On 6 Jan 2001, "k.camplate" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> asked
With the new planets being discovered, have they all been in
basically the same axis as our solar system?
No one that I know of has said anything specifically about this.
So I would expect the answer to be what is expected, namely that they
are not all on the same axis.
Indeed, I would expect that the orbital planes of the new planets are
distributed like the orbital planes of multiple stars systems, that is
to say, randomly from our point of view.
How is our system
orientated with respect to the rotation of the galaxy?
Cocked at an angle. Take a look at the Milky Way; that gives you best
sense. You can see the angle we are at. (And from a dark site, you
can see the dust lane -- quite dramatic, like being inside of NGC 4564
rather than seeing it from a distance.)
`Hamlet's Mill' argues that some thousands of years ago, the
precession of the equinoxes brought the angle such that the Milky Way
passed through the North Pole and divided the sky into two halves that
rotated around the pole. The book argues that many myths came from
the drift away from this orientation over the millenia. I have never
actually calculated where the Milky Way would be with the precession
of the equinoxes, so I don't know if the primary thesis is correct,
although I suspect it is.
I think that the way they 'discover' other planets is from its
sun's wobble towards and away from us as that planets circles the
sun.
Right. Doppler effect on the spectrogram. That is why the only
planets discovered so far have been very big.
Can we detect stars that wobble up and down yet, or in some way?
Yes. That is the older, but not very accurate way. It involves
parallax. As far as I know, no one thinks the evidence created by
theis method is very good. So far it is `suggestive' but weak.
People in the US government are talking about funding a telescope that
might detect earth sized planets in a decade or two. Since the topic
is sexy, it might get funding, in place of a project to better
characterize weather and climate on Jupiter or a project to study
Ceres and Vesta in detail.
Also, as the new ground-based interferometric telescopes come on line,
it is possible they will be able to detect small-mass planets. I
don't know. Star glare scattered through the atmosphere may be too
much, even with adaptive optics.
--
Robert J. Chassell [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Rattlesnake Enterprises http://www.rattlesnake.com
