Exo Planets and Solar Systems

Historic planetary instability and catastrophe. Evidence for electrical scarring on planets and moons. Electrical events in today's solar system. Electric Earth.

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Lloyd
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Re: Newfound Planet Orbits Backward - Let's give EU a try at it!

Unread post by Lloyd » Sun Aug 16, 2009 1:23 pm

JohnMalone: What's the chance of capturing a lone straggling planet, versus the chance of electrically-caused fissioning? My sense is that the electrical expulsion mechanism would be far more common.
* We and the Saturn System were apparently captured by the Sun a few thousand years ago, so there's no reason to imagine a lone straggling planet. Thornhill has suggested that Brown Dwarf star systems might be quite common in interstellar space, so their capture by larger stars might not be so uncommon. Also, Thornhill has suggested that most gas giant planets that fission from a star probably remain as close companions to the star, rather than becoming remote satellites.

mharratsc
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Re: Newfound Planet Orbits Backward - Let's give EU a try at it!

Unread post by mharratsc » Mon Aug 17, 2009 11:41 am

And now for something completely different!!

IT'S......

"The Problem With Modern Cosmology!!!" *circus music*
"I think it's extremely exciting. It's fascinating that we can study orbits of planets so far away," Seager told SPACE.com. "There's always theory, but there's nothing like an observation to really prove it."
Almost like a skit from Monty Python's Flying Circus, I swear... :\


Mike H.
Mike H.

"I have no fear to shout out my ignorance and let the Wise correct me, for every instance of such narrows the gulf between them and me." -- Michael A. Harrington

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nick c
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Re: Newfound Planet Orbits Backward - Let's give EU a try at it!

Unread post by nick c » Tue Aug 18, 2009 10:48 am

hi JohnMalone,
Okay, the interloper model sounds plausible, but still seems extreme to me. Since we can come up with several cases of retrograde motion of moons close to home, it seems the behavior is not all that rare. What's the chance of capturing a lone straggling planet, versus the chance of electrically-caused fissioning? My sense is that the electrical expulsion mechanism would be far more common.
Well, I guess we can speculate on probabilities and what is or is not plausible, but the fact remains that we have no basis for figuring that out. I gather from reading the EU that capture is not such an uncommon event. And if something unlikely happened, it still, nevertheless, happened.
The interloper model does not exclude the electrically caused fissioning model, in fact I would say that the interloper may have been born, at some time previous to capture, in a fissioning event (though probably from another star)...or it could have been the result of formation by a z pinch, the point being that it was formed by whatever means outside of the solar system into which it is interloping.
Thornhill, as Lloyd has noted, thinks that many of the members (Saturn, Earth, Mars, Venus, and others) of our own system were the result of capture by the Sun. The idea is that there are many "dark" stars or brown dwarf stars in interstellar space, lone travellers (possibly with there own retinue of satellites) that can be captured by a larger star such as the Sun as it moves through the galaxy.
The fact that there are several cases of retrograde moons, and retrograde rotation (Venus) within our own solar system, is evidence in favor of some disruption in the past-possibly capture. To this we might add the strange case of [url2=http://nineplanets.org/uranus.html]Uranus[/url2], which along with most of its' moons is tipped over on its' side.


nick c

tholden
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Planet collision in deep space

Unread post by tholden » Wed Sep 23, 2009 6:39 am

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,538 ... latestnews
...wo distant planets orbiting a young star apparently smashed into each other at high speeds thousands of years ago in cosmic pileup of cataclysmic proportions, astronomers announced Monday.

Telltale plumes of vaporized rock and lava leftover from the collision revealed its existence to NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, which picked up signatures from the impact in recent observations.

The two-planet pileup occurred within the last few thousand years or so - a relatively recent cosmic timeframe. The smaller of the two bodies - a planet about the size of Earth's moon, according to computer models - was apparently destroyed by the crash. The other was most likely a Mercury-sized-planet and survived, albeit severely dented.

"This collision had to be huge and incredibly high-speed for rock to have been vaporized and melted," said Carey Lisse of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland, lead author of a paper describing the findings in the Aug. 20 issue of the Astrophysical Journal....

mharratsc
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Re: Planet collision in deep space

Unread post by mharratsc » Wed Sep 23, 2009 9:28 am

Wow- I thought I would post something along the lines of 'planets can't collide if electromagnetic forces repel them from each other', but... the rest of the posts were such a barrage of inane goofiness I thought it would do more harm than good! :shock:

Mike H.
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'Super Earth' discovered orbitting nearby small star

Unread post by tholden » Thu Dec 17, 2009 10:11 am

http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/12/16/supe ... index.html

Image
(CNN) -- Astronomers announced this week they found a water-rich and relatively nearby planet that's similar in size to Earth.

While the planet probably has too thick of an atmosphere and is too hot to support life similar to that found on Earth, the discovery is being heralded as a major breakthrough in humanity's search for life on other planets.

"The big excitement is that we have found a watery world orbiting a very nearby and very small star," said David Charbonneau, a Harvard professor of astronomy and lead author of an article on the discovery, which appeared this week in the journal Nature.

The planet, named GJ 1214b, is 2.7 times as large as Earth and orbits a star much smaller and less luminous than our sun. That's significant, Charbonneau said, because for many years, astronomers assumed that planets only would be found orbiting stars that are similar in size to the sun.

Because of that assumption, researchers didn't spend much time looking for planets circling small stars, he said. The discovery of this "watery world" helps debunk the notion that Earth-like planets could form only in conditions similar to those in our solar system.

"Nature is just far more inventive in making planets than we were imagining," he said.

In a way, the newly discovered planet was sitting right in front of astronomers' faces, just waiting for them to look. Instead of using high-powered telescopes attached to satellites, they spotted the planet using an amateur-sized, 16-inch telescope on the ground.

There were no technological reasons the discovery couldn't have happened long ago, Charbonneau said.

The planet is also rather near to our solar system -- only about 40 light-years away.

Planet GJ 1214b is classified as a "super-Earth" because it is between one and 10 times as large as Earth. Scientists have known about the existence of super-Earths for only a couple of years. Most planets discovered by astronomers have been gassy giants that are much more similar to Jupiter than to Earth.

Charbonneau said it's unlikely that any life on the newly discovered planet would be similar to life on Earth, but he didn't discount the idea entirely.

"This planet probably does have liquid water," he said.

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Re: 'Super Earth' discovered orbitting nearby small star

Unread post by jjohnson » Thu Dec 17, 2009 10:48 am

I heard this report on the news yesterday. Everything else aside, I wondered how astronomers determine the distance to a tiny, dim star anywhere in our neighborhood. Is it too close for the expanding universe red-shift to be observed in its spectrum? If so, that theoretical method is out. it is a mere point without measurable diameter, so parallax is an unlikely yardstick. The planet's orbital parameters (short period) are based on the assumed mass of the star (likely assumed from its spectrum and the H/R diagram) and the assumption that the planetary mass is negligible in the calculation. Is there a Cepheid variable nearby (and how does one know that one star is "nearby" another one, looking at a 2-D image?) I've read that just estimating stars' radii is difficult and "not exact" - how not exact is it? A factor of 2 or more? How can error bars be assigned to diameter calculations without our being able to get anywhere close enough to more than 2 stars to confirm their diameter? Are any readers more knowledgeable than I am (which is a low bar, advantage yours) who can explain how distance measurements at ranges under 100 light years are conducted? Thanks!

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nick c
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Re: 'Super Earth' discovered orbitting nearby small star

Unread post by nick c » Thu Dec 17, 2009 2:35 pm

jjohnson wrote:I wondered how astronomers determine the distance to a tiny, dim star anywhere in our neighborhood. Is it too close for the expanding universe red-shift to be observed in its spectrum? If so, that theoretical method is out. it is a mere point without measurable diameter, so parallax is an unlikely yardstick.
Parallax, for the Sun's neighborhood, is accurate. By taking measurements 6 months apart, so the Earth is at about a 186 million mile (2 astronomical units) difference in it's orbital position, the distance of a nearby star can be measured through the use of geometry.
parallax.jpg
The usefulness of this method is limited by the resolution of the apparent positions to a distance of about 100 light years.

http://universe-review.ca/R02-07-candle.htm#parallax
What kind of a star is the primary? Seems to be a red (or brown dwarf), though the article does not specify, only that it is much smaller than our Sun. I think we need more detail than can be obtained from CNN.

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Re: 'Super Earth' discovered orbitting nearby small star

Unread post by redeye » Thu Dec 17, 2009 6:23 pm

Stories like his bug me. They use a mocked up image like that which suggest we are getting this level of information from our telescopes. In reality they're getting very little, certainly not enough to ever indicate the presence of life. If they are looking for life would Venus or Titan not be better candidates.

Cheers!
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jjohnson
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Re: 'Super Earth' discovered orbitting nearby small star

Unread post by jjohnson » Thu Dec 17, 2009 10:33 pm

NIck - I meant how are the distances determined where parallax or other means are no longer a useful tool - where our orbital diameter of 2 AU is insufficient to provide accurate estimates of diameter or distance from Earth. 40 LY may be well within the parameters of distance using parallax - as I said: I don't know what the cutoff distance is where parallax would fail, or any other method, for that matter. With Betelgeuse, they have managed to resolve a disc, at least to within some tolerance, but here's a star which is more than several AU in diameter. But dwarfs? How does today's astronomer tell if a Class M speck is 40 or 400 LY away - what assumptions have to be made?

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nick c
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Re: 'Super Earth' discovered orbitting nearby small star

Unread post by nick c » Fri Dec 18, 2009 10:21 am

jjohnson wrote:Nick - I meant how are the distances determined where parallax or other means are no longer a useful tool - where our orbital diameter of 2 AU is insufficient to provide accurate estimates of diameter or distance from Earth. 40 LY may be well within the parameters of distance using parallax - as I said: I don't know what the cutoff distance is where parallax would fail, or any other method, for that matter. With Betelgeuse, they have managed to resolve a disc, at least to within some tolerance, but here's a star which is more than several AU in diameter. But dwarfs? How does today's astronomer tell if a Class M speck is 40 or 400 LY away - what assumptions have to be made?
The [url2=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hipparcos]Hipparcos[/url2] satellite has increased the range of the parallax method to well over 100 ly. I think there is something like a 10% margin of error, lower for closer stars.
Red (and Brown) Dwarfs are probably the most common stars, though difficult to detect with increasing distance due to their low luminosity. Our immediate neighborhood of stars contains many dwarf stars. Most of the Sun's neighboring stars are very dim or not even visible to the naked eye from Earth. When we look into the night sky most of the naked eye stars are actually much bigger and/or brighter than the Sun. We see the distant search lights and not the more common, but dim, glow worms.
The giant Betelgeuse has been measured by parallax, at that distance the margin of error is much higher.
The star's distance is a problem and a puzzle (true for all the other parameters as well). Direct parallax measures from space, using the most modern results, give 495 light years, whereas the parallax using the star's natural radio emission gives 640 light years.

http://stars.astro.illinois.edu/sow/betelgeuse.html
Without knowing the exact distance, it is difficult to estimate the size of Betelgeuse...farther away means a larger diameter, closer means a smaller diameter.
At a compromise distance of 570 light years, and allowing for a lot of infrared radiation and for absorption of light by circumstellar dust, the luminosity comes in at 85,000 times that of the Sun, considerably more than comes out of Antares. At the larger distance, luminosity boosts up to 105,000 Suns. From these and the temperature, we derive respective radii of 3.1 and 3.4 Astronomical Units, more than double the size of the Martian orbit.

Beyond the parallax method we get into the area of guesstimates. [url2=http://outreach.atnf.csiro.au/education ... heids.html]Cepheid variables[/url2] are considered a "standard candle," for distance within the galaxy as well as in nearby galaxies where stars can be resolved. But in the EU a stars' variablility is dependent on external birkeland currents, so this measuring stick would have to be evaluated on those terms. Don't know if it would still be of use as a distance gauge, I suspect it would still be of some value.
Spectral analysis of a star can determine the characteristics and type, giving some idea of the [url2=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_magnitude]absolute magnitude[/url2], thereby yielding an estimate of distance.
On intergalactic scales the redshift has come under attack from Arp (and the EU), calling into question the standard view of the size and structure of the visible universe.

http://www.astrophysicsspectator.com/to ... actic.html
http://www.astrophysicsspectator.com/to ... actic.html

Anyway, the dwarf and its planet from the original post, are probably 40 ly away, give or take a couple of ly.
We won't be going there anytime soon :shock:

Nick

jjohnson
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Re: 'Super Earth' discovered orbitting nearby small star

Unread post by jjohnson » Fri Dec 18, 2009 6:05 pm

No, we won't! And thanks for the answer. I just had no idea from my readings (none in current astronomy textbooks) over what distances the various measurement systems were considered "accurate". I have no faith in red shift and the expansion of the universe concepts after reading Arp, and having some short dialogs with him via e-mail.

Jim

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Re: 'Super Earth' discovered orbitting nearby small star

Unread post by junglelord » Fri Dec 18, 2009 7:25 pm

Its funny the back tracking that astronomy does, while at the same time sounding so arrogant about its "knowledge".

When I was a kid, in the late 60's early 70's and even into the 80's and 90's, they never made a bold claim that all stars have planets.

I KNEW as a child that all stars have another body, at least one other star, and always planets, again at least one.

Guess what? I was right all along. I remember saying to teachers, "Of course other stars have planets....DUH!"

We know more as a child, and do better to continue in that mode.
Redshift is not all they make it up to be, I am with Arp on that one and others that dispute the
"Accepted" theory on redshift.
If you only knew the magnificence of the 3, 6 and 9, then you would have a key to the universe.
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Casting Out the Nines from PHI into Indigs reveals the Cosmic Harmonic Code.
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Dotini
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Re: Newfound Planet Orbits Backward - Let's give EU a try at it!

Unread post by Dotini » Thu Apr 15, 2010 6:50 am

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/ ... 041310.php

The preponderance of exoplanets seem to move in retrograde motion, thus upsetting the established explanation.

Respectfully,
Dotini

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nick c
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Re: Newfound Planet Orbits Backward - Let's give EU a try at it!

Unread post by nick c » Sat Apr 17, 2010 1:37 pm

This has mainstreamers fumbling through their "emergency ad hoc explanation" file. They have two serious problems pertaining to the nebular hypothesis for solar system formation:
1. hot Jupiters- gas giants in close proximity to their primary.
In order to account for these, thet seem to be very common, the nebular hypothesis must come up with a migration scenario, where the planet was formed in the outer reaches of the solar system and has moved into an inner orbit. Before the discovery of these 'hot Jupiters' there was no expectation of finding gas giants in orbits so close to the primary.
2. retrograde orbits- planets orbiting opposite of the rotation of the primary
Of course, the retrograde orbit pretty much excludes the migration explanation. This poses a great difficulty to the nebular hypothesis, leaving capture as the most feasible alternative explanation. The problem for mainstream then becomes explaining why capture should be such a common event.

Thornhill has speculated that there are "free floaters" (planets and brown dwarf stars) in interstellar space, and that our solar system is the end result of this type of capture event (of course a captured body does not necessarily have to go into a retrograde orbit. I would expect that the nature of the resulting orbit of the captured body, prograde or retrograde, would be a 50/50 proposition (?) depending on the conditions at the time of capture.) It would be interesting to see some data on exoplanets that reveals how many are in retrograde orbits? and how eccentric are those orbits? What is the axial tilt of the planets? It would also be interesting to determine if any exoplanets have both retrograde and circular (low eccentricity) orbits.

Exoplanet links:
http://www.superwasp.org/wasp_planets.htm
http://www.superwasp.org/publications.htm

Clearly, the fanciful thinking that planets are formed from gravitational condensation from an original nebula is being challenged by evidence being gathered from observations of exoplanets and other solar systems.

Nick

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