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Planet at Alpha Centauri found
I'd like to know why they have just found a planet at Alpha Centauri,
our nearest star, when they have been searching the skies for years and have found 600 or so planets (iirc). it must've been the first place they looked, mustn't it? Strikes me as odd. |
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Planet at Alpha Centauri found
Dear Jack:
On Wednesday, October 17, 2012 11:20:08 AM UTC-7, wrote: .... I'd like to know why they have just found a planet at Alpha Centauri, our nearest star, Not the nearest, just "very near". when they have been searching the skies for years and have found 600 or so planets (iirc). it must've been the first place they looked, mustn't it? Strikes me as odd. There are 3 or 4 methods involved, and only recently have they become more accurate. If the Earth is very near the stellar systems's ecliptic plane, then we have a much better chance of detection (regardless of method). If the planet is massive, we have another very good chance of detection. Beyond this, we didn't even know for sure there was a massive object in trojan with the Earth until very recently, and we had no idea Pluto had at least 5 moons until we went out there. Not really that odd, that you don't know what is what, until you really start looking... then sharpen your tools, and look some more. Who is paying money to know these things, because the instrumentation isn't free, and there is significant time involved in analysis? David A. Smith |
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Planet at Alpha Centauri found
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Planet at Alpha Centauri found
Yousuf Khan wrote:
On 17/10/2012 2:20 PM, wrote: I'd like to know why they have just found a planet at Alpha Centauri, our nearest star, when they have been searching the skies for years and have found 600 or so planets (iirc). it must've been the first place they looked, mustn't it? Strikes me as odd. Most of the 1000's of exoplanets found so far have been discovered by Kepler. Kepler only looks for planets by the Transit Method, which when you get right down to it, is the easiest method of detecting planets. Before Kepler, we used the Wobble Method. The Wobble Method uses Doppler shifts to determine if a planet is tugging on a star. It works really well when the planets are really massive and/or very close in to their stars. Smaller planets are harder to detect using this method. We couldn't use the Transit Method like with Kepler because this star system doesn't seem to be aligned to our line of sight. Also Kepler probably doesn't even point in the direction of this star system. True, Kepler is scanning only a small portion of the sky in the northern Milky Way, in (IIRC) Cygnus. So our only hope was to find a planet with the Wobble method, which as I said before, is better at detecting Big planets. But they've refined the Wobble Method, and it can detect far smaller planets now. It's much harder to detect planets with the Wobble method, but it can detect planets that aren't perfectly aligned with our line of sight. Yousuf Khan -- Mike Dworetsky (Remove pants sp*mbl*ck to reply) |
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Planet at Alpha Centauri found
dlzc wrote:
Beyond this, we didn't even know for sure there was a massive object in trojan with the Earth until very recently, and we had no idea Pluto had at least 5 moons until we went out there. Nix, Hydra and "P5" were discovered using Hubble. New Horizons won't get to Pluto until July 2015. -- Bill Owen |
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Planet at Alpha Centauri found
On Oct 17, 1:33*pm, (Steve Willner) wrote:
Help keep our newsgroup healthy; please don't feed the trolls. Steve Willner * * * * * *Phone 617-495-7123 * * Cambridge, MA 02138 USA So, here we have guys from Harvard and JPL and they are standing on a planet with a specific set of values for size and rotational speeds yet these highly paid individuals can't come to terms with the basic facts of our own planet and specifically the maximum equatorial speed of 1037.5 miles per hour or for 15 degrees of rotation - http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/as...s/970401c.html It is astonishing that they cannot follow the dictates of the 24 hour AM/PM system and the Lat/Long system which determines that our planet,do you hear,our planet turns at a rate of 15 degrees per hour as an assertion derived through very specific references and none of which involve VLBI and a rotating celestial sphere of Ra/Dec. Never has the world witnessed such a scam and a very expensive one that has brought all science into disrepute. |
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Planet at Alpha Centauri found
In sci.astro message 8fa74149-e333-408a-a87c-ef173497a4e0@googlegroups.
com, Wed, 17 Oct 2012 13:06:52, dlzc posted: Beyond this, we didn't even know for sure there was a massive object in trojan with the Earth until very recently, and we had no idea Pluto had at least 5 moons until we went out there. Going part-way out there did not make it possible to find them, except in so far as the intention of going past there makes it desirable to look for such. "We" have not yet gone to Pluto, though New Horizons can no longer avoid the Plutonic region. -- (c) John Stockton, nr London, UK. Mail via homepage. Turnpike v6.05 MIME. Web http://www.merlyn.demon.co.uk/ - FAQqish topics, acronyms and links; Astro stuff via astron-1.htm, gravity0.htm ; quotings.htm, pascal.htm, etc. No Encoding. Quotes before replies. Snip well. Write clearly. Don't Mail News. |
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Planet at Alpha Centauri found
On Oct 17, 11:20*am, wrote:
I'd like to know why they have just found a planet at Alpha Centauri, our nearest star, when they have been searching the skies for years and have found 600 or so planets (iirc). it must've been the first place they looked, mustn't it? Strikes me as odd. Perhaps it was simply too obvious, something like Guth-Venus as been for more than a dozen years. “GuthVenus” 1:1, plus 10x resample/enlargement of the area in question: https://picasaweb.google.com/1027362...79402364691314 http://groups.google.com/groups/search http://translate.google.com/# Brad Guth,Brad_Guth,Brad.Guth,BradGuth,BG,Guth Usenet/”Guth Venus” |
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