Posted on 01/25/2006 5:56:47 PM PST by nickcarraway
Well ... start pointing SETI towards it then !
ping
220 below zero? Guess we'll have to bring our scarfs and mittens.
could this be the planet of prehistoric hyannis orcinus, is there scotch underneath all that ice?
Has Zephron Cochran been born yet?
Residents of Roswell, New Mexico, will be happy to hear this.
Cool, do they know if there's any good skiing? ;)
"...More than 170 planets have been discovered outside our Solar System. Astronomers usually detect them by watching how they make their parent star wiggle, a technique known as the Doppler method. This is ideal if you are looking for massive planets orbiting very close to their star, which induce a lot of wobble."
"But there is no way this can be used to find small, blue-green planets approximately 150 million kilometres from a yellow sun. It is simply not sensitive enough, says Didier Queloz, an astronomer from Geneva Observatory in Switzerland who was part of the team that found the first extrasolar planet, just 11 years ago."
"The new sighting relies on an effect called gravitational lensing, where a massive object such as a star warps space so that it behaves like a lens. This means that it bends and slightly magnifies light from a more distant star before it reaches our telescopes. Adding a planet to the mix modifies the lensing effect by a tiny amount, just enough to work out its mass and orbit..."
Scientists should really refrain from making value judgments...
Mmmmmm.
cool, maybe we can jump on before earth ends up burned up as stated in another post. Earth has it's last days coming up.
I'm really impressed that their telescopes are so good that they can distinguish homely planets from good-looking ones at that distance.
SPACE GEEK ALERT!
If I can thread poach a little... I know some of the people on this thread are already "FOLDING" but for those who aren't, there is now a major project by FReepers and others regarding protein folding and distributed computing. The effort is dedicated to Ronald Reagan.
http://vspx27.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=teampage&teamnum=36120
FReepers are ranked nationally (top 360 almost) in our efforts to help this massive science project. Please join us if you would like to contribute and "Fold one for the Gipper". Here is one of several threads that can help point you to start donating your unused CPUs if you are interested.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1562606/posts
Callin' all SPACE GEEKS! JOIN us!
any thoughts?
Can we send the socialists there to create their utopia (and leave the rest uf us alone)?
Although, the "Global Warming" crowd should feel quite at home.
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