13 ms·
Seven-Planet System Detected
- toblender 13y ago"The star is 2500 light years away from Earth." Found that on google. Doesn't seem so far away :P
- devx 13y agoYeah, unreachable without FTL travel.
- deletes 13y agoIt would take about 15.6 years [0] to reach the star on a ship capable of a constant 1G acceleration. Here is the explanation and equations: http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SR/rocket.html http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SR/rocket.h... [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6637131 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6637131
- evoloution 13y agoDoes this take the needed deceleration in account? If we are to land there anyway :P
- deletes 13y agoYes, but the real problem is fuel( even with antimatter ). And radiation.
- pdonis 13y agoI agree that the real problem is fuel, but 10 years isn't quite long enough if you are going to accelerate halfway and decelerate halfway to arrive at low speed. For a 2,500 light year trip composed of two 1,250 light year legs, the time experienced by the ship will be (in units where c and a are both approximately 1): 2 * T(1250 lyr) = 2 * (c/a) arccosh (ad/c^2 + 1) = 2 * arccosh(1250 + 1) = 2 * 7.8 = 15.6 yr.
- gnaritas 13y ago15.6 years for the passenger, thousands of years from our perspective.
- Groxx 13y agoMeh. People were willing to go half-way across the world to try living somewhere new, probably never to return. Announce the trip, and you'll have to weed out volunteers pretty viciously.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- alex-g 13y agoSo after a few subjective years, you will be overtaken by newer and faster ships, and when you arrive, there will be a flourishing civilization already there to greet you.
- fernly 13y agoAnd the people in the faster ships will be your grandchildren, yup. Plot of Heinlein's "Time for the Stars", pretty much.
- ck2 13y agoIt is dubious we will ever travel faster than 10% the speed of light. But a probe might be able to.
- wikiburner 13y agoNot dubious - speculative: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4534359 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4534359 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6238297 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6238297 Although, I certainly wouldn't bet against it long term.
- maaku 13y agoIf you did, you'd really be betting on your ability to collect / pay up the debt.
- vectorjohn 13y agoWhat does that even mean? Of course it is reachable without FTL travel. Besides time dilation which could make it a subjectively short trip, there is also cryogenics and other life extension techniques that could get us there. If you accept any ship could get there, you might as well consider that space travel isn't the only technology that will advance.
- ars 13y ago> there is also cryogenics and other life extension techniques that could get us there. You are aware those don't actually exist? People assume they will exist, but we have nothing to base that assumption on except "it would be cool".
- vectorjohn 13y agoBesides the fact I think it's clear they will exist (assuming we don't destroy ourselves somehow), I already addressed that. We're already talking about things that don't currently exist. I can talk about a ship to Mars which doesn't currently exist. But both a Mars trip and cryogenics seem pretty reasonable to me.
- ars 13y ago> it's clear they will exist ???? Based on what exactly? > But both a Mars trip and cryogenics seem pretty reasonable to me. You think those are similar? We could do a Mars trip today with enough money. Every bit of money in the entire world would still not get you cryogenics - it requires a new idea that doesn't exist right now.
- robryan 13y agoThat is arguable, we have the freezing people but going. Sure it is being done in a very destructive way to the human body, it is a bet though that at some point in the distant future technology will get good enough that the current freezing method could be reversed.
- 13y ago
- maga 13y agojust three years at warp 9 =)
- grecy 13y agoIt's strange to realize that even at Warp 9, it still take a very long time to get anywhere much. In the TV shows and movies, they never seem to spend more than a few days at a time going anywhere at warp speed.
- ceejayoz 13y agoHell, in the new movies, you can transport from Earth to the Klingon homeworld instantly, and fly there in like 20 minutes.
- Groxx 13y agoHell, in TOS they went to the edge of the galaxy (or back) in practically no time, under their own power.
- itafroma 13y ago> In the TV shows and movies, they never seem to spend more than a few days at a time going anywhere at warp speed. There are a few canon reasons for this: 1) Ignoring special episodes (and all of Star Trek Voyager) where they use a contrivance to hurl the ship tens of thousands of light-years, the working range of a starship on Star Trek is relatively small: * The distance to the Romulan Neutral Zone, on the outer fringes of Federation Space, is only 28 light years away from Earth. * Deep Space 9 (so named because it's on the outer frontiers of known space) is 70 light years away from Earth. * Oo'nos, the Klingon homeworld, is ~100 light years away from Earth. 2) Ship speed exponentially increases as warp factor increases, and by the time the USS Enterprise-D is in service, warp 9 is fast, but not "I need to get there immediately because every plot shown on TV is an emergency" fast. The maximum sustainable speed for the Enteprise-D is warp 9.6, which is 1,909 times the speed of light. This would allow Picard to reach even Qo'nos from Earth in under 3 weeks. 3) With the exception of the JJ Abrams franchise (where they seem to keep going back to Earth after every mission), the ships featured in Star Trek are generally exploratory: between each episode, they'd roam their mission areas performing routine work. The episode plots would generally revolve around them dealing with an issue that happened to be close to wherever they happened to be at the time. Of course, being a set of TV series and movies, liberties with distances were routinely taken. For example, in the first episode of Enterprise, they say Qo'nos is 4 days away from Earth at warp 4.5, which would place it less than half the distance between Earth and Alpha Centauri, the closest star system.
- nezumi 13y agoHang on, I thought 'Solar system' means the system orbiting the star 'Sol' i.e. our sun? Isn't the general term 'planetary system'?
- wonderyak 13y agoYes, 'Solar' refers to our sun, Sol. So there is only one 'Solar' system which is our own. I think 'star system' is acceptable as well.
- IbJacked 13y agoI'm not disagreeing, but genuinely curious: what do astronomers call the "solar wind" in other systems? Referring to every wind by the star's name would seem odd.
- doctoboggan 13y agoJust replace solar with stellar.
- jlgreco 13y agoThis seems like yet another case of unnecessarily Earth/Sol-centric terminology, much like "apogee" being Earth specific such that you have to use "apoapsis" if you want to be generic. I mean, do we really need a new word for every planet, the sun, a star in general, a black hole specifically, and galaxies? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apsis#Terminology http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apsis#Terminology We should declare terminology bankruptcy to wipe out our existing terminology/language debt, then pick sensible terms for everything. While I'm the topic, we should also do "kilogram"->"grave", "gram"->"micrograve".
- nitrogen 13y agoShouldn't that be "milligrave" if you're using SI prefixes?
- ck2 13y agothe entire system lies within one Earth orbit Perhaps little chance of life as we know it.
- deletes 13y agoMoons orbiting the outermost gas giant could support earth like life.
- tg3 13y agoAlthough if the gas giant is anything like Jupiter those moons are probably getting smothered in radiation that is dangerous to Earth-like life.
- InclinedPlane 13y agoJupiter is a special case. Due to orbital resonances with the galilean moons the inner moon of Io experiences extreme tidal heating, which results in extensive vulcanism (Io's surface is the youngest in the solar system because of this). This creates a sulfur dioxide atmosphere around the moon which gets stripped off by Jupiter's strong magnetic field after which it eventually gets turned into plasma and forms the inner radiation belts around Jupiter. Without those things happening the radiation environment would be far lower. Saturn, for example, has much milder radiation levels. Also, life tends to evolve to tolerate whatever level of natural radiation background exists. Most, but not all, life from Earth would have trouble with the radiation levels near Jupiter but life that originated on a moon around a gas giant would probably be fine. If anyone wants an idea for a scifi story posit a technological species arising on a planet that experiences significant levels of background radiation. Such a species would be able to more easily tolerate working with radioactive materials, as would their ecosystem. For example, something like the Chernobyl accident may not even be a serious problem for them, since every organism would be able to tolerate radiation exposure. They might be able to operate fission reactors without much shielding. And they might be able to tolerate the radiation exposure of interplanetary space without needing any special shielding at all.
- PhasmaFelis 13y ago
- devgutt 13y agoKepler 62 seems interesting
- mVChr 13y agoAgreed! What I found most interesting about this article is that our own solar system seems fairly unique (I know, small sample size). Kepler 62 is the only one that has an Earth-like planet at about the same distance from the central star, and even in that case that particular planet is the outermost one in that system. I guess I always assumed that due to various physical laws that other star systems would be pretty similar to ours in regards to planet-types (hot-rocks vs middle-ground vs gas-giants vs coldies) at various orbits, but there seems to be much more at play here (star size, etc, etc). Truly fascinating.
- greeneggs 13y agoYou're not the only one; astronomers have also been surprised. But you have to keep in mind that our data right now is very incomplete. Kepler only operated for four years. You'd need a minimum of three years to detect a planet with a one-year-long orbit. (The first two years give two blinks when the planet crossed in front of the star, and then the third blink should be exactly a year later.) As they analyze the data in more detail, they'll probably find planets with longer-period orbits, but possibilities are limited.
- talles 13y agoJust a big yellow screen here (firefox 24)
- Zoomla 13y agoit eventually loads in Firefox 17 but it is yellow for a fraction of a second (probably javascript that is slow to load?)
- jcmoscon 13y ago... and I know the Guy who created it!
- ethanazir 13y agoWhen are we going to lazer a communique to one of the planeted systems?
- Debugreality 13y agoI found this site interesting for more information: http://www.openexoplanetcatalogue.com/system.html?id=KOI-351%20c http://www.openexoplanetcatalogue.com/system.html?id=KOI-351... The star is about the same size as sol so it might be possible to live on some of the moons of the edge planet if we ever got there.
- deletes 13y agoI think you found my new favorite website. Some of the closest habitable neighbour stars. tau Ceti: http://www.openexoplanetcatalogue.com/system.html?id=tau%20Ceti%20f http://www.openexoplanetcatalogue.com/system.html?id=tau%20C... Gliese 876: http://www.openexoplanetcatalogue.com/system.html?id=Gliese%20876%20c http://www.openexoplanetcatalogue.com/system.html?id=Gliese%... HD 62509: http://www.openexoplanetcatalogue.com/system.html?id=HD%2062509%20b http://www.openexoplanetcatalogue.com/system.html?id=HD%2062... Gliese 581: http://www.openexoplanetcatalogue.com/system.html?id=Gliese%20581%20b http://www.openexoplanetcatalogue.com/system.html?id=Gliese%... This is an interesting example, useless at first glance but you know there are a lot of smaller planets closer to the star. http://www.openexoplanetcatalogue.com/system.html?id=HR%208799%20e http://www.openexoplanetcatalogue.com/system.html?id=HR%2087...
- mVChr 13y agoSeriously, the orbit visualizations are pretty cool: http://www.openexoplanetcatalogue.com/system.html?id=KOI-351%20c#viz http://www.openexoplanetcatalogue.com/system.html?id=KOI-351...
- paolord 13y agoWas Gliese the one where the aliens from the Battleship movie came from? I think I read somewhere some scientist picked it for the movie.
- daveyoon 13y agoWhy aren't we seeing any electromagnetic signals from any of these systems?
- InclinedPlane 13y agoWe probably wouldn't even if there was a copy of Earth there.
- jamhan 13y agoWhy not link to the original article, instead of some weird half-Greek aggregator blog? http://www.dlr.de/dlr/en/desktopdefault.aspx/tabid-10081/151_read-8560/year-all http://www.dlr.de/dlr/en/desktopdefault.aspx/tabid-10081/151...