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posted by martyb on Saturday April 22 2017, @04:32AM   Printer-friendly

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).


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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 22 2017, @04:15PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 22 2017, @04:15PM (#497954)

    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.

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