Newly Discovered Alien Planet as Dense as Lead

(Space.com) Astronomers have pinned down some details of an exotic nearby alien planet that’s almost as dense as lead. The exoplanet, called 55 Cancri e, is 60 percent larger in diameter than Earth but eight times as massive, researchers revealed Friday (April 29). That makes the alien world the densest solid planet known — It’s twice as dense as Earth. Astronomers previously thought 55 Cancri e took about 2.8 days to orbit its parent star. But the new study reveals that the exoplanet is so close to its host star that it completes a stellar lap in less than 18 hours. The super-dense alien world is part of a multiplanet solar system about 40 light-years from Earth, in the constellation Cancer (The Crab). Its sunlike parent star, 55 Cancri, is bright enough to be seen from Earth by the unaided eye, researchers said. Since 1997, astronomers have discovered five planets circling 55 Cancri (including 55 Canrci e in 2004). All five alien worlds were detected using the so-called radial velocity — or Doppler — method, which looks for tiny wobbles in a star’s movement caused by the gravitational tugs of orbiting planets. Initially, astronomers thought 55 Cancri e had an orbital period of about 2.8 days. But last year, two researchers — Harvard grad student Rebekah Dawson and Daniel Fabrycky of the University of California, Santa Cruz — re-analyzed the data. They suggested that the alien planet might actually zip around its host star much faster than that.

A PICTURE OF "55 CANCRI E"
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Thats a beautiful planet, thanks for the info.
Go US Santa Cruz!!!!!

Think how old you would be living on that planet with 18-hour years, dizzying!

Originally posted by Illustronic
Think how old you would be living on that planet with 18-hour years, dizzying!

This is why time is considered to be merely a human invention.

reply to post by Illustronic


I swear to god i wold give up my life, to visit another planet!

reply to post by antinwo101


You know the reason for all the teasing over finding brand new planets is to prep everybody for the staged alien invasion or staged alien savior thing, that's gonna be the finally straw before they kill off and make the sacrifice to trump all holocausts.

reply to post by Conspiracy Now


Not so, without time nothing would exist, and you just experienced time to reply to something you previously read.

This is total bunk. First of all, the link is wrong. Secondly, that space.com website is very amateurish.

But anyway, all this stuff is conjecture. "Scientists" have "detected" other planets not by observation, but by what they think are wobbles in a star, caused by the nonsense and disproven Doppler effect.

There is such a thing as Doppler shift, IN SOUND WAVES.

The Doppler shift is ASSUMED for light, however, it has been shown many times over that the redshift equals distance THEORY is wrong, with numerous objects of higher redshift appearing IN FRONT OF items with lower redshift. According to the THEORY, this is impossible. Therefore, the theory must be wrong.

And, with these weak methods of determining that they THINK there is another planet affecting some star, how could they ever figure out the density of said planet, when they cannot SEE how large it is in any way? At best, they could figure the MASS of the planet, if their harebrained theories were correct, but since density is mass divided by volume and they cannot detect the volume, how could they possibly calculate the density?

Also, the fact that at first their "theory" calculated the planet's orbit at 2.8 days, now corrected to 18 hours or about one fifth, well, let's see....that means they were WRONG at first, but now they're right? HA HA HA>

TOTAL NONSENSE>

reply to post by CaptChaos


curious.astro.cornell.edu...

There's more than one way of guessing apparently. I assume our observations take the following ideas into the field and not just throw all their eggs into one basket.

Here are the methods that have been used to at least attempt to detect extrasolar planets:

1) Direct Observation: This seems the most obvious choice - seeing the planet itself. Unfortunately, with our current technology this is very very difficult because the planets are swamped by the light from their parent star. Trying to make out the light from an extrasolar planet amidst the light from its parent star would be like trying to pick out the light from a firefly hovering next to a searchlight in San Francisco on a foggy night using a telescope in New York City. Although we have not definitely detected any extrasolar planets with this method so far, hopefully that statement is very close to not being true thanks to advancements in telescope detector technology.

2) Astrometry: The study of the precise postions of stars on the sky is called astrometry. We always think of a planet orbiting a star, but what is actually happening is the planet and the star are both orbiting a shared center of mass. The star is always much more massive than the planet, so the center of mass is much closer to the star, and thus the star's orbit is very tiny while the planet's orbit is much more pronounced. Even though the change in the star's position is very small due to the tug of the planet, this tiny difference may be detectable through a close study of the star's position over time. So far due to the difficulties of these measurements, no extrasolar planets have been detected this way either.

3) Doppler Shift: This method also relies on the fact that the planet and star are both orbiting a shared center of mass. If the orbit is edge-on, the star will move towards us and then away from us in its tiny orbit. When an object is moving towards us, the light we detect is blue-shifted (we see the light at shorter wavelengths than normal) and when an object is moving away from us, the light we detect is red-shifted (we see the light at longer wavelengths than normal). The Doppler shift for light is very similar to the Doppler shift for sound which you have probably witnessed if you've ever stood on the side of the road when an ambulance passed by. The ambulance's sirens sound different when they are approaching than when they are receding because the sound waves are compressed and then stretched. These changes in the star's spectrum (a plot of brightness coming from the star versus wavelength) due to the Doppler shift can be detected. This method has resulted in the discoveries of most of the extrasolar planets so far.

4) Pulsar Timing: The first extrasolar planet ever detected was discovered in 1991 around a pulsar. A pulsar is a very old star that emits its light in beams that can sweep across our field of view (sort of like light from a lighthouse). These pulses can be very precisely timed (pulsars make very accurate clocks), but if a planet is orbiting the pulsar, the timing between the pulses gets altered. Because the environment around a pulsar would be very hostile to life, astronomers do not actively use the pulsar timing technique to find extrasolar planets. They are more interested in finding planets that could possibly harbor life and that are more like our Earth.

5) Brightness Variations: If the planet passes in between its parent star and the observer (meaning the orbit is edge-on), the light from the parent star can be seen to dip slightly as the planet blocks it. A few extrasolar planets have been detected this way. As in the star HD209458 which was found to have a planet using this method, the star's brightness only decreases by about 0.1% and the dip only occurs for a few hours.

6) Gravitational microlensing: This method uses complicated mathematics from Einstein's theory of general relativity. The basis of this technique is the fact that heavy objects curve the space around them so when light travels by an object, the light can be magnified. Astronomers using this method look at a star that might have a planet as the star passes in front of a distant background star. The light from this background star gets magnified in a very special way by the planet of the foreground star (if the planet exists). If I am not explaining this method very well, don't worry! Gravitational microlensing is very controversial because it cannot be verified. The special alignment between the foreground star and the background star never happen again, so astronomers can't prove whether or not the special magnification they saw was real or just regular old measurement error.

And apparently the technique using the doppler shift has discovered more planets than the others. So, make of that what you will.

reply to post by mr-lizard


And so we discover lead planets.
Iron being the last step in fission I would expect all iron planets.
Just a universe of Stars, Iron planets and left over gasses.

Iron planets, oops, Iron Sky a Nazi trailer and their Iron Cross.
Too much association there.
Did someone make Iron fly.

reply to post by TeslaandLyne


Iron Maiden, ha ha, but seriously iron is one of the top ten most common elements in the Universe, our sun has an iron fusion core, but it doesn't take a star's gravity to coalesce an iron core, it does however take a star to fuse hydrogen and heavier elements into iron. Just yesterday I listed the most plentiful elements and just from memory they don't follow the Periodic Table of elements after Helium (2), because Oxygen (8) is third, Iron (26) is ninth followed by Sulfur (16). Neon is about fifth, the rest I haven't logged into memory on the tip of my tongue.

Nice!
It's amazing what these "scientistics" can "discover" too bad we are too ignorant to understand and so, we fall in denial and stupidity...
S&F

reply to post by Illustronic


Thanks I saw that post as the topic is useful in all the cosmic cases.
And to think electrostatic activity is the source of all the atomic elements and compounds.
Lead is an end product of fission or radioactive decay I'm thinking.
Fusion from gases to iron is star activity.
So we have something on lead.
Just what is it doing circling a star we must find out.
Perhaps lead is being built up into uranium which will then decay back to lead.
Perhaps not the Relativists outlook on life.

reply to post by Conspiracy Now
[This is why time is considered to be merely a human invention. ]

I wonder is out there someone has found a truly universal measurement of time ? obviously revolving round your sun is not able to be used interplanetary

Originally posted by antinwo101
reply to post by Illustronic

 

I swear to god i wold give up my life, to visit another planet!

Well chances are you literally would be giving up your life if you visited another planet.

Is that a real picture of the planet? It's so clear, specially at 40 Light Years away. That should mean that we should have pictures of our planets that can show a dime sized object on mars.

Am I wring for thinking this way?

Originally posted by Tnewguy
Is that a real picture of the planet? It's so clear, specially at 40 Light Years away. That should mean that we should have pictures of our planets that can show a dime sized object on mars.

Am I wring for thinking this way?

It's just an artist concept of the planet.

Originally posted by antinwo101
reply to post by Illustronic

 

I swear to god i wold give up my life, to visit another planet!

Who you tellin? I always imagined it was possible. One day...

reply to post by pacofunk64


These artist's concepts, theoretical predictions, and scientific "discoveries" are frustrating. I might as well take a blurry picture of a star and make a prediction about the atmosphere of the moon orbiting one of the planets and write it nice enough for someone paint a picture of it so I could get it posted like these almost monthly "discoveries."

Originally posted by CaptChaos

This is total bunk. First of all, the link is wrong. Secondly, that space.com website is very amateurish.

But anyway, all this stuff is conjecture. "Scientists" have "detected" other planets not by observation, but by what they think are wobbles in a star, caused by the nonsense and disproven Doppler effect.

There is such a thing as Doppler shift, IN SOUND WAVES.

The Doppler shift is ASSUMED for light, however, it has been shown many times over that the redshift equals distance THEORY is wrong, with numerous objects of higher redshift appearing IN FRONT OF items with lower redshift. According to the THEORY, this is impossible. Therefore, the theory must be wrong.

And, with these weak methods of determining that they THINK there is another planet affecting some star, how could they ever figure out the density of said planet, when they cannot SEE how large it is in any way? At best, they could figure the MASS of the planet, if their harebrained theories were correct, but since density is mass divided by volume and they cannot detect the volume, how could they possibly calculate the density?

Also, the fact that at first their "theory" calculated the planet's orbit at 2.8 days, now corrected to 18 hours or about one fifth, well, let's see....that means they were WRONG at first, but now they're right?

Cap, Cap, Cap...

What's with all the negativity, anyway?

Yes, the OP's link only went to space.com's homepage. Here's the article's:

article on 55 Cancri E

(It was really tough to do a site search on "55 Cancri E", let me tell you).

You really ought to try reading it before criticizing the way the research was done. First off, Doppler shift was not used. But on this topic, please provide a source when you make the claim that light-wave Doppler shift theory is wrong. In your refutation of it, you don't say what the objects are. Are you talking two supernovas in two galaxies or what? As is, you're just talking out of your hat.

Back to the planet. Here's why they revised it's orbit rate:

Initially, astronomers thought 55 Cancri e had an orbital period of about 2.8 days. But last year, two researchers -- Harvard grad student Rebekah Dawson and Daniel Fabrycky of the University of California, Santa Cruz -- re-analyzed the data. They suggested that the alien planet might actually zip around its host star much faster than that.

So Dawson and Fabrycky joined up with a few others to observe 55 Cancri e more closely. The team trained Canada’s MOST (Microvariability & Oscillations of STars) space telescope on the planet's star, then watched for the tiny brightness dips caused when 55 Cancri e passed in front of -- or transited -- it from the telescope's perspective.

So they evidently used different/better instruments and got a better analysis. What hacks, huh? [sarcasm alert] And it wasn't a problem with the theory involved; it was a matter of more precise observations.

From these transit observations, they also found that the star's brightness changed by 0.02%. Having a good idea of the star's size, they can then infer the diameter of the planet. And having a good idea of the star's mass and the period of orbit (the latter for the period of luminosity decrease of the star), and assuming the approximation of a circular orbit, one can apply Keppler's 3rd law to get the orbit radius and Newton's 2nd law to infer the mass of the planet -- see link below for the details of these. Once you have the diameter and mass of the planet, you can obtain its density -- you do know you can get volume from diameter, assuming a sphere, right?. And there you go, voila: the density.

gravity primer