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Newly Discovered Planet Orbits "Backward"

boloboffin said:
Maybe the other star is just upside down and the planet is revolving the right way, relative.

How do planets and stars know the right way to revolve about things? Something I've often wondered...
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It's not just the star, it's moving retrograde relative the entirety of its own solar system. Think of, say, Mars going the other way around.
 
Is this article evidence against the proposition that the universe is supposed to follow the Right Hand Rule? :alien009:
 
It is, DR, it is. But the rule doesn't help much in this case because we don't know if it is the right hand of Thor or Zeus or Mithra or the FSM or.....
 
Is this article evidence against the proposition that the universe is supposed to follow the Right Hand Rule? :alien009
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It is evidence that alien life is becoming rarer and rarer as we are knocking out certain star systems as candidates.
 
Singularitarian said:
And who are you to talk to me like this?

And by the way, i would cover the facts first before making any suggestions, as to like me only suggesting a ''proof'' here.

In the article, it says:

"I think it's extremely exciting. It's fascinating that we can study orbits of planets so far away," (Sara) Seager told SPACE.com. "There's always theory, but there's nothing like an observation to really prove it."

So you are gravely mistaken, bub.
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I'm Jason Patterson, and you are?

You were the first person to mention anything about proof in the thread. You first post was fairly reasonable, but then you claim that the astronomers in the story proposed "rather incoherent theories and possible suggestions" regarding the slingshot idea. If you read the paper, it suggests nothing of the sort, only that that type of interaction is a reasonable explanation of the planet's orbit. I guess you could call that a possible suggestion, but it has nothing to do with a theory and is far from incoherent. If you have another remotely likely explanation for how a planet could be in a retrograde orbit aside from a slingshot or orbital capture, I'd love to hear it. It would take a pretty huge anomaly in the rotation of the dust cloud from which the system formed for this to have been made in place.

Your response is fairly typical of what you've written elsewhere. You mined the paper for the word prove and found one instace of it. You didn't bother to read who the statement was by (an astronomer who was not involved in the discovery) or what they were speaking about (our ability to observe extrasolar planetary orbits sufficiently well to observe a situation like this) and posted it as evidence in favor of your argument. It didn't work here as it has not worked elsewhere.
 
makaya325 said:
It is evidence that alien life is becoming rarer and rarer as we are knocking out certain star systems as candidates.
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That's exactly backwards. When the Drake equation was intially proposed, no one had any idea how common planets were. The first ideas on the subject were that a planet suitable for life would have to be in a relatively narrow region around its host star called the "Goldilocks" zone or habitable zone, where water would stay liquid. Such a planet would be like Goldilock's preffered poridge, just right.

However, many things have undermined that idea.

1) We discovered life on Earth that lives entirely off of geothermal energy, to whom sunlight is completely irrelevant, making life on planets that are in perpetual night much more likely.

2) We discovered that Io, one of the moons of Jupiter, is the most geologically active body in the entire solar system! That's a serious source of energy from tidal forces alone, not starlight.

3) We discovered that tardigrades, viruses, and archea thrive in environments would be instantly lethal to most organisms, making the range of conditions that life can tolerate much wider.

4) Europa, another moon of Jupiter, likweise experiences tidal stresses and is covered by a vast ice crust. It's entirely possible it harbors warm, dark oceans.

5) We keep disovering planets at a stunning rate. There's been over 200 extrasolar planets discovered so far.

So, we now know that there's no shortage of places for life to develop and that life can exist in a much wider range of conditions than we thought. Ergo, the more we learn the more likely alien life seems.
 
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makaya325 said:
It is evidence that alien life is becoming rarer and rarer as we are knocking out certain star systems as candidates.
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It is not evidence that alien life is becoming rare. Astronomical science is adding candidate systems, not knocking them out.

makaya, could you please not post in the Science, Mathematics, Medicine, and Technology forum. Doing so is distracting and embarrassing to every evidence-based forumite.

ETA: Better said by ID above.
 
~enigma~ said:
They follow the rotation of the star they are orbiting. Geez bolo...thought everybody knew that :)
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Hey, man, contrary to popular opinion, I don't know it all. :)

So I guess the planets all know to line up in the same plane or thereabouts because of the way the host star is rotating, too?
 
boloboffin said:
Hey, man, contrary to popular opinion, I don't know it all. :)

So I guess the planets all know to line up in the same plane or thereabouts because of the way the host star is rotating, too?
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Since they all (usually) condensed out of the same original gas cloud, they're pretty much have to share the same rotation. Anything way sckewed off the the plane of the solar system or rotating retrograde would require a special explanation.
 
ImaginalDisc said:
Since they all (usually) condensed out of the same original gas cloud, they're pretty much have to share the same rotation. Anything way sckewed off the the plane of the solar system or rotating retrograde would require a special explanation.
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Well, I wasn't quite getting it from this, but knowing there was an answer inspired a Google, which brought up this page, and after the guy said "pizza dough", I got it.

NOW I know it all.
 
William Parcher said:
Newfound Planet Orbits Backward
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Impressive quotes from WP's link...

Planets orbit stars in the same direction that the stars rotate. They all do. Except one.

A newfound planet orbits the wrong way, backward compared to the rotation of its host star. Its discoverers think a near-collision may have created the retrograde orbit, as it is called.

The star and its planet, WASP-17, are about 1,000 light-years away. The setup was found by the UK's Wide Area Search for Planets (WASP) project in collaboration with Geneva Observatory. The discovery was announced today but has not yet been published in a journal.
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I think the fact that we can observe the orbit of a planet half the size of Jupiter from a distance of what takes light 1,000 years is just fascinating. The light we are seeing now in those observations left the system when here on earth the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was destroyed by Caliph al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah in Jeruseum and the 69th emperor of Japan, Emperor Go-Suzaku was born.

WASP-17 likely had a close encounter with a larger planet, and the gravitational interaction acted like a slingshot to put WASP-17 on its odd course, the astronomers figure.
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I think the idea of close encounters by planets or even worlds colliding is extemely cool. I don't know if anyone has ever had a dream similar to this but I often have one where two planets are so close together that there atmospheres mix and I can look up and see the seas and clouds of that alien world. Just a neat dream.

WASP-17 is about half the mass of Jupiter but bloated to twice its size. "This planet is only as dense as expanded polystyrene, 70 times less dense than the planet we're standing on," said professor Coel Hellier of Keele University.

The bloated planet can be explained by a highly elliptical orbit, which brings it close to the star and then far away. Like exaggerated tides on Earth, the tidal effects on WASP-17 heat and stretch the planet, the researchers suggest.

The tides are not a daily affair, however. "Instead it's creating a huge amount of friction on the inside of the planet and generating a lot of energy, which might be making the planet big and puffy," Seager said.
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Expanded polystyrene!? Imagine visiting a world with the consistency of packing peanuts. Cool.

The thing I find useful about this article is that I know someone who is a Seventh Day Adventist YEC educator with whom I have had friendly debates. One of the first things that comes out when we talk is him referring to perfect orbits of planets. Instead of making references that might not be as simple for him, now I can just say "WASP 17". Maybe he'll think it came from Satan.
 
kitakaze said:
The thing I find useful about this article is that I know someone who is a Seventh Day Adventist YEC educator with whom I have had friendly debates. One of the first things that comes out when we talk is him referring to perfect orbits of planets. Instead of making references that might not be as simple for him, now I can just say "WASP 17". Maybe he'll think it came from Satan.
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Perfect. . .elipses?

Circular orbits went out of scientific understanding in the RENAISSANCE!
 
oh from the title i thought they finaly found Planet X :(
would be about time, its soon 2012 :D
 
ImaginalDisc said:
Perfect. . .elipses?

Circular orbits went out of scientific understanding in the RENAISSANCE!
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No, it wasn't quite that easy. This cat was on about the direction, alignment, and continuity of planetary orbits. When he said perfection, one of the first things I asked was if he was talking about circular orbits. This conversation was a couple of months back. I said there was some basic physics he needed to check out as well as a number of weird things in our solar system such as sideways Uranus. I know I'll be sending him a link to check out WASP-17.
 
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kitakaze said:
No, it wasn't quite that easy. This cat was on about the direction, alignment, and continuity of planetary orbits. When he said perfection, one of the first things I asked was if he was talking about circular orbits. This conversation was a couple of months back. I said there was some basic physics he needed to check out as well as a number of weird things in our solar system such as sideways Uranus. I know I'll be sending him a link to check out WASP-17.
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I have to cite Douglas Adams' parable of the puddle.

. . imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, ‘This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!’ This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it’s still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything’s going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.
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If planetary orbits in our solar system were highly eccentric or chatoic the solar system would have fallen apart before we evolved.

Dur.
 
kitakaze said:
I think the fact that we can observe the orbit of a planet half the size of Jupiter from a distance of what takes light 1,000 years is just fascinating.
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I just want to underscore kitakaze's sense of wonderment here. Forget the details for a moment. We now have instruments (telescopes) that can detect motion and properties of things virtually unimaginably far away. A relatively few years ago we didn't even know they existed. How cool is that?

Or, to look through the other end of the scope, we can image individual atoms. It wasn't so long ago that atomic theory was controversial. What an incredible period we live in. Imagine, say, 500 years from now. What knowledge will we possess that will make 2009 look absolutely primitive?
 
ImaginalDisc said:
If planetary orbits in our solar system were highly eccentric or chatoic the solar system would have fallen apart before we evolved.

Dur.
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That is about as short and sweet as you can put it. I wish I had said it just like that. It was one of those lazy hottub conversations. I spoke to that effect but I rambled on a bit about how solar systems form. He was a bright and reasonable guy but when push came to shove he was more comfortable with taking a stance that scientific observations in support of Creation are supressed by an anti-Christian agenda. I asked what those were and gave me a book entitled The Evolution Handbook by Vance Ferrell. It was the worst concentration of lies and misinformation I have ever seen. Every conversation after that consisted of me bringing the book to the hottub and pointing out straight-up lies in it in a friendly and non-confrontational way.

I would send him links about evolution and astrophysics but in the end he was happy to keep the blinders on and ask about tips on Japan. I remember at one point he right out told me that China had been predominantly Christian but that this era of history had been erased from public record. See, who needs evidence?

Sometimes they're too far gone, there's no turning back.
 
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