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posted by
martyb
on Wednesday November 14 2018, @10:33PM
from the with-an-oink-oink-here-and-a...oh,-wait dept.
from the with-an-oink-oink-here-and-a...oh,-wait dept.
Exoplanet discovered around neighbouring star
Astronomers have discovered a planet around one of the closest stars to our Sun.
Nearby planets like this are likely to be prime targets in the search for signatures of life, using the next generation of telescopes.
The planet's mass is thought to be more than three times that of our own, placing it in a category of world know as "super-Earths".
It orbits Barnard's star, which sits "just" six light-years away.
Writing in the journal Nature [DOI: 10.1038/s41586-018-0677-y] [DX], Guillem Anglada Escudé and colleagues say this newly discovered world has a mass 3.2 times bigger than the Earth's.
Also at phys.org.
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Exoplanet Detected Around Barnard's Star, 6 Light Years Away
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(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 14 2018, @11:12PM (11 children)
The headline should be: "Astronomers observe flickering starlight and interpret it as an exoplanet". This method has never been independently verified.
(Score: 5, Informative) by edIII on Thursday November 15 2018, @12:21AM (2 children)
Independent verification is most likely impossible for the foreseeable future, and possibly all of humanity's future.
That being said, we can definitely tell it is an object. There is no way for the flickering starlight to be flickering simply because of the star. That would be some rather extreme behavior I don't think has been noted. The flickering itself is consistent with large objects in stable orbits. So not just flickering, but flickering according to a pattern that makes sense to astrophysicists. We can reasonably conclude to that the object is most likely a planet, or something that would fall into the definition of a planet.
In other words, something cast the "shadow" on us, and is therefore some kind of object.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 15 2018, @01:09AM
Not my problem, they still need to validate any new methodology before trusting it. Its fine to take it as preliminary best guess, but not like how this news article treats it.
(Score: 2) by cmdrklarg on Thursday November 15 2018, @05:18PM
There are some that have been directly observed. These are exoplanets larger than Jupiter however.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_directly_imaged_exoplanets [wikipedia.org]
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(Score: 2) by Entropy on Thursday November 15 2018, @12:34AM (2 children)
How do you expect them to detect a planet other than by starlight?
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Thursday November 15 2018, @12:52AM
So far radio waves have been pretty succes, um, oh wait.
nevermind
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 15 2018, @02:03AM
They probably have to send a probe to the nearest one, predict what it should look like, image the planet, then send back the image. If the guess at what it looks like (and it even exists) is good, then great.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Thursday November 15 2018, @12:56AM (2 children)
No method has been, or can be, until we manage to visit one of the stars in question.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 15 2018, @01:00AM
Yep, someone has to go visit one of these planets and send a pic back to see how right they were.
(Score: 2) by dry on Thursday November 15 2018, @09:18PM
The right telescope should work to verify a planet is actually there. What it looks like is outside of the scope of these discoveries.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday November 15 2018, @01:17AM
That's what they were using the Mt. Wilson Sixty Inch for when I was at Tech. The objective was to infer sunspot activity.
I expect planet transits are different from sunspots because the spectrum doesn't change. Sunspots appear black because they are cooler; that would also shift their Blackbody Spectrum towards the red.
The really hi-res photos of the sun are taken with a polarizing monochromator. That's an exceedingly narrow bandpass filter. Pro filters use alternating layers of Polaroid and optically flawless quartz crystals. But the Hoi Polloi can buy one made out of Calcite for two or three grand. I don't clearly remember how they work but the were written up in Ingalls' "Amateur Telescope Making" because they are within reach of exceedingly experienced amateur opticians.
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(Score: 3, Informative) by Immerman on Thursday November 15 2018, @05:13PM
Actually, planetary detection methods HAVE seen independent confirmation. Well, I couldn't swear to *this* method since they didn't mention what it was, but there are several different, completely independent techniques used to detect exoplanets, and they have all independently verified the existence of various planets, providing the independent confirmation you want.
One of the most successful methods are to detect the faint dipping of a stars brightness when a planet passes directly between us and the star. Find a dip in the brightness that repeats with a very precise period and amplitude, and you've probably found a planet. There's no known process that would cause such stable rhythmic dips in a star's output. Though for smaller planets it can be difficult to identify the dips among the noise of normal brightness fluctuation, and it does require that we be looking at the orbital plane almost perfectly edge-on, well never see the planet transit the star.
The other extremely successful method ignores brightness altogether, and instead looks at the color of the star. Specifically at the doppler shift of that color as the star wobbles around it's shared center of mass with the planets. When the planet is moving away from us, the star is moving towards us, blue-shifting the star's spectrum. Similarly, when the planet is moving towards us, the star is moving away, red-shifting the spectrum. And since we have various vary precise reference points in the spectrum, such as the hydrogen lines, we can measure the doppler shift very precisely, with no possibility of other noise clouding the signal.
Two completely different techniques for detecting exoplanets, and they have independently detected many of the same planets, confirming their validity. Now, that doesn't necessarily translate to *every* planet, as the techniques have different strengths and weaknesses, so that many planets can only be detected by one or the other, but the basic methodologies have been independently verified.