
while interesting the utility is in question, we understand orbital mechanics well, and anything further away is not really relevant, does it really matter if alpha century operates under different laws of physics than here? not to us it doesn't, don't get me wrong I support sending probes if we can (which we probably can't) but lets not live in magic land, until and if we can find a way around the speed of light we are here and we will likely never be able to do more that 1/10 c so that makes alpha centary more than 40 years each way and this star 400 years away, I could be wrong but we are very bad at making even simple things that last that long never mind extremely complex spacecraft
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday April 22 2017, @07:57AM
If you talk about utility, you have to say: Utility for what? Because if you follow that chain, you'll always end up at some ultimate goal that has no utility, but is desired for itself.
In this specific case, the ultimate goal is understanding the world. It's the one goal that distinguishes us from the other life forms on this planet.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 22 2017, @01:04PM
while interesting the utility is in question, we understand orbital mechanics well, and anything further away is not really relevant, does it really matter if alpha century operates under different laws of physics than here? not to us it doesn't
I'd think that discovering that laws of physics are local would be a very important observation. After all, stuff in space tends to move around, explode, irradiate, etc.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 22 2017, @09:19AM
Life everywhere. We estimate there are millions of planets with intelligent life. We haven't begun to map them. Interesting?
Interesting? Not really. We hypothesize that there are many planets with life but have yet to find evidence of any forms of life on any other planet, moon or space rock - not even within our own solar system.
I guarantee you that once we find extraterrestrial life, and the efforts by governments and religious groups to denounce it fail, we will put a pin in our map of the Universe to mark it.
(Score: 4, Informative) by stormwyrm on Saturday April 22 2017, @05:51AM (2 children)
At that mass, it’s more probable that it looks more like Neptune rather than Earth [forbes.com]. The transition from being a rocky world like Earth to a gaseous one like Neptune occurs at just twice the Earth’s mass:
If you’re more that twice the mass of Earth and you receive the same amount of energy from your star, you’ll be able to hold onto a substantial hydrogen-and-helium envelope of gas, creating an atmospheric pressure that’s hundreds or even thousands of times as great as what we have on Earth’s surface.
Earth and Venus are just about at the high end of rocky planets [forbes.com]. Something less than 2 to about 0.6 earth masses either way is rocky. Something from 2 to 130 earth masses is something more like Neptune or Uranus. Something from 130 to 8% of the sun’s mass is more like Jupiter, and anything above 8% of the sun’s mass will be massive enough to ignite nuclear fusion and become a star unto itself.
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Ramze on Saturday April 22 2017, @07:27AM (1 child)
I do agree that with that sort of gravity, it's very likely that the atmosphere is very dense -- probably very like Venus in density.... but it's hard to say. Venus is smaller than Earth, but has a much denser atmosphere... which means Earth could support an even denser atmosphere than Venus! Yet, ours is fine. This new planet could probably support an incredibly dense atmosphere, but that doesn't mean it has to be that way.
Either way, the surface gravity is expected to be 3.4 times Earth gravity... which means humans won't be able to live there unless they're Olympic weightlifters.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Saturday April 22 2017, @07:53PM
Perhaps the capture of the moon had something to do with thinning the atmosphere? It does seem like the atmosphere should be a lot thicker unless something stripped a lot of it away.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 22 2017, @05:56AM
A revenue-generating planetary blockade?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 22 2017, @06:00AM
Make it mandatory in the form? We see these regularly.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by wonkey_monkey on Saturday April 22 2017, @10:54AM (16 children)
The planet is circa 5*10^9 years old, 500*10^6 years older than Earth.
Not the most helpful way of writing "5 billion" and "500 million"...
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 22 2017, @11:13AM (7 children)
The planet is circa 5*10^9 years old, 500*10^6 years older than Earth.
Not the most helpful way of writing "5 billion" and "500 million"...
Agreed. They should have at least wrote it as 5e9 years old and 5e8 years older than Earth.
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Saturday April 22 2017, @11:32AM (3 children)
On the contrary, if scientific notation had to be used, I think the power should have been kept the same - 5e9, 0.5e9 or 5x10^9, 0.5x10^9.
And what's so dangerous about the <super> tag that means we're not allowed to use it?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 3, Funny) by bart9h on Saturday April 22 2017, @01:18PM
If some normal html tags are dangerous, imagine the super tags!
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 22 2017, @03:08PM (1 child)
And what's so dangerous about the <super> tag that means we're not allowed to use it?
Nothing dangerous, you're just not allowed to use it unless you spell it <sup>.
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Saturday April 22 2017, @09:21PM
Ooops
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Saturday April 22 2017, @12:17PM (2 children)
The reason to use different magnitudes is to preserve the number of value numbers. But I think the hint of using say 5e9 is a good idea.
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Saturday April 22 2017, @01:56PM (1 child)
The reason to use different magnitudes is to preserve the number of value numbers.
Eh? If you mean the length of the prefix, then that didn't work here, since one is 5 and the other is 500...
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 22 2017, @04:15PM
I think GP's "value numbers" is another term for what I know as "significant figures" or "significant digits".
There are several benefits of exponential notation, and several forms or means of applying it, depending which of those benefits is pursued.
In proper scientific notation, the mantissa (or significand) is always in the range 1 ≤ x < 10, so there are never any "placeholder" trailing zeros. Any digits after the decimal point indicate additional accuracy. This avoids the ambiguity of whether "50" (or "50 * 10n") denotes a number known to a single digit ("5 * 10n+1") or two ("5.0 * 10n+1"). I think this is what GP was talking about.
In what is sometimes called engineering notation, the mantissa ranges from 1 ≤ x < 1000, and the exponent is a multiple of 3. This maps nicely to SI units, but can exhibit ambiguity for anything with 3 or fewer significant figures. Some people will use the next larger unit (thus "0.5 * 106", "0.50 * 106", or "0.500 * 106", instead of "500 * 103"), making significant figures unambiguous, but this is not common.
And sometimes it's helpful to use the same exponent, to make it easy to compare or add/subtract two numbers, even when this violates the rules of scientific or engineering notation. Frankly, I don't have much time for this or the rest of the whole xkcd.com/558/ [xkcd.com] thing. In my perspective, if someone can't or won't understand that a 10 billion is bigger than 100 million, then I see their innumeracy (and of course the education system that failed them) as the real problem, not everyone else's failure to dumb specific things down enough for them. Then again, if you're trying to communicate with innumerate fools, you have to do what you can to get through.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Saturday April 22 2017, @12:13PM (7 children)
Is that a American billion or European billion ?
It becomes a numerical fog quickly and thus I avoid such unclear terms.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 22 2017, @01:08PM
How about "megayears" and "gigayears", I occasionally see those :)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by wonkey_monkey on Saturday April 22 2017, @01:54PM (5 children)
Since the text is in English, and the English-speaking world pretty much exclusively uses billion to mean 1,000,000,000 these days, it's not that ambiguous.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 2, Disagree) by kaszz on Saturday April 22 2017, @03:46PM (4 children)
It could be British English which would make it 10^12. Which meaning that is used is un-deterministic.
(Score: 3, Informative) by isostatic on Saturday April 22 2017, @05:17PM (1 child)
Whenever you see the word billiion in Britain, it means 1,000 million.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Saturday April 22 2017, @08:34PM
When you see the word "billiion" in Canada, it means WTF, but with 'eh?' added on.
Billiion? Wtf, eh?
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Saturday April 22 2017, @09:15PM (1 child)
It could be British English which would make it 10^12.
No it wouldn't, and it hasn't for many, many years.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 24 2017, @02:11AM
Yup, not since at least around 1974. That was the time when the UK government began using the short scale [millbanksystems.com] (1 billion == 109) in official documents:
The Prime Minister here was Sir Harold Wilson. Before then the short scale was already seeing widespread colloquial use, and after the government began using it officially in 1974, use of the long scale (1 billion == 1012) dwindled in Britain and today is just about extinct. No English-speaking country today uses the long scale (India officially uses neither scale, they have their own system for number words such as lakh, crore, etc), though other languages (such as Spanish and French) use number words that reflect the long scale.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Saturday April 22 2017, @08:32PM
Gravity is 3.4x earth:
I've fallen and i can't get up... And I'm only 19 years old!!!
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Saturday April 22 2017, @09:18PM (1 child)
The planet is circa 5*10^9 years old, 500*10^6 years older than Earth.
For some reason I thought it was <super>, but it's actually <sup>, and this is exactly the kind of thing it should be used for:
The planet is circa 5*109 years old, 500*106 years older than Earth.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday April 23 2017, @12:38PM
Well, you could also use the right multiplication sign:
Or if you prefer:
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.