DailyDirt: Strange New Worlds
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
The universe is a big place, so it’s possible to find pretty much anything you can think of — if you’re patient enough to scan the vastness of space. Here are just a few weird planets that astronomers have found recently.
- Kepler 16b isn’t the lecture hall for your astronomy exam. It’s the un-trademarked name of Tatooine. This is the first planet that’s been observed orbiting a binary star system. [url]
- The Kepler telescope has been a busy bee. It’s found two planets sharing the same orbit. These two co-orbiting planets, in the KOI-730 system, are always 120 degrees apart, so they don’t collide. [url]
- The planet TrES-2b is so dark. How dark is it? It reflects less than 1 percent of the incident light from its parent star, and so it’s darker than coal. (sorry, no joke here.) [url]
- Apparently, there are lots of “free agent” planets floating around the universe without a star to orbit. Expect a disaster movie where one of these lonely planets is headed straight for Earth (nevermind the statistical improbabilities). [url]
- To discover more links on space exploration, check out what’s floating around in StumbleUpon universe. [url]
By the way, StumbleUpon can also recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.
Filed Under: astronomy, kepler, orbit, planets, tatooine, telescope
Comments on “DailyDirt: Strange New Worlds”
Coal planet?
“The planet TrES-2b is so dark. How dark is it? It reflects less than 1 percent of the incident light from its parent star, and so it’s darker than coal. (sorry, no joke here.)”
I can’t wait till they find a obsidian one! Hope the creepers don’t follow
and now we have particles moving faster than light: http://news.yahoo.com/strange-particles-may-travel-faster-light-breaking-laws-192010201.html
Re: Re:
thats last weeks news
Re: Re: Re:
it’s actually the twin of last week’s news that was traveling faster than the speed of light… slightly older than last week’s news now because of time dilation.
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“and now we have particles moving faster than light”
No we don’t. Re-read the article and try to remove the sensationalist headlines. Pisses me off that media does this, because it results in people spreading it around as fact when it clearly is not. Note what the actual scientists who made this discovery said, not what else is written in the article. In short, no one knows how the neutrino’s arrived 60 nanoseconds fast than light over that fairly vast distance. That has to be studied before we can factually say “we have particles moving faster than light”. Most likely, they aren’t. There are other ways this could have happened. One idea of many is perhaps there is an unmeasured bowing/flexing of the earth that caused the illusion of the particles arriving sooner than light would have. The amount of time they arrived sooner was so infinitesimally small, the bow/flex of the earth (if that was the cause) would only need to be equally infinitesimally small to cause the delay. Again, that’s just one of many possible causes, all more likely than the neutrinos actually traveling faster than the speed of light.
Re: Re: Neutrinos
Or it could be:
neutrions have no mass.
Mass increases as you approach the speed of light.
This is the limiting factor, at the speed of light you have infinite mass so it would take infinite energy to push past it which is impossible.
But wait, neutrinos have no mass so the mass increase effect of near light speed does not apply.
Yes, this is possible but now it needs to be confirmed.
Thank goodness it just “free agent” planets floating around the universe and not a moon that has been blasted from obrit and through space from a ‘nuclear’ event on the moon’s surface.
I would hate to see the weekly misadventures of “free agent” MOON floating around the universe.