Posted on 06/13/2002 9:51:07 AM PDT by dead
The first solar system that looks like it could harbour an Earth-like planet has been found, after a 15-year search.
An international team, including two Australians, announced early today that it had identified the first Jupiter-like planet orbiting a star - at nearly the same distance Jupiter is from the sun.
The star, 55 Cancri in the constellation Cancer, was already known to have another giant planet much closer in, zooming around it in a fortnightly orbit.
A team member, Chris Tinney, of the Anglo-Australian Observatory, said calculations showed that a planet similar in size to the Earth could survive in a stable orbit between the two.
Finding such a system had been a long-term goal of planet hunters. "It's a very significant discovery," Dr Tinney said. "There's no place like home, but we're definitely coming closer."
Earth-sized planets cannot be detected with present technology, but this system would be one of the first places to look when NASA's Planet Finder space telescope is launched later this decade, he said.
Astronomers detect planets from the way they make their star wobble. Jupiter, for example, induces a wobble of 11 metres a second in the sun.
All up, 15 new planets were announced by the team, led by the world's top planet hunters - Geoffrey Marcy, of the University of California, Berkeley, and Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution in Washington.
This takes the planet total to more than 90 since the first one outside our solar system was discovered in 1995. The latest include the smallest so far - a planet 40 times bigger than Earth, orbiting very close to its star in the constellation Auriga.
Four of the 15 planets were found using the Anglo-Australian Telescope in NSW, taking its total to 10. Most of them are gas giants, like Jupiter, but they are much closer to their stars and with eccentric, rather than circular, orbits as short as a few days.
The latest planet, discovered by the University of California's Lick Observatory, is more than four times Jupiter's size, and slightly further out in an elongated orbit.
Cancri is 41 light years away, and at five billion years is a similar age to the sun.
They should do that now!
Of course they are doing that all the time. They had a run in Afghanistan, but they are out now. They are still running Iran for the time being. but they don't run Egypt, Algeria, Turkey, Pakistan, Indonesia, or even Saudi Arabia, much as it seems they have a free reign there. Nope, even without the infidels they won't rule earth.
I demand equal time in schools for alternate theories of astronomy!! Is that good enough impression of a creationist?
If this planet does have life on it, I'm hoping it's intelligent life. The universe needs a planet with intelligent life. So far, there's no evidence of intelligent life anywhere, especially here on Earth.
The dog ate their homework.
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