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Wasp-193B, a giant planet with a density similar to that of cotton candy
- dberg 3y agoHere I was thinking this was a new LLM with 193B parameters.
- spacemanspiff01 3y agoMaybe it is, somewhere I'd the depths of the void there is a giant planet sized llm, with cotton candy neurons.
- dhosek 3y agoIn an infinite universe, everything exists, it just takes forever to reach it.
- BenjiWiebe 3y agoIn an infinite string of ones, does a two exist?
- htrp 3y agoMatryoshka Brain....
- qaq 3y agosame :)
- world2vec 3y agoActually a pretty cool name (and model size) for a locally run LLM.
- msikora 3y agoYep, same!
- dylan604 3y agoI recognized the WASP prefix. It's a pretty cool program[0]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_Angle_Search_for_Planets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_Angle_Search_for_Planets The software to detect the transits seems like a fun challenge. Locating each star in each of the images taken, then comparing their brightness in each one. Seems simple enough until you then realize your literally dealing with astronomically large numbers.
- JackFr 3y agoI love SPECULOOS as a network of robotic telescopes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speculaas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speculaas
- throwup238 3y agoThat raises some very important questions: what is the cotton-candy/human crush depth equivalent? How much buoyancy would I have? Like, can I swim in this cotton candy planet? How deep can I get in the cotton candy clouds or will I just sink and get candy crushed?
- lostlogin 3y ago> candy crushed Someone was going to make the candy crush joke.
- paulkrush 3y agoMaybe earth could look like this if we put enough satellites in orbit.
- nanomonkey 3y agoI'm imagining an orbital trailer park for nanorobots, with wispy power cords and network cables trailing all over the place as everyone participates in one big LAN party.
- onion2k 3y agoExactly how a planet can inflate so much is a question that no existing theory of planetary formation can yet answer. Is there a reason to limit theories to natural formation? An alien race could have built it as a hydrogen storage tank or something.
- jdiff 3y agoBecause of all the things humanity has learned about the universe, none of them has turned out to be aliens or evidence of aliens. You can theorize it all you want, but so far every time the universe has just turned out to be a big, strange place.
- netbioserror 3y agoThe idea of a planet 1.5x the size of Jupiter, but 1/7th the mass...is very unintuitive from a gravitational perspective. Maybe it's spinning so ungodly fast that centrifugal forces are keeping it puffed out?
- __MatrixMan__ 3y agoI wonder if it's physically possible to start with a situation that you're describing and end up with a toroidal planet.
- itishappy 3y agoYes and no. It's possible, but it's not a stable configuration, so it's unlikely to form naturally. https://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2014/02/torusearth.html https://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2014/02/torusearth.html
- rangerelf 3y agoI thought there wasn't such thing as a "centrifugal force" :-|
- ordu 3y agoIn an inertial frame of reference there is not. In a rotating frame of reference there funny forces like centrifugal and a Coriolis force.
- NKosmatos 3y agoThe density mentioned (0.059 grams per cubic centimeter) is the overall density of the planet. Most probably it has a much much denser core, solid or thick super hot fluid, like all gas giants. It doesn’t mean that the whole planet has the same cotton candy density (0.05 grams per cubic centimeter) from the top layers down to the core ;-) On the funny side of this, what would happen if we kept adding cotton candies at an empty/isolated place in space? After some critical mass, the cotton candies would collapse under their own weight/mass and a new asteroid would be created. If we kept adding even more candies a further collapse would create a new planet :-) Imagine stacking/accumulating different materials. A planet made just of bananas, a planet made of only water, a planet from rice… /note to self - check if there is such a planet simulator available
- keithly 3y agoOr a planet made of a mole of moles... https://what-if.xkcd.com/4/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/4/
- piker 3y ago> You might notice that we’re ignoring the pockets of space between the moles. In a moment, you’ll see why. Lol!
- hbrav 3y agoAs you added more and more cotton candy you would begin to compress the centre under the pressure, and you would get some heating from this. I think there's a good change you would melt and cotton candy and eventually it would re-solidify into an enormous boiled sweet core, with a diffuse envelope of cotton candy around it.
- Finnucane 3y agoA giant planet actually made of cotton candy would be way more interesting.
- fnordpiglet 3y agoClearly it’s a hollow sphere world.
- nico 3y agoI thought this was an announcement of an LLM model called Wasp that had 193B parameters Was happy when I clicked the link and it was about a newly discovered planet 1200 light years from Earth
- chimpanzee 3y agoThe article doesn’t mention this, but the planet is often speculated to be the home planet of the Klowns. https://youtu.be/plUXguATsTQ https://youtu.be/plUXguATsTQ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_Klowns_from_Outer_Space https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_Klowns_from_Outer_Space
- abecedarius 3y agoHow do you get an object of 44 Earth masses with the average density of styrofoam? The obvious starting point I guess is a core of very light elements, and a really really extended atmosphere. But an atmosphere thins out exponentially, more steeply the higher the gravity. So for an atmosphere to help much, those 40ish Earth masses of hypothesized core need to be spread out a whole lot already. It seems like a difficult planetary engineering problem -- spin it up almost to bursting? So taking that to be too silly, the core must be only a small fraction of the mass: a big gas cloud with a nugget in the center. I'm not sure that could work, but it's what I'd try to work out next.
- jameshart 3y agoDyson sphere around a neutron star.
- perihelions 3y agoIt's basically explained in the article: it's probably just very hot—the atmospheric scale height[0] is proportional to temperature. The open question (per the article) is why it got so hot, because they don't have a model for that. ("It certainly requires a significant deposit of energy deep into the planet’s interior, but the details of the mechanism are not yet understood.“") [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale_height https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale_height
- jandrese 3y agoMaybe it is something like a small planet that has a giant ring complex that happens to be aligned perpendicular to us?
- astrolx 3y agoUsually, you would see the sign of this in the data - because we can actually detect the gap between the planet and eventual rings. But if the gap is extremely small, then it could be a possibility.
- ck2 3y agoIt's weird to me they can make such assessments with confidence when we didn't even know the density/composition of Jupiter to any certainty until Hubble was around just in time to observe Shoemaker-Levy plow into it and eject enough surface matter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_Shoemaker%E2%80%93Levy_9#Chemical_studies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_Shoemaker%E2%80%93Levy_9...
- cdelsolar 3y agoWe’ve known the mass and the size of Jupiter since way before the shoemaker-levy impact.
- astrolx 3y agoAFAIK the Shoemaker-Levy impact was useful for other studies, but not so for the density/mass of Jupiter (also as per your link). Jupiter is full of surprises still (mostly about its interior). However, the assessments made in this article about the mass and radius of the planet are using very basic physical laws (mostly Kepler laws from the 1600s).
- abc_lisper 3y agoOr it could be alien made. Like a dyson sphere - but a planet, with solar capture on the shell. Build everything without all the mass, add magnetic shoes and other tech to make living in 0g a reality.
- cedws 3y ago>In data taken between 2006 and 2008, and again from 2011 to 2012, the WASP-South observatory detected periodic transits, or dips in light, from the star WASP-193. Astronomers determined that the star’s periodic dips in brightness were consistent with a planet passing in front of the star every 6.25 days. The scientists measured the amount of light the planet blocked with each transit, which gave them an estimate of the planet’s size. I'm not a physicist nor astronomer so I apologise if I sound arrogantly dismissive about something I am clueless about. But how can they be so confident about something from a single measurement? Couldn't there be other things causing dips in light, like dust clouds/asteroids also passing in front of the star at the same time? It seems like a flimsy way of figuring the size of another astronomical body.
- feoren 3y agoWhen we think about making an observation with a telescope, we might think of someone in a crow's nest looking at a far away island, and think: it could be debris, it could be a boat, it could be a smudge on the telescope, it could be a whale, etc. etc. There are several reasons why this intuition breaks down looking at the stars. For one, astronomical systems are extremely regular. The same thing will happen, over and over, almost the exact same way, millions or billions of times before anything appreciably changes. It's extremely rare to find a system that is in the midst of significant change. We do find them, of course, and study them, but we do so after passing over countless "boring" areas of the sky. This regularity means that anything we look at is extremely likely to be in a very stable configuration, and we can use our knowledge of orbital mechanics to rule out all sorts of things like weird dust clouds orbiting the star, which would not be stable (or would look very different if they were). Realize also that we stare at these systems (or at least check up on them periodically) for years at a time -- in this case they said 2006 to 2008, and again 2011 to 2012. So we can easily rule out some random thing passing between our telescope and the star precisely every 6.25 days for 3 years. It must be something stably orbiting the star. We can also use the exact shape of the "light profile" to be pretty certain about the shape of the object passing in front of it. Over dozens or hundreds of observations, we see the same characteristic dip in light at the exact same period every time, and it matches the shape of a circle passing in front of another circle. It doesn't happen immediately, because the planet spends a bit of time only partly obscuring the star, and we can use this to discern that it is roughly circular in shape. We use this profile and the amount of reduction to calculate the size of the planet. Asteroids would be far too small to detect (we can't even detect all the asteroids in our own solar system!) Also realize that when they say "light", they're usually looking at a whole spectrum of light. It's not one number that dips, it's a whole waveform that subtly changes. A dust cloud would be partly transparent, differently for different wavelengths, and change the light in a different way. In the extreme cases we can even use this to guess whether the planet might have an atmosphere, because it changes the waveform differently at its edges. Space is also really empty. A bird might pass in front of your telescope on land, but in space, it's almost certain that nothing is going to randomly pass between you and what you're looking at, even over years. And finally, even with all this, they spend years analyzing the data before they can be confident enough to make claims like this. There is a lot of data and a lot of time spent on it, and it's the culmination of many different lines of evidence. It's certainly not "flimsy".
- humanfromearth9 3y agoI see uliege and I upvote. The best university in the world.