Science Tidbits #5

[RJDiogenes]

let me tell you about my friends job,,..

he is the head engineer on the team that is building the largest telescope in the world, he already did that once in the 90's in Chili up in the Andes --now that it is not the biggest he has to do it again even bigger..

That's a damn nice job.

[Lupine]

Who'd have thought this day would come? There are now so many known exo-planets that astronomers literally don't have time to study them all.

[RJDiogenes]

Wow, there's now 4,104 confirmed Exoplanets. That's definitely way too many to study individually. There's only one solution: Just have the IAU create a ludicrously restrictive definition of Exoplanet that brings the total down to eight.

Maybe this is another aspect of Exoplanetology that they can farm out to amateur astronomers to do on their home computers. And the first person to confirm a planet gets to name it.

And speaking of things we never expected, who knew that we'd have so many extrasolar objects to study? Exocomet Borisov (love that name) is now swinging around the sun and we should have a pretty good view of it for a few months. Unlike Yomama, it seems to be a pretty standard cometary body so far, except that it comes from some alien Solar System, but who knows what might pop out of it and invade us?

[Lupine]

Wow, there's now 4,104 confirmed Exoplanets. That's definitely way too many to study individually. There's only one solution: Just have the IAU create a ludicrously restrictive definition of Exoplanet that brings the total down to eight.

I wouldn't put it past them!

Unlike Yomama, it seems to be a pretty standard cometary body so far, except that it comes from some alien Solar System, but who knows what might pop out of it and invade us?

I think that was the plot of a movie.

[RJDiogenes]

Man, all the good plots are taken.

[Lupine]

Another day, another estimate on when Homo erectus died out.
It's odd though that the article states that modern humans didn't arrive on the island until 39,000 years ago. Humans had been in Australia longer than that, so that date almost has to be wrong.
Regardless it is possible, even likely, that modern humans encountered H. erectus at some point.

[RJDiogenes]

It does seem very likely, which is pretty exciting. A hundred thousand years is a very short time, and it's a reminder that we were very close to living in a world with multiple human species. Which would have been a strange and interesting place.

[Lupine]

^Makes you wonder how we would have turned out if there had been people around who weren't "us".

[RJDiogenes]

I was giving that some thought. Unfortunately, the inescapable conclusion, I think, given that competition and self-preservation and xenophobia are all survival traits in the wild, things would probably be even worse.

[RJDiogenes]

The latest Hubble email has an article about those Puffy Planets. Apparently they are real. I can't imagine how something with so little density holds itself together. I'd love to see what they look like.

[Lupine]

They're right that it is probably a transitory stage of planetary formation. There might have been a time in Earth's early history where it had an extensive shell of hydrogen and helium that the sun eventually burnt off.

[RJDiogenes]

I'm rather hoping that they're the home worlds of the Bubble People.

[Lupine]

And sadly I have to report that my prediction that we'd find alien life by 2020 didn't come true.

[RJDiogenes]

Well, perhaps during 2020....

[RJDiogenes]

Oooh, I want to see this.