Posted on 12/19/2012 6:30:24 AM PST by Red Badger
The nearest single Sun-like star to the Earth hosts five planets - one of which is in the "habitable zone" where liquid water can exist, astronomers say.
Tau Ceti's planetary quintet - reported in an online paper that will appear in Astronomy and Astrophysics - was found in existing planet-hunting data.
The study's refined methods of sifting through data should help find even more far-flung worlds.
The star now joins Alpha Centauri as a nearby star known to host planets.
In both those cases, the planets were found not by spying them through a telescope but rather by measuring the subtle effects they have on their host stars' light. Continue reading the main story
In the gravitational dance of a planet around a star, the planet does most of the moving. But the star too is tugged slightly to and fro as the planet orbits, and these subtle movements of the star show up as subtle shifts in the colour of the star's light we see from Earth.
This "radial velocity" measurement is a tricky one; stars' light changes also for a range of other reasons, and requires picking out the specifically planetary component from all this "noise".
Now, Hugh Jones of the University of Hertfordshire and colleagues have refined their "noise modelling" in order to subtract it, and thereby see the smallest signals hiding in the data - starting with Tau Ceti.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.co.uk ...
Those familiar with the star map developed by Marjorie Fish based upon information from the Barney and Betty Hill UFO abduction case, will recall that Tau Ceti was identified as one of the stars on that map.
When we do it...that is how we are going to do it.
Space travel, as we now conceive it, is impossible.
In order to travel to the stars, we must think of space as space-time.
Crossing huge distances of space requires enormous amounts of energy, supplies and most critical of all - time.
To cross space in a timely fashion, pun intended, you must exit your starting point’s space-time and enter at your destination’s space-time.
Einstien says it is possible, all we have to do is figure out how.
Manipulation of the basic forces should give us the power to jump across space as easily as a frog jumps across a puddle of water.
......
· join · view topics · view or post blog · bookmark · post new topic · subscribe · | ||
Google news searches: exoplanet · exosolar · extrasolar · | ||
The problem of deceleration exists also for the beamed energy craft, so it’ll probably be built and used to send probes to nearby stars. By the time it reaches those stars, people not yet born probably will have developed something better, like the stuff currently in use by various ETs.
Even project Deadelus didn’t call for deceleration. That called for a flyby of either Barnard’s star or Alpha Centauri.
If you find a way off this rock, will you need a window washer? :p
It would seem that such a traveler would have to effect the expansion rates of the entire universe both going and comming, which seems to net out alright, but how to initiate that in either direction, or frame....
I dont think we'll ever be able to do it. And if there are any ETs out there, which seems very possible, I doubt they can do it either. I suspect we'll just have to keep listening.
You're kidding, right?
Part of the problem is everything is moving at great velocity in many directions simultaneously.
The Earth is spinning on its axis, revolving around the Sun, the Solar System is moving in a circular orbit around the Milky Way galaxy while also moving in a sinusoidal manner above and below the galactic plane, and the whole galaxy is moving away from all the others at a huge rate.
Exiting the space-time at your starting point isnt nearly as big a problem as entering the space-time at or near your destination. You might wind up in free space, inside a rocky asteroid or the corona of the nearest star. Two of those choices are not optimum for a return trip.
A series of short hops would most likely be the safest method to allow you to get your bearings correct for the next jump and avoid being vaporized by a nuclear furnace.
Remember, gravity is a depression in the fabric of space-time. The larger the mass, the greater the depression, or ‘gravity well’. So you would want to make sure your jumps were well away from any large masses. Imagine materializing in the upper atmosphere of the planet you want to explore, only to burn up like a meteor as you plunge through the sky at thousands of miles per hour. You want to come into the system out near its outer edges, like Pluto, then use conventional methods to ‘fall in’ toward the inner planets.
Of course accidents of chance, like materializing in front of an undetectable cometary body might ruin your whole day..........
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.