4 ms·
Scientists may have discovered the first planets outside the Milky Way
- tekkk 9y agoDai estimated the distant galaxies contain 2,000 planets for every star. That means trillions of planets probably reside there, he said, consistent with the ratio of free-floating planets found in the Milky Way, which contains billions of planets. Huh. Sometimes it creeps on my mind how big the universe is and that everything is meaningless, on large scale. How we are controlled by such mundane things and neural pathways that follow some useless pattern but are too strong for us to change by our own. Oh well, guess I should get back to my drudgery.
- 8bitsrule 9y agoA look at the original paper (http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/aaa5fb http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/aaa5fb) tells us that they found "frequent Fe Kα line energy shifts observed in the gravitationally lensed quasar RXJ 1131–1231 at a lens redshift of z = 0.295 or 3.8 billion lt-yr away." Going from 'line energy shifts' to 'DISCOVERED PLANETS in ANOTHER GALAXY!!' is way too big of a leap. This is click-bait science writing. Getting people interested in good science is great, but slathering it in gooey layers of sugary crap will eventually lead to people tuning out of anything that doesn't SCREAM.