[HN Gopher] Six-exoplanet system challenges theories of how plan... ___________________________________________________________________ Six-exoplanet system challenges theories of how planets form Author : dnetesn Score : 36 points Date : 2021-01-26 11:01 UTC (1 days ago) (HTM) web link (phys.org) (TXT) w3m dump (phys.org) | rbanffy wrote: | "Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known." - Carl | Sagan | gmuslera wrote: | Could it be a message? Why to send from place to place a radio | signal when we could set up a bunch of planets in an | improbable/impossible regular configuration to be noticed from | everywhere during a very long time frame? | | Probably it is the argument of several existing science fiction | books. | rbanffy wrote: | "We were" | Razengan wrote: | That is exactly what happens in Star Control II. One of the | most satisfying Easter Eggs I found on my own. | philsnow wrote: | are you talking about the rainbow worlds pointing corewards, | or something else? | TeMPOraL wrote: | Star Trek: Picard did that with _stars_ recently. | svachalek wrote: | Yeah the Pierson's Puppeteers in Ringworld (1970) did something | like that, and I'm sure there are others. | | But in this case I just don't think this is weird enough, it's | probably more a matter of tweaking planetary formation models. | ardy42 wrote: | > Could it be a message? Why to send from place to place a | radio signal when we could set up a bunch of planets in an | improbable/impossible regular configuration to be noticed from | everywhere during a very long time frame? | | Intuitively, for signalling purposes, setting up six planets in | a weird orbital configuration to attract attention seems like | it would take WAY more energy to do. Also, it tells you nothing | about how to reply to the hail. | | Though I could see it as some kind of solar system-sized | monument. | macintux wrote: | I was born in 1970. Had you told me in my teenage years that we'd | have supercomputers in our pockets, I'd have probably been | skeptical, but had you told me that we would be not only | discovering planets in other systems but measuring their density | and composition I'd have assumed you were drunk. | varjag wrote: | It took me a while to realize my younger peers have no | recollection of times when we didn't know if the planets | existed outside our solar system at all. Now it's like the | obvious part in the Drake equation, mind-boggling. | TeMPOraL wrote: | I was born late 1980s and I think by that point we still | didn't have any evidence of extrasolar planets... | | ...but damn if it wasn't bloody obvious there must be some. | TheGallopedHigh wrote: | The first time we discovered an exoplanet was in the late | 90s orbiting I believe a binary pulsar system. | TeMPOraL wrote: | I'd assume people had some some indirect evidence before. | I remember some noise about exoplanets during my teenage | years - there was a Polish astronomer[0] involved in the | first discovery. But I thought to myself, surely everyone | expected this to happen? I was later surprised to | discover that even in the 90s, people seriously believed | there were no extrasolar planets. | | (Perhaps theirs was the more scientific position, and I | was just a nerd biased by science fiction stories. But | then, I was taught the Sun was just another star, and if | God wanted our solar system to be special, surely He | wouldn't need to create more planets than just the Earth? | I guess I had some intuition for Occam's razor before I | knew it by name...) | | I only got a more complete picture of the timeline of | discoveries much later in life, from this video[1]. | | -- | | [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksander_Wolszczan | | [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gai8dMA19Sw | varjag wrote: | Believe it or not people used to argue that planetary | formation can be super rare or even a set of conditions | unique to our system. Not quite unlike the current | narratives about extraterrestrial life. | dvfjsdhgfv wrote: | I remember my teachers mocking me when I was saying that if | the Sun is a star it's rather logical there are planets | around other stars and that the view that they don't exist | is the extreme one, but I was scoffed at that this is "pure | speculation" and "science fiction". | | On the other hand, when seeing a model of atom and solar | system for the first time I was convinced reality is a set | of layers with the micro- and macrocosm being just the two | closest ones we're able to perceive, but I'm far less sure | of it now. | [deleted] | reedwolf wrote: | I wish Musk/Bezos/Branson et al would spend their billions on | colossal space telescopes rather than Mars vanity projects. | Imagine being able to image the surface of an exoplanet... | TeMPOraL wrote: | That's like saying, "I wish the government was spending money | on constructing stuff up the mountain, instead of vanity | 'roads' that lead to it". | anchpop wrote: | Any progress on "Mars vanity projects" directly helps the | project of colossal space telescopes. The reason the James Webb | Telescope is so expensive is because old spaceships didn't have | enough cargo volume to hold the telescope unfolded, so they had | to create an incredibly expensive and error-prone unfolding | mechanism. SpaceX's Starship is big enough to hold the JWT | unfolded - something that would dramatically lower costs on any | future telescope of the same size or bigger. | LatteLazy wrote: | Video simulation of the system I found on YouTube: | | https://youtu.be/-WevvRG9ysY | | It's incredible to me that within my lifetime we've gone from | "planets around other stars might not even exist" to "here's a | list, you want rocky or gas, big or small, habitable zone or | not?" | | Also, as always, xkcd: | | https://xkcd.com/1298/large/ | sradman wrote: | > The new research has revealed that the system ["TOI-178, a star | some 200 light-years away in the constellation of Sculptor"] | boasts six exoplanets and that all but the one closest to the | star are locked in a rhythmic dance as they move in their orbits. | In other words, they are in resonance... A similar resonance is | observed in the orbits of three of Jupiter's moons: Io, Europa | and Ganymede. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-01-27 23:01 UTC)