Astronomers find 'home from home' - 90 light years away!

spaceref.com ^ | 3 Jul 03 | staff

[RightWhale]

New solar system like ours but 90 lightyears away.

[KantianBurke]

how long is a "lightyear" might I ask?

[rvoitier]

Lightyear is a measure of distance. If I remember correctly it's about 6 trillion miles.

Glad you posted this...I've been looking for an out of the way place for a vacation. ha.

[Monty22]

5.88 trillion miles

[Slicksadick]

97,761,600,000 or so miles. 186,000 miles a second x 60 x 60 x 24 x 365 is my guess.

[Slicksadick]

oopsie 5,865,696,000,000

[reagan_fanatic]

Oh great...another planet those evil white male Christian Conservatives can pollute with their gas-guzzling SUV's

/sarcasm

[Sam Cree]

Are they implying that earth like planets may also be orbiting this star?

[m1911]

Looks more like it's the first thing they've found with any analogues to any of the planets in our Solar System. In this case, to Jupiter, not Earth.

[Dead Corpse]

We don't have scope resolution down to the level where we could see an Earth sized planet that close in to its Primary.

I'm curious though. Let's build a ship that can get us there and back again, and go find out for our selves. ;-)

[Prodigal Son]

how long is a "lightyear" might I ask?

It's like a light sabre but longer... ;-)

[MrsEmmaPeel]

how long is a "lightyear" might I ask?

Its about half the calories as a regular year.

[Young Werther]

Orbit a dozen or so Hubbles and space them a couple thousand miles apart. They would form an excellent long baseline interferomerter and we would then be able to resolve the weather patterns on those planets that revolve around those stars in the neighborhood. A Scientific American article in the early 90s postulated such a scope.

[Prodigal Son]

;-)

I was thinking about Jay Leno's "Jaywalking" when I wrote that. He was asking college students the question "If a light year is the distance light travels in a year- what is a light sabre?" One person answered "The distance light travels in a sabre?"

[Our man in washington]

Well, if there is a planet out there, we need to send a sizable portion of our planet to go there immediately. We're running out of room on this planet and we're destroying mother earth, you know. (snicker.)

I think we need to send the liberals first, to make sure the new planet has a functioning welfare system and environmental regulations before the rest of humanity arrives. Or at least that's what we can tell them.

[ASA Vet]

Let's build a ship that can get us there and back again, and go find out for our selves

90 LY at warp 8 is only 32 days travel time each way.

[RightWhale]

Are they implying that earth like planets may also be orbiting this star?

Yes. Haven't seen any yet, but they will no doubt use the new NASA earthlike planet finder instruments to be launched in the next few years to look exactly there.

[RightWhale]

Let's build a ship that can get us there and back again, and go find out for our selves

This should be NASA's first priority. (Just to lay out the suggestion that NASA needs something useful to do.)

[LibWhacker]

The distance light travels in one year, approx. 6 trillion miles. The very notion of a light year would've shocked the ancients, and even most people right up until a couple of centuries ago, who thought light was instantaneous; i.e., travelled infinitely fast. But compared to the size of the Universe, it crawls (at least for outside observers).

[RightWhale]

One of the planetfinder designs being built is something like that, I think. An array of detectors with a good baseline.