BA Blog: Welcome our tiny family

(Edit: 3000 lightyears. Microlensing. By, I think I heard, EPOXI (Deep Impact's new gig).) (Edit, later: not EPOXI!)

(Edit: BBC: Tiniest extrasolar planet found)

And, I saw it live because the BA and Pamela Gay are doing Ustream 'casts of the press conferences from the AAS. See topic AAS meetings on your computer . And get on over to Ustream live AAS press conferences (contents will vary over time).

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Wow, is that right? Is it already paying off?

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"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge" -- Charles Darwin
"Ignorance convinces" -- slang's dad
"Your right to hold an opinion is not being contested. Your expectation that it be taken seriously is." -- Jason Thompson

Don't quote me on that. I don't see it confirmed in the news. (That'll teach you to get your official news from journalists who went to the press conference, not some dork who listened in on his computer!)

Edit: OK. I read more. It was by the Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics (MOA), and the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE) collaborations using the gravitational microlensing method.

Yeah, I think EPOXI does transits of stars a bit closer.

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.. by looking at astro-ph:

http://arxiv.org/pdf/0806.0025

First of all, I'd like to congrajulate the hard-working astronomers who brought this about. This is a historic and quite amazing scientific discovery-- although perhaps not an unexpected one in light of other recent results in exoplanet science which hinted at it. And to think that less than a century ago the leading hypothesis for the formation of planets was two stars colliding and the debris from that collision giving rise to planets, comets, and asteroids. This old dead hypothesis implied that, given the rarity of stellar collisions, planetary systems would be equally rare. In accordance with the Copernican Principle, planets are NOT rare and are born in the same way (swirling debris disks) throughout the cosmos. Discoveries such as MOA-2007-BLG-192Lb are proof of the genuine, undeniable progress that is being made in terms of understanding our cosmic habitat. Instead of nay-saying and bashing astronomy let's rejoice and continue the search!

Heh. Well I'm still glad you (and others) share news here, despite the very rare (and usually quickly fixed) mistake once in a while. You're still doing a lot better than most mainstream media

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"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge" -- Charles Darwin
"Ignorance convinces" -- slang's dad
"Your right to hold an opinion is not being contested. Your expectation that it be taken seriously is." -- Jason Thompson

Even if it's a ultralow mass red dwarf, it's gonna be very cold. A star of 10^-3 solar luminosities would be about as bright from 0.7 AU as the Sun is from 22 AU, or a bit beyond Uranus's orbit.

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"Illuminati's Razor - The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer."
-- Fazor

Me, I'm going for speed over accuracy. It's the New Media!

(I'm watching the Weird Binaries press conference right now. There's two reports and I think I got half of one: a tight binary pair inside a red giant. But, I'm running around correcting URLs at other sources, so others can attend the right time and place. And with the Ustream dropouts obliterating half of what's said, I don't know what's going on. But it's fun. It's fast. When it's right, it's a bonus.)

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01....and I was going to sell some real estate there to Tiny Archibald... pete

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A third rate theory forbids
A second rate theory explains after the fact
A first rate theory predicts...A. Lomonosov

On the other hand, that same day I think (so maybe I just confused details of two different press release presenters), had hints of an EPOXI super-Earth reported in Astrobiology.com: Hunt for Super Earth Planets Underway

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*sigh*

The lowest-mass planet, PSR 1257+12 A, discovered in 1994 (that's 14 years ago!) has a mass of one seventh hundredth of this planet!

Why do people always overlook this pulsar? Its planets are not only the first confirmed, but also the most freakish by far.

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Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.
-- Richard Feynman

This is exactly why they are overlooked. Not everyone like to do morning stroll under a 3-meter thick lead umbrella.

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Sanity is overrated.
Butterfly.

wow this really has me stoked, but 3000 light years away? even if there is life there we will never in our time be able to communicate with the exo-planet or prove it is "habitable" ... just a stepping stone really, small stars harbor small planets

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my extrasolar planet blog

The distance of 3600 ly makes it the closest known microlensing planet! The record holder, OGLE-05-390L is whopping 21000 light years (6500 pc) away. That's almost one quarter of the diameter of Milky Way. Since gravitational lensing method may be the one which finds the first exo-Earths, it is likely that they lie at comparable distances. Which is truly ironic, since if some of our neighboring stars have such planets, we won't find them for a long time.

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Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.
-- Richard Feynman

Wikipedia gives 7e−05MJ as the mass of PSR 1257+12 A, which would make it about one one hundred and thirty-fifth as massive as MOA-2007-BLG-192Lb. It also gives a discovery date of 1992.

Strange planets! Presumably they formed after the supernova. They are surely too close to the primary to have survived its red giant phase, let alone the supernova.