Everybody's all abuzz about this picture:
This may be the first image of a planet around a sun-like star. May be, mind-- it looks likely, but there are still a lot of caveats. If it is a planet, and not a dim background star, it's got about eight times the mass of Jupiter, and is orbiting at eleven times the radius of Neptune's orbit. Those are a little hard to explain.
Still, isn't it cool to be living in the future?
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The star that is nearest our own has a planet that could be habitable by Earthlings.
This is very important news.
The news comes to us from this research paper in Nature: A terrestrial planet candidate in a temperate orbit around Proxima Centauri by Guillem Anglada-Escudé, Pedro J. Amado, John…
"Continue to surprise those who would put you in a neat demographic. Be insistently curious." -Gordon Gee
Twenty years ago, our Solar System was the only one we knew of that we were certain had planets orbiting around a main-sequence star.
Image credit: retrieved from Universe-Review.ca.
Perhaps…
Coronographic imaging with the Advanced Camera for Surveys, on the Hubble Space Telescope, has revealed a jupiter mass planetary companion, with confirmed common proper motion with its parent star, Fomalhaut.
This would be the first robust bona fide direct imaging detection of an extrasolar planet…
there'd be eight little planets sitting on the wall
I am so very sorry; despite being a dynamicist with a natural affinity for Resolutions 5A and 6A, demoting Pluto was still bloody foolish.
Ok, here is the actual text
1) A planet1 is a celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has…
"... isn't it cool to be living in the future?"
In a weird sense, this is also like living in the past. I feel as if I'm in an old Analog story, perhaps written by "Hal Clement." Super-Earth oddly far from sun-like star. Intelligent beings on that planet. Life, but not life as we know it. Astronomy, Physics, Chemistry absolutely textbook accurate. Oddball biology that, in context, makes sense. Beings have concept of the universe slightly different from our at the edges, but mostly the same. Now we know that planet exists. Next chapter is when we go there, but from their point of view. We and they jointly figure out the planetological anomaly.
That's what it feels like to me, anyway. Fortunately, I've been explaining the "habitable zone" to my students...
Wow, that is really cool, including that bit about living in the future. ^_^