Steinn checks in from his Mediterranean vacation with not one, not two, but three reports from the conference on Extreme Solar Systems, and a hint of maybe more to come.
The big news here, as far as I can see, is that they're starting to find more low mass planets, and more planets with long orbital periods. These are both the result of technical improvements-- the sensitivity of the planet-finding techniques has improved as people get more practice, enabling more low-mass detections, and as Steinn puts it, "things are piling up at multi-year periods as the searches go on for long enough to have senstivity out there." The "hot Jupiter" model is looking less like the norm, and quoting Steinn again, "I don't think the "Rare Earth" hypothesis is holding up well, the pieces of the argument are being dismantled wholesale as we find more systems and gain more understanding."
This is good news not just because it increases the chances of finding Earth-like planets elsewhere that may hold life (I'm not naive enough to think we'll get to those planets any time soon, but it would just be cool to know that aliens exist), but because it helps cut off a whole line of annoying anthropic/ design arguments. If we were stuck with a universe in which all the extrasolar planetary systems we know of preclude Earth-like planets, then our solar system starts to look pretty weird, and that fuels armchair philosophizing about Our Place in the Universe. The more typical we look, the happier I'll be.
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It might not be "cool" to know that aliens exist, especially if they know that we exist. See the lead story on my blog, Quark Soup: http://www.quarksoup.net .
heh... actually, all of this is well predicted by the anthropic physics
http://evolutionarydesign.blogspot.com/2007/02/goldilocks-enigma-again…
And Brandon Carter noted: 'while our location isn't central, it requires anticentrist dogma to deny that we are still preferred'.
You have to take into account all of the anthropic coincidences which point to a fine layer of similarly evolved galaxies, time and location-wise, in the history of the universe.
The result is that the goldilocks enigma resolves the Fermi paradox, while making testable predictions about where and when life is most likely to be found in the habitable zone that the eqliptic WMAP anamolies are pointing to in spite of the anticentrist skeptics.
ecliptic anomalies... no really, I'm just upside-down and dyslexic... ;)
The whole "holy hot Jupiter" hypothesis always bothered me. Yeah, we found lots of them, but given the limitation of our methods, of course that was all we would find -- large masses in close orbits = large track distortions. If all you have is a hammer....
So I never accepted the idea that because everything we saw was a hot Jupiter, cool Earths were rare. My guess is that somewhere over 80% of all stars will end up having planets of one Martian mass or above, once we are able to see them. When you look at the theories of stellar evolution, all based on infalling mass in matter clouds, how could you *not* have planets?
My guess is that somewhere over 80% of all stars will end up having planets of one Martian mass or above, once we are able to see them. When you look at the theories of stellar evolution, all based on infalling mass in matter clouds, how could you *not* have planets?
Exactly, and a critically related parallel to this is the extremely rapid occurrence of life as soon as the Earth cooled enough for it to happen.
If carbon based life serves some practical function in the thermodynamic process, then you can bet that we're not even alone, nor are we here by accident, and that runs exactly contrary to everything that Chad's worldview would allow, due to what he perceives to be human arrogance, rather than what it means in this case, which is that we're just bitches, now get back to work... ;)
Seriously, Chad, have you ever considered that maybe the anthropic physics actually is specially relevant to the "ever elusive" structure mechanism?
David Gross... everybody.... they all cry about how the biggest failure of science in the last 20 or 30 years is due to the fact that nobody has produced a "dynamical principle" that would "make the landscape go away"... yet they refuse to look anywhere in the direction of the most apparent answer to that riddle.
I'm freaking amazed by this, considering the ever compounding evidence and whatnot that must be ****WILLFULLY IGNORED****. I constantly run into physicists that know no more about the anthropic physics than they want to, which ain't much beyond the cc, fine structure, and hierarchy.
Pathetic, if you ask me.... 'we need a dynamical principle'... as long as we don't have to take the anthropic physics too seriously.'
phhhht... what a copout on first principles, in my *anthropically educated* opinion... ;)
need info on empty spot just found in space word is it is massivs,