Dr Boffin. DR BOFFIN?!?!?!?
Come on guys, it's only the 22nd of March....
And how did this guy rank with Jobs, Gates and Paris?
Pandora plus Endor: Multi hab-moon motherworld discovered
Top astro boffins have announced the discovery of the first planet which could be the real-life parent world of fictional habitable moons Pandora and Endor. According to Blighty's top exomoonologist, there might even be more than one inhabited moon circling the newly discovered gas giant. Corot-9b orbits a G3 star not …
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Monday 22nd March 2010 12:28 GMT David Evans
Wishful thinking
Kind of reaching here aren't you? There are a couple of big problems with gas-giant moons, rather than planets, as life-bearing candidates; first of all, tidal forces would be a bitch, which doesn't make life impossible, but certainly makes it harder; but more difficult would be radiation from the gas giant, which would overwhlem the magnetosphere of any moon (assuming it has one in the first place), making it a rather unwelcome place for anything biological.
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Monday 22nd March 2010 16:33 GMT Torben Mogensen
Re: cold?
"would it not be the case the half the time that the moon takes to orbit the gas giant, it'll be in eclipse from the sun, and so be very very cold?"
Unless the moon's orbit is _very_ close to the planet, eclipses will be fairly short. Also, if the inclination of the moon's orbit around the planet differs even slightly from the plane of the planet's orbit around its sun, there would not even be eclipses every "month". For much the same reason that lunar eclipses don't happen every month.
In short, though eclipses are likely to be a bit more common and a bit longer than lunar eclipses on Earth, they are unlikely to have any measurable impact on the climate.
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Monday 22nd March 2010 12:53 GMT Brutus
Bog off, spoilsport!
We like our wishful thinking. And we can counter your objections with more entirely unjustified (and scientifically dubious) wishful thinking: the gas giant's radiation and tidal forces actually act as a spur to mutations and darwinian evolution, so the inhabitants will be incredibly tough and most likely highly advanced and we'd do well to accede to their demands for a tribute of earth women and chocolate.
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Wednesday 24th March 2010 09:47 GMT Paul 129
Think of the children!
Ya at last something for the Think of the Children Brigade. Load them up into a rocket and send them off to ask these aliens to cease and desist.
Word up the next lot that the first lot has been corrupted by the aliens, which is why they haven't returned by the following year.
Rince and repeat. Might get a few thousand years of peace before they suspect anything.
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Monday 22nd March 2010 15:37 GMT grimreality
COnvection ROtation and planetary Transits
COROT standing for COnvection ROtation and planetary Transits
CRAPt standing for Convetion Rotation And Planetary transits
On another possible flame exomoonologist, sounds like something Labour would come up with to give another relative a job for life. (for all the flaming trolls I understand this may be meaning outside earth. But then again if it is a moon it is outside earth)
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Monday 22nd March 2010 16:33 GMT eezatehgeeza
Used ""my"" head...
Google, Reg and "other" research materials plus Excel yielded the "facturd" that any ship would have to travel at approx. 565,718,840 Brontosauruses/second to make it there in the same time it took the "ISV Venture Star" to make it to Pandora!!!!
Yes - work finishes in 5...4...
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Tuesday 23rd March 2010 09:26 GMT Steve Roper
Your head must have zero mass then
Given that 565,718,840 Brontosauruses/sec is approximately 56.6 times the speed of sheep in a vacuum, the transit time would be closer to 0.0043 Mayan end-of-world cycles rather than the 0.00097 it took to reach Pandora - observer time. And you forgot to factor in relativity; since your ship would be travelling faster than the sheep, it would have infinite mass (unless it, like its pilot's head, had zero mass to begin with) and also be travelling back in time and get there before it left!
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Monday 22nd March 2010 18:34 GMT Trygve
Prank call???
I can only imagine the expression on the esteemed scientist's face as the questions from 'The Press' became increasingly deranged and excited.
What a shame the discussion appears to have been terminated before El Reg got as far as quizzing him about the statistical probabilities of steamy interspecies bonkathons interrupting hostilities & leading to a pan-moon peace breakout.
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Monday 22nd March 2010 18:36 GMT Anonymous Coward
Oh dear
The slight problem with all this talk of habitable moons is that COROT-9b orbits its star at a distance where it receives roughly the same amount of heating as Mercury does from our Sun. I guess no-one bothered to do the simple calculation for stellar flux levels before jumping into the habitability hype. Given the evidence that habitable conditions meet their end at the hands of the runaway greenhouse instability at far lower levels of stellar heating, it seems more likely that if Earth-sized moons do exist around COROT-9b, the conditions would put those at the lead-melting surface of Venus to shame.
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Monday 22nd March 2010 22:02 GMT Anonymous Coward
Artificial wormholes?
Hmm. If some theories about multiple dimensions are true then it may be possible to use a modified superconducting >100T magnet to deform space-time enough to at least send a short message.
In theory the "Wow" signal could have been just that. Shame we didn't have the receiving equipment set up to get much more than a blip.
AC, because this is probably covered under the PATRIOT act or something...
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Tuesday 23rd March 2010 11:29 GMT Anonymous Coward
Commader Jameson
...unless he's got the Acorn Electron "downgrade" whereapon his ability to enter hyperspace was dictated by a semi-random process of frantic key jabbing for minutes on end...and even then his destination even more random. Though witchspace was a particularly favourite place to end up.
Ah yes, them were the days...
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Tuesday 23rd March 2010 12:13 GMT Anonymous Coward
Sigh....
...why is the human race so utterly arrogant....
Life cannot exist here because waffle, arrogance, busllshit...
Just becuase this planet needs a "comfy" -+50c and water, why do we presume everything thing else needs what we call basics?
For all we know there may be lifeforms that breathe fire, drink liquified helium, eat iron and shit plutonium.
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Tuesday 23rd March 2010 14:16 GMT Steve Mann
Bah!
WTF is an "exomoon" FFS?
Azathoth on a bike! If as much effort was put into getting *into* space as thinking up new names for perfectly ordinary objects seen in a telescope, we would be talking about these bloody moons in terms of decent names like Jinx, Wemadeit or Wunderland instead of carrot-9b or whatever stupid nonsense the so-called "scientists" responsible called it.
"Exomoon".
Where's the Tylenol?
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Tuesday 23rd March 2010 16:27 GMT Bizlaw
Dream a little dream ...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/Design/graphics/icons/comment/fail_32.png While it may be that there are moons around Cobot-9b with life, this is nothing more than speculation by these scientists! Facts: They found a gas giant plant orbiting a sun similar to our Sun. Uh, that's about it. They haven't even found a moon yet.
Sure, I think there's life out there on other planets. But to concoct a story based on Avatar-Star Wars moon life just because a big ball of gas has been found in a solar system far, far away does not life make.
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Wednesday 24th March 2010 09:36 GMT C 2
Inside the radiation belts, not IN them ...
where the gas giant's magnetosphere blocks the stellar wind. Then even a relatively smaller moon can keep its atmosphere much longer, of course the moon would be tidally locked. As long as it is not inside the Roche limit it'd be fine.
If its orbit is a matter of a few days or less, rotation relative to the parent star would be acceptable.
As for the gas giant sweeping up asteroids and comets, they'd be headed for the more massive object then wouldn't they.
This topic is closed for new posts.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
