Pack your bags – we may have found the first planet outside of our galaxy Astronomers have for the first time discovered what looks like a planet outside the Milky Way, judging by a study published this week in Nature. Over 4,000 exoplanets have been spotted orbiting stars in our galaxy since the early 1990s when scientists confirmed the Solar System isn’t a unique formation. Our Sun is just one …
Fascinating stuff, but those bags are going to get pretty dusty while we wait for confirmation, let alone probably rotted away on arrival if we try to get there.
The idea that we can migrate to other planets still seems a long way from fruition, even if it were a better idea than becoming less destructive of this one (which is right now our highest survival priority).
Nah, eat and run is the way to go. The idea we don't really have anywhere to run to doesn't cross the minds of most people: Most expect to be dead when the shit finally hits the fan, so let the suckers deal with this when it happens. The rest expects somebody will eventually step in and save them (Batman, the government, their Faith, in short whatever replaced their parents).
I love science-fiction, as I'm sure many people do. The idea that we can span the distances between stars inside of a human lifetime is tantalizing, to be sure, as is the idea that we can find other habitable planets that can support our specific life form.
Unfortunately, I'm pretty convinced that, even if we could do so, we'd just bring the same amount of lazyness and apathy to preserving the new planet as we have shown with the old.
So being stuck here right now is probably the best lesson we can get on the consequences of mismanaging planetary resources.
Nature is self-regulating, failed experiments self-abort.
Besides, you don't really believe humans can really "learn lessons", do you. Humans are selfish and egocentric, we can be scared to caution for a while, but from experience that doesn't last more than a generation (ie. 25 years) at best.
> By the way nature is not self regulating, it just seems like that to people who dont look close enough.
Depends on what you understand by "regulating". If a population of predators gets too big or too greedy they decimate the preys, and consequently starve to death. The lack of predators allows the surviving preys to thrive, which in turn profits any remaining predators. And so on and so forth.
Humans avidly destroy (waste, destroy, pollute) everything they actually need to live, and this is bound to cause their extinction at some point, one way or another. Nature will maybe take a million years, but some other life form will eventually come to dominate, something we now have absolutely no idea about, much like dinosaurs could never had ever imagined the invention of humans (mammals at that time being rare marginal mice-sized creatures).
Now obviously those who think we're the crown of creation, and masters of our destiny, are bound to feel insulted. Sorry to bust your bubble guys, it's a flimsy, fragile bubble which doesn't stand up to too much scrutiny.
Then perhaps the future generation of "humans" that had to re-evolve from the unholy union of cockroaches and waterbears will learn to read our ancient writings and will take a lesson from how we extincted ourselfs and most of the other species, from the planet. As a species, current humans never learn until they have no other choice.
Thought this too. Or it could be obscured by something else by then. After all it's unlikely it's right on the rim of that faraway galaxy, with nothing in front and nothing behind from our point of view.
I'm pretty sure the point here is more the novelty factor than he scientific importance of that specific faraway source of x-rays (we know nothing about and certainly won't ever learn more). There are similar things much nearer to us to study, but it was a first, and as such needed to be celebrated.
They are very high indeed. Oversimple calculation (assume source is pointlike, planet is size of Saturn, orbital radius twice Saturn's) gives distance for which transit would be visible here about 500ly. If you assume source is bigger than point (which it is, but stellar-mass BH is fairly compact, but then emissions from accretion disk not BH) then it will be larger than that.
No but it does not have to: the orbital plane of the system does not change due to conservation of angular momentum and for the rest you can not shift by 500ly in 70y.
This is really same argument as to why fixed stars are fixed: they are not fixed in fact but over human timescales they are quite fixed. Galaxies are even more fixed on these timescales.
> they're resolving individual stars in other galaxies
I'm not sure you can call that "resolving individual stars": They do spot an x-ray source from a direction which seems to point to another galaxy. Since those x-ray emissions are rare and specific, they can attribute them to a specific situation (binary with one undead member feeding off its companion). I'm pretty sure they are unable to say where exactly in that faraway galaxy it is located though, AFAIK x-ray astronomy doesn't have that great a resolution.
They aren't, not nearly, as other comment says, although they are able to point well within size of M51.
Chandra has resolution of about 0.5 arc seconds, so about 1/1300th apparent diameter of M51 (11 arc minutes by 7 arc minutes). So Chandra can identify quite well from where within M51 source came but nowhere near which star.
However number of x-ray sources in M51 is fairly low – perhaps one, two hundred I think, so is quite possible for Chandra to know which of these sources it was looking at.
Titanic Skyjollies are building the first rocket to see this planet at first hand. The launch date is early 2022 and the travel time is approx 69 years, 11 months and 28 days. The flight is currently only available on a one-way basis. Applications are now open, the following have already applied:
1. Mark (Meta, no relationship to Facebook) Zuckerberg.
2. Richard (Beardy) Branson.
3. Jeff (Baldy) Bezos.
4. Insert your name, or nominate someone you love, here.
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