A Puffed-Up Extrasolar Planet 60
Maggie McKee writes, "New Scientist Space reports astronomers have found a planet less dense than a wine cork and 38% larger than Jupiter. It circles a star about 450 light years from Earth. A similarly bloated planet has been found before (HD 209458b), so these puffed-up planets may be quite common. But no one knows how they got so swollen. One possibility is 'that some poorly understood mechanism has separated hydrogen and helium in each planet.'"
Bloated? (Score:4, Funny)
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it's like a piece of candy (Score:2)
probably not much of a rocky core
Actually.... (Score:1)
Astronomers... (Score:5, Funny)
Reminds me of an old joke. An astronomer, a physisist and a mathematician are traveling on a train through Scotland. Through the window of the train they notice a black sheep.
"Aha," shouts the astronomer. "In Scotland, all sheep are black."
"Nonono, " says the physist. "We only know that there are black sheep in Scotland, not that all scottish sheep are black."
The matematician looks furiously at the other two and almost screams "In Scotland there is at least one sheep with at least on black side!"
Re:Astronomers... (Score:5, Insightful)
When you consider that they've only observed an infinitesimally small portion of the universe, seeing two of the same thing suggests that there's a good chance there are more of them.
Re:Astronomers... (Score:5, Informative)
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But if you find TWO, it is much more likely that the rate is actually in the ballpark indicated by your sample.
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I'm curious to see your reasoning for this. If you know that your sampling is not representative of the population, or you have a reason to suspect a bias which makes it more likely that you are finding instances of the "something" than if you had a lot more samples available, sure, I'd agree with your reasoning.
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Let's suppose you have hat, with numbers in it. There are 10 tens and one each of 0-9. Each number 0-9 is relatively rare, compared to the 10s.
So let's draw a sample from the hat. Our probability of drawing a 10 is 10/20 or 50%. Our probability of drawing a NOT 10 is also 10/20. Suppose we draw two samples, one is a ten, one is a 3. Not knowing anything about the numbers in the hat (how many there are, how many of each kind there are or even W
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We've observed around 180 exoplanets via Doppler and have ten which perform transits; how many do we have to observe before we start getting a feel for the more common
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Once you see two quite similar ones you can be much more confident that puffy planets are actually somewhat common. If you see nine regular planets and two puffy ones it's unlikely that the puffy ones are actually very rare, which is why the astronomer in the article is speculating that they might be common.
There could easily be LOTS of
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Finding ten regular planets and one puffy one gives you an idea that most planets are probably regular ones, but doesn't really tell you much about the character of the population. There might be only regular planets and puffy planets,
Two is impossible.. (Score:5, Interesting)
"The number two is impossible," - Isaac Asimov in The Gods Themselves.
The meaning being that there may be none of something in the universe, there may be one of something, but if there are two, there are lots more than two. Actually, in this case he was referring to universes themselves, not just things in the univrerse, but the point is the same.
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Counterexample: Regular polyhedron in ( 3 dimensions ): The tetrahedron, hexahedron, octahedron, dodecahedron, icosahedron. That's 5, and all there is.
And on the topic at hand: The claim were that these things are common. If they are really rare, there might still be a lot of them.
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No, the claim was that they "suspect" they might be common. There's a big difference between declaring that something "is" and stating that something "might be."
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I was referring to an ancestor, not the article...
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Such as polarities. There's positive and negative, so there must be lots more.
Integers can be odd or even, so there must be lots more varieties of integers.
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In the universe finding even one instance of anything makes it potentially common.
Re:Astronomers... (Score:5, Funny)
'Ah,' the biologist says, 'they must have reproduced'.
'Nah,' says the physicist, 'three is within statistical error of two'.
'Well,' says the mathematician, 'one thing is for certain: if someone walks into the building now, it will be empty'.
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marshmallow (Score:4, Funny)
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Mmmm.... Marshmallow
New Scientist (Score:1)
As to the link, for some reason the newscientistspace.com site isn't accessible to me at the moment. It is quite strange that there exist planets with such a low density. It would be very interesting to be able to send a mission to a planet like this some day and find out a little more about what factors possibly came together to create something with such a
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Dude, if we ever have the ability to send missions that far, I say F the puffed up cork planets and head straight for the earth-like ones, that's where the action is.
Obligatory "It's so dense it will float..." (Score:1)
so where's the wine bottle? (Score:1)
They found it! (Score:2)
Looks like they found Majipoor [wikipedia.org].
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globus_Cassus [wikipedia.org]
Would explain a few things...
Drats! (Score:2, Funny)
Good grief. (Score:4, Funny)
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about 460 billion km: http://www.physorg.com/news63346824.html [physorg.com]
puffed-up planets, eh? (Score:2, Funny)
Right you are, Ken, you needn't look further than Kirstie Alley [blogs.com].
Ah, the speculation (Score:2, Insightful)
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Mating Displays (Score:5, Funny)
Another possibility (Score:2)
Maybe these bloated planets are the only large enough for us to be able to see at this point.
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There are certainly limits to the lower range of sizes of planets we can detect - and since most detection methods work based on gravitational influence, it is apparent that a large worlds close in to its sun will be easier to detect than a small one far away.
Many of the first planets we found were very large with very close orbits, however recently we've been able to detect terrestrial - "rocky" that is as opposed
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Less Dense than a Wine Cork... (Score:1)
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Hmmm (Score:1)
do these rings make me look fat? (Score:2)
Bloated Planets? (Score:1)
o.0
Not planets (Score:2)
I propose we call them extrasolar goobledygooks. Perhaps the IAU will vote that in too.
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Personally, I think they could find more important things on which to waste their time
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Isn't that just an (admittedly better worded) restatement of what I just said?
Frankly I think the IAU have managed to look like a bunch of bafoons. There are so many things wrong with the definition as compared with hundreds of years of usage, and doing an about face after their first press release makes them look assinine.