First water world exoplanet spotted – and thankfully no sign of Kevin Costner, rejoice! Scientists have detected water vapor wafting from the atmosphere of an exoplanet orbiting around its star within the habitable zone for the first time, according to a paper published in Nature Astronomy. Classified as a super-Earth, a type of planet that’s less than ten times the mass of our home world, K2-18b encircles its …
To be fair, the light year is probably a difficult unit for Joe Bloggs to relate to, because it is so much larger than any distance we can physically experience. They probably feel that with miles, Joe Blogs will at least be able to relate to the base unit, and probably learned at school e.g. the distance from the Earth to the Sun in miles, so they have that as a yardstick. For those of us with at least a passing interest in astronomy cosmology, yes, not helpful.
"the light year is probably a difficult unit for Joe Bloggs to relate to"
The Sun is travelling at approximately 828,000km/h
Speed of light (in a Vacuum) is 299 792 458 m/s or 299,792.458 km/s.
A light year is 9,464,615,782,836.48 km
Therefore the Sun takes roughly 1303 years to travel 1 light year.
"To be fair, the light year is probably a difficult unit for Joe Bloggs to relate to"
The BBC has its own standards for length, volume, mass and electrical energy. These are the London bus, Olympic swimming pool, elephant and home respectively.
I'm surprised that this article did not give distances to the stars in terms of the London bus.
ah, this classical male shavinist pig who dares treat females in the usual boring fashion consistent with treatment by all males in all post-apocalyptic scenarios of a bygone era. I can't wait for a female-directed and starred re-make, when Kevin buttocks are exposed in their sagging glory! Justice ahoy...
The problem with detecting planets is that, at this point in time, all we have is the transition model - and that means that detecting something that is actually Earth-sized is near impossible unless the system is very close and the planets orbit passes between us and their star.
Needless to say, we're not detecting any actually Earth-sized planets hundreds of light-years away any time soon.
Not that we have the means to get there anyway, so . . .
There's some fascinating behind-the-scenes on the intrigue and complications around the reporting of this story, here: https://twitter.com/marinakoren/status/1171873631808438273
Spoiler alert: two teams, same discovery
For a much more detailed look at what the mass / composition of known exoplanets look like plotted on a graph, from Emily Lakdawalla of TPS, starts here. Gets properly deep and geeky and fascinating: https://twitter.com/elakdawalla/status/1171880863186841600
On the flip side, if they are hostile and can travel 10% LS then we don't have to worry until sometime in the mid 21st century. 2063 anyone?
To be honest on an 8G planet their options would be limited space wise, possibly they might be able to get as far as floating habitats but that takes technology. Which they probably can't build without a substantial landmass, sufficient raw materials etc.
I'd be more concerned about the possibility of the Singularity than earth being invaded by hostile Super-Squid from Planet X (tm) or someone pushing the button.
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