Posted on 02/27/2014 8:42:49 AM PST by GraceG
Actual Headline: Mega Discovery! 715 Alien Planets Confirmed Using A New Trick On Old Kepler Data
Planet-watchers, some exciting news: you know how we keep talking about planet candidates, those planets that have yet to be confirmed, when we reveal stories about other worlds? Thats because verifying that the slight dimming of a stars light is due to a planet takes time -specifically, to have other telescopes verify it through examining gravitational wobbles on the parent star.
Turns out theres a way to solve the so-called bottleneck of planet candidates vs. confirmed planets. NASA has made use of a new technique that they say will work for multi-planet systems, one that already has results: a single Kepler release of data today (Feb. 26) yielded 715 new planets in one shot. That almost doubles the amount of known planets found before today, which was just under 1,000, officials said.
(Excerpt) Read more at universetoday.com ...
All very interesting but given the enormous distances of light years separating us and the laws of physics, they if they exist can never visit us and we can never visit them. However for the last forty years earth has been transmitting enormous amounts of digital data. Perhaps someday a return message may be received.
All very interesting but given the enormous distances of light years separating us and the laws of physics, they if they exist can never visit us and we can never visit them. However for the last forty years earth has been transmitting enormous amounts of digital data. Perhaps someday a return message may be received.
I dunno. I suspect there are a lot more than that. Do we really have to find every single blade of grass on our planet before we are willing to say the planet is pretty much covered in the stuff?
Kepler was really quite amazing for a severely shortened mission. It only looked at one tiny spot in the sky and discovered so many planets and potential planets. Even more amazing when you realize that it could only spot transiting planets meaning it missed those on a right angle orbital plane or too far out from the star to have passed while we looked.
If a planet were the same distance from its star as earth is from the sun it only transits for a few hours once per 365 days.
715 new planets and still nothing to watch on any their tv stations.
When someone figures out to link a working E-Cat reactor to a working Heim drive and a workign anti-gravity drive.
I figure get all three working, put them all in an old decomissioned diesel submarine, do some retrofitting to make them space worthy and there you go!
“All very interesting but given the enormous distances of light years separating us and the laws of physics...”
Even with us traveling at 1/1000th the speed of light we could eventually colonize the Galaxy or a decent sized chunk of it in a few million years. Provided Communism/liberalism doesn’t end us first...
Bistromathics itself is simply a revolutionary new way of understanding the behaviour of numbers. Just as Albert Einstein's general relativity theory observed that space was not an absolute but depended on the observer's movement in time, and that time was not an absolute, but depended on the observer's movement in space, so it is now realized that numbers are not absolute, but depend on the observer's movement in restaurants.
Further explanation of the theory behind bistromathics:
The first nonabsolute number is the number of people for whom the table is reserved. This will vary during the course of the first three telephone calls to the restaurant, and then bear no apparent relation to the number of people who actually turn up, or the number of people who subsequently join them after the show/match/party/gig, or to the number of people who leave when they see who else has shown up.
The second nonabsolute number is the given time of arrival, which is now known to be one of those most bizarre mathematical concepts, a recipriversexcluson, a number whose existence can only be defined as being anything other than itself. In other words, the given time of arrival is the one moment of time at which it is impossible that any member of the party will arrive. Recipriversexclusons now play a vital part in many branches of mathematics, including statistics and accountancy, and also form the basic equations used to engineer the Somebody Else's Problem field.
The third and most mysterious piece of nonabsoluteness of all lies in the relationship between the number of items on the bill, the cost of each item, the number of people at the table and what they are each prepared to pay for. (The number of people who have actually brought any money is only a sub-phenomenon in this field.)
” The Bistromathic Drive is used in Slartibartfast’s craft Bistromath and works by exploiting the irrational mathematics that apply to numbers on a waiter’s bill pad and groups of people in restaurants. “
I think Bistromath only leads one not to jump across the universe, but into another universe, because it seems after each lunch I have, that when I get back from lunch it seems that i have moved into a slightly more horrible universe where the populace is dumber and Obama has more power and the Republicans are more spineless....
I blame Europe's Large Hydron Collider for that. They fooled with forces they didn't understand. We are now in the bizarre "mirror mirror" universe of startrek fiction where America spies on it's citizens and Russia lectures us on Christian values.
Botany Bay !
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