Saturday, December 7, 2013

Let's Hang On To What We Got

They've found over a thousand planets outside our solar system by now. It's hard to spot an extra-solar planet all by itself. You not only need a good telescope, you need a giant hand to hold in front of its star to block out the glare. So mostly this is not how they're found. One of the ways you can find planets in other solar systems is to measure just how fast the star is trying to get away from us; and if it's dragging planets with it, you'll see a wobble in its progress. It's impossible to get up to speed towing the kids. Another way to discover new planets is to examine the brightness of the stars they're revolving around. If the planet travels in front of the star in relation to us, the star should dim a little. In order to do this, you have to be looking at the star just when its planet is traveling across its face, or you won't notice it. Space being the roomy place it is, the odds of a planet lining up between us and its star are pretty low, but it happens, and there are people--night shift workers, mostly--who spend all their time looking for it. As long as it doesn't happen when they're in the bathroom, they'll catch it.

So we do know that there are planets out there in other solar systems, and sometimes we even know what they're made of. They've recently located one made of rock and iron, just like Earth. Earth is mostly molten but crusts up nicely on the chilly outer edges. This new planet is whipping around its star in eight and a half hours and is not considered a likely spot for life. It would be hard for a critter to hang onto a planet flying around that fast, but inasmuch as the planet is entirely molten, holding on is the least of the challenges.

They've even found planets orbiting around pulsars. A pulsar is what's left over when a star blows up, and all that's left is the throbbing. I wouldn't have imagined that any planets would survive their star going supernova, but they do. This should be a great comfort to the kind of people who are so insufficiently frantic about their own mortality that they need to worry about the sun blowing up. I've met them. They tend not to get worked up about climate change, for some reason.

Scientists like to find planets they think might support life. Unfortunately, with the state of scientific literacy being what it is, this encourages people to imagine we might hop onto those planets once we're done trashing this one. If you point out how many light-years away they are, they just think it sounds sunnier.

Of course, we needed to properly define what a planet is before we could assert we had found any, and recently we've come to a consensus. A planet must be big enough that its own gravity has spanked it into a round shape. But it must not be so massive that it begins its own thermonuclear reactions. If that happens (it would have to be thirteen times bigger than Jupiter), it is essentially a star, if not a major one. It would be called a brown dwarf, or, as they prefer to be known, a Little Star Person Of Color. But there's a third requirement for achieving planet status, and this is the one that doomed Pluto: it needs to have mopped up most of the stuff around it. It turns out that Pluto is a member of a whole roaming pack. Not only that, but some of the other members of the pack are nearly as big and vicious. Pluto's in the Kuiper Belt, a revolving swath of space crap including a few other spheres that could qualify as planets themselves if we weren't enforcing that clean-up clause, but we must have standards.

My favorite of the planets discovered so far is the one they're calling the Fluffy Planet, with a density like that of cork. Even if it doesn't have enough mass and gravitational pull to hold onto anything, we could always pin stuff to it.

47 comments:

  1. The situation is hardly helped by the dire state of science reporting in the media. They keep reporting on newly-found planets as "possibly Earth-like" if they're similar in size, even if they're tidally locked to the star or have a surface temperature of 1,000 degrees.

    this encourages people to imagine we might hop onto those planets once we're done trashing this one. If you point out how many light-years away they are, they just think it sounds sunnier.

    The way I explain this to people is that the Voyager space probes are traveling at about ten times the speed of a rifle bullet, and at that speed, it would take them seventy-five thousand years to reach the nearest other star (not that they're even headed in that direction). That seems to help people grasp the concept of interstellar distances.

    A simple way to identify a planet with complex life would be to look for free oxygen in the atmosphere. Free oxygen is so reactive that it would all disappear in a few centuries unless it were being sustained by some process like photosynthesis. So if a planet has a lot of free oxygen in its atmosphere, there must be something like plants there. I don't expect we will ever see such a case, though.

    A planet must be big enough that its own gravity has spanked it into a round shape.

    Does Rush Limbaugh qualify?

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    1. There are many reasons Rush Limbaugh should be spanked...but that mental picture is so unpleasant I need to go lie down.

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    2. No, he does not qualify, because he is surrounded by crud and hasn't cleaned up anything. I don't even want to think about his moon.

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  2. You should have been a science teacher as you make this both understandable and interesting.

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    1. It's only in recent years that I've thought it would have been fun to be a teacher. And a science teacher would be the most fun of all. All I knew when I went to college was that I'd get a major in the liberal arts. Ended up with a biology degree.

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  3. A science lesson I actually understood! Pootie looks like he's ready for anything. I reached up and shifted my own protector shield in salutation. :-)

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    1. Pootie was born ready. I don't think anything fazes that boy.

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  4. Very enlightening! However, Pluto will always be a planet to me. I'm an astronomy rebel.

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    1. We've got a major thoroughfare that got renamed MLK Jr. Boulevard over thirty years ago, and I still tell people to "hang a left on Union."

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    2. And another will be forever 39th Ave.

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  5. Geez, I didn't know you were an astrom.., er asstrol..., um space cadet. I think Pootie has the right idea, though.

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  6. I spend an awful lot of time enforcing the clean-up clause around here. AND I feel as though I might be approaching the same size as a planet.

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    1. As long as you don't have rings around Uranus you'll be fine.

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    2. Watch out for those Klingons!

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  7. Love Pootie's tinfoil hat. I keep cents-off coupons for aluminum foil in my purse and hand them out for the whackadoodles that hang out on the fringes of my post office. "There", I tell them, "now you can afford to reline your tinfoil hat!" They rarely think I'm as funny as I think I am.

    I am a big fan of Bill Nye the Science Guy (who had an awesome show) and think that most of the scientific illiterates in Congress should be strapped down and forced to watch reruns.

    Bill! Bill! Bill! Bill!

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    1. What is it about the fringes of the post office that attracts whackadoodles? They're on the inside, too.

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  8. You make science make sense. Huh.

    The only part of this I already sort of noticed is that some folks are more worried about losing their guns than losing the planet.

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    1. I can't think about it. I don't tend toward depression, except about that.

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  9. Love the little stars of colour. And envisage them proudly calling themselves brown.

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    1. Just think: if we got big enough, we could be stars too. More fudge cake for all!

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  10. May I ask what that orb in the last picture is? It looks a little like a giant cookie rolled in graham cracker crumbs, or alternatively rolled in sand, although I can't imagine why anyone would do that ... except as a practical joke ... hmm... getting back to the question ... I think it's something to do with the topic at hand, so probably a planet, but - can you fill us in?

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    1. I meant, of course, "probably a non-planet", but I already knew THAT. Okay, I'm shutting up now.

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    2. Well...it's one of the things that turns up when you search for "cork planet" images, but I agree, it looks more like a cookie.

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    3. Ohhhh ... right beside the paragraph on the cork planet, almost like you planned it :) Thanks for telling me in such a nice way!

      I think I need a good sleep.

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  11. I think it might be interesting to have a planet that is shaped like a long flat oval. Don't lean too far over the edge!!!

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  12. I think there are a lot of people who still live on one of those.

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  13. Wait a minute, I need to go out and buy a hubble telescope or something roughly that size....my glasses aren't strong enough to see more than our moon.

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    1. The nose-pieces on those things really dig in, though.

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  14. My goodness! I didn't even know Little Brown State Dwarfs existed. How quaint. :)

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  15. I've wanted a telescope for years, but I never thought of using it to see stars and planets......the neighbors liberally show their moons and I want a better view.

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    1. We had a bad telescope given to us and could never see anything out of it, so we parked it in our tower aimed at our neighbors so that when they came over to visit, they noticed it.

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  16. Who knew you were a Physics buff? Welcome aboard the science train.
    the Ol'Buzzard

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  17. Gravity is our friend. It sticks us to the earth. It makes sex easier. Sex in free fall would be - you'd need rubber bands or velcro belts or something. Gravity makes pooping possible. And huzzah! Gravity makes planets! What would we do without gravity?

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    1. Personally, I'm pretty sure I'd fall apart without it.

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    2. Pooping happens in space. I just don't know how they do it on the space station...

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    3. I'm appalled you had to go all the way to the googles to find out how astronauts go potty, when I have Astronaut Poop listed under my Poop Posts already.

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  18. I have to admit, when I read the title of this post, the Frankie Valli song, "Let's hang on to what we've got" began playing in my head. But your statement about not trashing out planet is much better.

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    1. That song's been ticking me off for a couple days now. I never was a Frankie Valli fan. I know that's heretical. Hey. Maybe he and Michael Bolton can get together and do a live version of the Sound Of Music.

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    2. You've finally come up with the only singers who could do worse than Pickler did.

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    3. I had to look up Pickler. Did she do it? I know Carrie Underwood was in there somewhere. I saw about five minutes of it and bailed.

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  19. once again, you made me laugh, loudly, while sitting at my desk. And now my family is staring at me, like I'm crazy!

    "My favorite of the planets discovered so far is the one they're calling the Fluffy Planet, with a density like that of cork. Even if it doesn't have enough mass and gravitational pull to hold onto anything, we could always pin stuff to it."

    That CRACKED me up!

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    1. I'm just going to gently point out that just because I made you laugh and your family thinks you're crazy, it doesn't mean you're not crazy.

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