Hi, Darren, List,
As Carl said, if there's nothing (or nobody) out
there, it'd be an awful waste of space, a principle
alluded to one of the conferencees: "If there is space
to put a planet there, there will be a planet there."
Everyone should bear in mind that the mix of
detection methods is heavily biased toward massive
planets close to their stars. those oddballs. In all
probability, there are cold distant Jupiters by the
hundreds for every close hot Jupiter and equally
great numbers of Earth-to-Mars-sized Earths for
every Super-Earth hugging an M dwarf, too.
Maybe a thousand for every one. Planets are
just a natural outcome of the way the universe is
put together.
Like life...
Sterling K. Webb
--------------------------------------------------------------------
----- Original Message -----
From: "Darren Garrison" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Monday, October 19, 2009 11:52 AM
Subject: [meteorite-list] A bunch more planets. Yawn.
We now live in a time when there are so many known extrasolar planets
that the
discovery of a few dozen more of them is kind of pedestrian.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gSIOd5240uPvZThYwptYclUq5E3QD9BE6H4O0
Lots more planets found outside solar system
By SETH BORENSTEIN (AP) - 2 hours ago
WASHINGTON - Astronomers have found 32 new planets outside our solar
system,
adding evidence to the theory that the universe has many places where
life could
develop.
Scientists using European Southern Observatory telescopes didn't find
any
planets quite the size of Earth or any that seemed habitable or even
unusual.
But their announcement increased the number of planets discovered
outside the
solar system to more than 400.
Six of the newly found planets are several times bigger than Earth,
increasing
the population of so-called SuperEarths by more than 30 percent. Most
planets
discovered so far are far bigger, Jupiter-sized or even larger.
Two of the newly discovered planets were as small as five times the size
of
Earth and one was up to five times larger than Jupiter.
Astronomer Stephane Udry of the University of Geneva said the results
support
the theory that planet-formation is common, especially with certain type
of
common stars.
"I'm pretty confident that there are Earth-like planets everywhere,"
Udry said
in a Web-based news conference from a conference in Portugal. "Nature
doesn't
like a vacuum. If there is space to put a planet there, there will be a
planet
there."
What astronomers said is especially exciting is the high percentage -
about half
- of a type of star systems with relatively light stars that had planets
around
them. This is more than planet-formation theory expected, astronomers
said. Two
of the four planets found around these type stars were relatively close
to Earth
size, said astronomer Xavier Bonfils of Grenoble Observatory in France.
The discoveries were made by the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet
Searcher,
which looks for slight wobbles in a star's movements, which would be
made by the
tug of a planet's gravity on the star. There are no photos of these
planets.
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