Six-exoplanet system challenges theories of how planets form | Hacker News Reader

Six-exoplanet system challenges theories of how planets form

phys.org

51 pointsdnetesn36 comments

I was born in 1970. Had you told me in my teenage years that we’d have supercomputers in our pockets, I’d have probably been skeptical, but had you told me that we would be not only discovering planets in other systems but measuring their density and composition I’d have assumed you were drunk.

It took me a while to realize my younger peers have no recollection of times when we didn't know if the planets existed outside our solar system at all. Now it's like the obvious part in the Drake equation, mind-boggling.

I was born late 1980s and I think by that point we still didn't have any evidence of extrasolar planets...

...but damn if it wasn't bloody obvious there must be some.

The first time we discovered an exoplanet was in the late 90s orbiting I believe a binary pulsar system.

I'd assume people had some some indirect evidence before. I remember some noise about exoplanets during my teenage years - there was a Polish astronomer[0] involved in the first discovery. But I thought to myself, surely everyone expected this to happen? I was later surprised to discover that even in the 90s, people seriously believed there were no extrasolar planets.

(Perhaps theirs was the more scientific position, and I was just a nerd biased by science fiction stories. But then, I was taught the Sun was just another star, and if God wanted our solar system to be special, surely He wouldn't need to create more planets than just the Earth? I guess I had some intuition for Occam's razor before I knew it by name...)

I only got a more complete picture of the timeline of discoveries much later in life, from this video[1].

(EDIT: it seems that the first discovery was in 1992, when I was single-digit years old, so the noise I remember about Wolszczan must have been about the other discovery in 2007.)

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksander_Wolszczan

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gai8dMA19Sw

Believe it or not people used to argue that planetary formation can be super rare or even a set of conditions unique to our system. Not quite unlike the current narratives about extraterrestrial life.

I remember my teachers mocking me when I was saying that if the Sun is a star it's rather logical there are planets around other stars and that the view that they don't exist is the extreme one, but I was scoffed at that this is "pure speculation" and "science fiction".

On the other hand, when seeing a model of atom and solar system for the first time I was convinced reality is a set of layers with the micro- and macrocosm being just the two closest ones we're able to perceive, but I'm far less sure of it now.

> On the other hand, when seeing a model of atom and solar system for the first time I was convinced reality is a set of layers with the micro- and macrocosm being just the two closest ones we're able to perceive, but I'm far less sure of it now.

Yeah, I thought like this too until we started covering the basics of quantum physics and our teacher explained to us how the Bohr model of an atom was only a crude approximation of what's happening. I no longer see atoms as miniature solar systems, but every now and then, I ponder if the planets aren't macroscopic electron clouds...

Oh, they certainly are, as scientifically documented in "He Who Shrank", by Henry Hasse.

the wikipedia on atomic orbital has some nice pictures of the wave function of electrons around the nucleus. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_orbital

God bless that planets do not jump to an outer orbit when they get excited :-)

Perhaps we are destined to perceive it like layers because of our perception, and not reality itself :)

Funny.

I was born in 1969 and have dissed my catholic religion teacher publicly in class(which I unfortunately couldn't opt out of) with exactly that prediction, in the context of discussions about how the catholic church put science back in the past. Same thing in history, physics and geology classes.

Because one could reasonably extrapolate that from the speed of scientific and technological development at the times.

Whatever.. told you so!

(But stlll no giant O'Neill habitats, still angry...)

edit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCJzUiBZItk

Ha, I got booted out of RE class in about 1972 for asking if Jesus had to appear on every planet in which intelligent life appears.

IMO it's bad to dismiss someone just because he asks tricky question. a practicing religion teacher should at least humble himself and admit that it's a deep question which he has not got the ready answer yet, but ready to discover the options accoring to church tradition and principles. you have just a few "stone-graved" truths in religion (like axiom) but it does not mean that you can not explore beyond that. see the great church doctors (eg. Thomas Aquinas), they discovered new answers within the base framework of the faith.

sticking to your question, IMO it must be analogous to discovering sentient beings on the New World continents here on Earth in the 1500's. People there are turned out to be "human" (finally), so they are eligible for the gospel. so I guess if we discover extraterrassial sentient beings, even though they are not human in the sense of "homo sapiens" human, but they qualify to the criteria of being (in biblical terms) "the heirs of the heaven" (having free will, consciousness, etc. - we may figure out what really are these exactly by that time), then it's the same procedure as in Acts 1;8 "be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth^?^?^?^?^? OUTER SPACE".

You predicted we’d be able to judge an exoplanet’s density and composition?

Nope. That there will be exoplanets, and we will be able to detect the larger gas giants first, then the smaller solid ones, and things like brown dwarfs between the stars too!

edit: Well, 'predict' may have been the wrong word since it wasn't my own idea. That I've got from reading anything I could get hold of, including Sci-Fi. I just got very angry about certain dogmatic world views trying to be imposed onto me. Which I countered with mine, based on 'gut-feeling' supported by past evidence.

edit: Also planets in orbits about double/multi-star systems.

> The new research has revealed that the system ["TOI-178, a star some 200 light-years away in the constellation of Sculptor"] boasts six exoplanets and that all but the one closest to the star are locked in a rhythmic dance as they move in their orbits. In other words, they are in resonance... A similar resonance is observed in the orbits of three of Jupiter's moons: Io, Europa and Ganymede.

Video simulation of the system I found on YouTube:

https://youtu.be/-WevvRG9ysY

It's incredible to me that within my lifetime we've gone from "planets around other stars might not even exist" to "here's a list, you want rocky or gas, big or small, habitable zone or not?"

Also, as always, xkcd:

https://xkcd.com/1298/large/

“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.” – Carl Sagan

Could it be a message? Why to send from place to place a radio signal when we could set up a bunch of planets in an improbable/impossible regular configuration to be noticed from everywhere during a very long time frame?

Probably it is the argument of several existing science fiction books.

That is exactly what happens in Star Control II. One of the most satisfying Easter Eggs I found on my own.

are you talking about the rainbow worlds pointing corewards, or something else?

Yes. It was a huge driver of my anticipation for a sequel (which sadly didn't deliver).

Yeah the Pierson's Puppeteers in Ringworld (1970) did something like that [edit: on second thought, it wasn't as a signal though], and I'm sure there are others.

But in this case I just don't think this is weird enough, it's probably more a matter of tweaking planetary formation models.

Do you remember exactly what was described in Ringworld? I'm curious!

The solar system of the puppeteers had a similar configuration (I don't remember if it were with just 5 planets) and they were running from the galaxy, carrying their system with them.

> Could it be a message? Why to send from place to place a radio signal when we could set up a bunch of planets in an improbable/impossible regular configuration to be noticed from everywhere during a very long time frame?

Intuitively, for signalling purposes, setting up six planets in a weird orbital configuration to attract attention seems like it would take WAY more energy to do. Also, it tells you nothing about how to reply to the hail.

Though I could see it as some kind of solar system-sized monument.

"We were"

Star Trek: Picard did that with stars recently.

Speaking of fucking around on a cosmic scale, I wonder if someone hid something in one of the galactic voids.

One can imagine someone writing a love note by moving stars to form a constellation for the beloved.

I wish Musk/Bezos/Branson et al would spend their billions on colossal space telescopes rather than Mars vanity projects. Imagine being able to image the surface of an exoplanet...

Any progress on "Mars vanity projects" directly helps the project of colossal space telescopes. The reason the James Webb Telescope is so expensive is because old spaceships didn't have enough cargo volume to hold the telescope unfolded, so they had to create an incredibly expensive and error-prone unfolding mechanism. SpaceX's Starship is big enough to hold the JWT unfolded - something that would dramatically lower costs on any future telescope of the same size or bigger.

That's like saying, "I wish the government was spending money on constructing stuff up the mountain, instead of vanity 'roads' that lead to it".

Musk and Bezos are fundamentally focused on drastically lowering the price per kg to orbit.

It's possible that Starship could bring the cost to LEO down to the tens of dollars per kg.

> colossal space telescopes

...and that's how you do that. (:

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