New planet 300 times the size of earth

[darkvamplips]

I thought this would be neat to share with everyone on here. I'll copy and paste what they say and send you the link to see for yourselves.



WASHINGTON (AFP) – The Hubble space telescope  has discovered a planet in our galaxy in the process of being devoured by the star that it orbits, according to a paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The doomed planet, dubbed WASP-12b, has the highest known surface temperature of any planet in the Milky Way -- around 1,500 degrees Celsius (2,800 degrees Fahrenheit).

But it could be enveloped by its own parent star over the next ten million years, the paper's authors have concluded.

Using a new instrument called the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph that was installed on Hubble in 2009, the researchers observed how the planet was whipped into an elongated shape by gravitational forces.

"We see a huge cloud of material around the planet, which is escaping and will be captured by the star. We have identified chemical elements never before seen on planets outside our own solar system," team leader Carole Haswell of The Open University in Great Britain said.

Discovered in 2008, WASP-12b is located about 600 light-years from Earth in the Auriga Constellation and is more than 300 times the size of Earth.

It also has a mass 40-percent greater than that of Jupiter, the biggest planet in our solar system.

It is so close to its parent star that it orbits it in little more than 24 hours.

Astronomers already knew that stars will swallow a planet that comes too close to it, but this is the first time that the phenomenon has been observed so clearly.

The paper, which was published in the May 10 edition of The Astrophysical Journal Letters, confirms a theoretical paper published in the journal Nature last Friday by Shu-lin Li, an astronomer at Peking University in Beijing.

Shu-lin had predicted that the planet's surface would be distorted by the star's gravitational pull, and that gravitational tidal forces would make the interior so hot that it would greatly expand its outer atmosphere.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20100524/sc_afp/usscienceastronomy

[Vekseid]

* Vekseid quietly adjusts the thread's location >_>

[Caeli]

How completely awesome.

Thanks for sharing.

[darkvamplips]

Your welcome. Sorry Veks

[Lycan Queen]

* Vekseid quietly adjusts the thread's location null_null

So Veks adjusted the location of the thread so it wouldn't be absorbed into its sun? Also, this is awesome!

[darkvamplips]

I thought it was pretty neat to.

[Maeven]

How completely awesome.

Thanks for sharing.

Not for the poor souls living there! =P

I'm with Stephen Hawking. We need to get off this planet!

[BlisteredBlood]

Hmm! Very interesting!

[Schrödinger]

Given how this star is 600 LY away from Earth and Hubble's location, we see the light registered by Hubble of the planet and her star's predicament, lagging 600 years behind on what we could see now, right? Or am I misunderstanding LY and light being registered by the telescope wrongly, here?

[Vekseid]

It's not a good idea to try to scale that sort of thing up too far, due to the concept of 'now' being relative, for practical purposes yes, if you see something 600 light years away you are seeing it as it was six hundred years ago.

[Leo]

It's not a good idea to try to scale that sort of thing up too far, due to the concept of 'now' being relative, for practical purposes yes, if you see something 600 light years away you are seeing it as it was six hundred years ago.

QFT. That's the second thing I thought of as I read the original post. Regardless, it's still an interesting discovery. I wonder if that star is large enough to have the chance to become a black hole...

[Crystal Sex Lover]

Talk about getting sunburned... A 24++ hour year. Sometimes I stop to think how small and insignificant we really are in this universe of ours. It really is mind boggling to think of whats out there. Not including if there is lifebeyond our solar system.

[NotoriusBEN]

I dub WASP-12b to be called "Crematoria"... one of the heaviest Slams in the galaxy.

Your assumption of lightyears is correct. One of the biggest things to grasp is that *everything* is relative to your position in the universe. Speeds, positions, time, etc.

In our current understanding of the universe, the speed of light is the absolute limit that anything can go. Given the absolute mind-boggling size of this universe... the speed of light is actually pretty damn slow. So it can be assumed that as you look farther into space, you look farther back in time, all the way back to 13 or 14 billion years ago when this place started (according to current science)

so technically, 1million years into the future, some alien 1million lightyears from earth with a powerful enough telescope, or whatever tech, can peek back 1million years and catch you doing the nasty on the beach


A thought process...

say we could travel to the edge of what we can see in the universe, do you think that is the actual edge of the universe, and from that line on is nothingness? or do you think there is "more universe" that we just cant see because it is "beyond our light-bang-limit" (lack of a better term)

[Leo]

I'm certainly nowhere near being well informed about physics, so this question may sound stupid or outdated to some :

According to Einstein, the speed of light is, as NotoriusBEN stated, the speed limit for anything in the universe (or should I say, in the known universe?). I was wondering, if anyone can indulge my curiosity : Are there any theories regarding the existence of 'conditions' (for lack of a better word at my disposal, I try to refer to a 'place' in the universe. But it seemed like the meaning of the word is insufficient to describe a... well... place, in the universe ) in the universe where the speed of light may be exceeded?

Since, once you leave the gravitational space of our planet and/or solar system, physics kinda go crazy... (right?) I thought maybe it is, in theory, somehow possible that something may exceed the speed of light or some force may make it possible...

Ok, I confused myself... please help!

[NotoriusBEN]

At this point in time... we just dont know. There certainly are theories ranging from the fantastic (like hyperdrive and warp drive from star wars and star trek) which just break the limit with superscience; to something semi-plausible like wormholes or "slip bubbles".

Im sure Im gutting the correct explainations, but with wormholes, you basically tear a hole in the universe and hop into it. "How's that make travel faster?" Use this analogy: take a piece of string and hold it tight at both ends in both hands. Travel in our universe would take place along that line from your left to your right hand. Now take both hands and bring them together without letting go of the string, letting it sag. Now make an imaginary line between your hands. The wormhole is that "imaginary line". Much shorter 'relative distance' compared to the actual distance in space. I still get headaches trying to get my head around that.

Slip bubbles are something new and probably the closest analogy in media is Mass Effect's Relays. You encase the spacecraft in a field of energy and basically set it in subspace. Due to polarity mumbo-jumbo that I have no idea how to explain clearly, the space in front of the craft is less dense than the space behind it. The spacecraft then proceeds to "fall into that less dense space", getting scary fast and since it's subspace, your not technically breaking real space laws...

Besides us as a species not knowing how to use these technologies in the first place, the power required to push something like the American space shuttles through them requires an energy output on the magnitude of our Sun

[Leo]

Ah... Mass Effect... makes sense, in theory. But the problem, as you put it clearly, is how to generate and handle an energy output on the magnitude of the Sun. Gotta love fiction, you can always get away with crazy technology by saying it was invented by an unknown alien race. But now that I think about it, wouldn't Asari, Turians or Salarians just "open the hatch" and enter one of those relays and study the technology? Or is there a witty explanation as to why they couldn't research their way to mastering the technology?

Anyway... I'm not alien to wormholes, read about them somewhere. But I couldn't remember the whole thing while typing my last post and didn't want to present the option without enough information about it. In any case, the whole wormhole theory sounds too unlikely to me. I mean, isn't it supposed to be a theory based on a theory? I recall mention of planets, stars etc. warping space around them. Wormholes supposedly have such great gravitational effect that they warp space to the point of bringing (quoting your example) the hands together. Now, for space to be warped, it has to be filled with something. A black hole will be nothing but a star the size of a marble if there is nothing to consume around it. This means Dark Matter has to exist in order for a wormhole have that effect... am I wrong?

[Paradox]

Do the aforementioned "slip bubbles" have a more scientific name? I cannot seem to find anything about them; however, I did find some women wearing bubble wrap >_>

[Sabby]

But now that I think about it, wouldn't Asari, Turians or Salarians just "open the hatch" and enter one of those relays and study the technology? Or is there a witty explanation as to why they couldn't research their way to mastering the technology?

Oh, they do try :) The only reason they never succeed is because the Reaper's come to 'harvest' and so everything is gone. If we had more time, we would eventually crack the Mass Relay technology. It was designed to be easy to study and learn from, but almost impossible to master in the time given to us... look at the world of Mass Effect. Almost every bit of technology they have is reverse engineered from Reaper technology.

So, yes, they do 'open the hatch' and try to learn it's secrets. And someone actually managed it once :) Ever heard of The Beacon?

There was even an Asari who suggested creating our own Mass Relay's, just as an insurance plan... what if these ones stopped working?

[Leo]

Oh, they do try :) The only reason they never succeed is because the Reaper's come to 'harvest' and so everything is gone. If we had more time, we would eventually crack the Mass Relay technology. It was designed to be easy to study and learn from, but almost impossible to master in the time given to us... look at the world of Mass Effect. Almost every bit of technology they have is reverse engineered from Reaper technology.

So, yes, they do 'open the hatch' and try to learn it's secrets. And someone actually managed it once :) Ever heard of The Beacon?

There was even an Asari who suggested creating our own Mass Relay's, just as an insurance plan... what if these ones stopped working?

Now that you mentioned them, I remember... Sure, the whole advances in technology that any race had post-relay-discovery is entirely based on the Reaper technology relays and the citadel are the products of. And yes, with your help, I recall the Beacon too. Hmm, must play less Mass Effect 2 and do more nerd research to refresh memories.

I've obviously gotten the answer to my question about the relay technology, but now I'm thinking : Are they not researching more since Sovereign's attack on the citadel? I've only paid attention to the characters in Mass Effect 2 and didn't care to read the stuff on planets, races, technology etc., so maybe I'm lacking information... I dunno, they've had some time to reach at least one milestone in research... or Bioware simply wanted to keep that stuff for the final game.

Regardless, thanks for the reminders :)

[Sabby]

This is the last I will say, as it's getting off topic from the original space travel/wormhole stuff in this thread. Bioware pulled an odd back step in the script. The Council has suddenly stuck their heads in the sand. Sovereign was just a Geth ship. There's no such thing as Reaper's. Shepperd is just a crazy person. People scavenged the hell out of Sovereign's remains. The pieces that hit the Citadel all got stolen. Nothing bad will happen. Everyone is okay. Move along. There's nothing to see here.

Okay, ending Off Topicness ^^ Back to your technojargon

[Leo]

So yeah, I wonder if humanity will still be around when the images of that planet getting completely consumed reaches our side of the galaxy... *ends the post with barely contained nerd-talk in his mind*

[Oniya]

Im sure Im gutting the correct explainations, but with wormholes, you basically tear a hole in the universe and hop into it. "How's that make travel faster?" Use this analogy: take a piece of string and hold it tight at both ends in both hands. Travel in our universe would take place along that line from your left to your right hand. Now take both hands and bring them together without letting go of the string, letting it sag. Now make an imaginary line between your hands. The wormhole is that "imaginary line". Much shorter 'relative distance' compared to the actual distance in space. I still get headaches trying to get my head around that.

Good resources for this sort of thing:  Madeline L'Engle's 'A Wrinkle in Time' explained this very concept to me at - I want to say fourth grade?

Edwin A. Abbott's 'Flatland' deals with the concept by taking it down a dimension (to flat creatures experiencing the world outside their sheet of 'paper' - gives 'plane of existence' a whole new meaning. 

Also, Rudy Rucker has a book entitled 'The Fourth Dimension' which introduces a lot of concepts along these lines (including time travel, parallel universes, synchronicity, and so forth) in a very light-hearted, very readable way, complete with Thurber-esque cartoon diagrams.

[NotoriusBEN]

Oh excellent sources, Oniya. Just be prepared to have your brain ache a bit from just dealing with these concepts because it's so far from our perception of normal.

I remember a NOVA broadcast on String Theory, The Theory of Everything, etc. that started at 8:00pm one night. At 8:03pm my brain exploded. There was talk about our universe being comprised of 8 or 9 dimensions and that theorists and mathmaticians were able to solve and balance out the equation of String Theory. Then it was torn apart and rebuilt five or six different ways and balanced out again. Everyone was frustrated because you can only have one solution in math until someone proposed that these differently written equations were for *different universes*. /mind explode

That line of thought brings in the idea of the "Multiverse" and a new line of equations called "Nth Theory" were I turned the channel to watch cartoons and engage in some string cheese theory.

[Leo]

Oh excellent sources, Oniya. Just be prepared to have your brain ache a bit from just dealing with these concepts because it's so far from our perception of normal.

I remember a NOVA broadcast on String Theory, The Theory of Everything, etc. that started at 8:00pm one night. At 8:03pm my brain exploded. There was talk about our universe being comprised of 8 or 9 dimensions and that theorists and mathmaticians were able to solve and balance out the equation of String Theory. Then it was torn apart and rebuilt five or six different ways and balanced out again. Everyone was frustrated because you can only have one solution in math until someone proposed that these differently written equations were for *different universes*. /mind explode

That line of thought brings in the idea of the "Multiverse" and a new line of equations called "Nth Theory" were I turned the channel to watch cartoons and engage in some string cheese theory.

This is why I choose not to delve too deep into physics and remain a non-well advised person about it.

[Mewchonne]

This is SO freakin' cool.