finding an exo planet in another galaxy
... that is quite impressive indeed. Have one on me :)
A gigantic super-planet has been snapped by astroboffins orbiting the massive star Kappa Andromedae. Artist's impression of Kappa And b The super-Jupiter dwarfs any of the planets found in the Solar System, with a mass at least 13 times that of Jupiter and an orbit that is larger than Neptune's. Its host star - Kappa …
Is there a Kappa Andromeda a in the same system?
Also, when I read the headline for this story, I thought it was talking about the Andromeda galaxy, rather than the constellation Andromeda, and became immediately alarmed that a massive swirly conglomeration of stars which was previously thought to be 2.5 million light years away had snuck up while we weren't looking to a mere 130 LY and is now lurking in our (relatively speaking) cosmic back-yard!
It's humanities belief on so many occasions we are special
We treat animals as inferior, when some animals have traits equal to our own, or more in the case of some Chimps in memory tests.
We thought the earth was the centre of everything. We weren't
We thought the solar system was the only planetary system. It wasn't.
We thought the planets in the solar system were the only rocky planets. They weren't
We thought the earth was the only habitable planet in the habitable zone. It's not, as of fairly recently. It stands to reason soon enough we will find an earth replica soon enough.
And we still think we are alone. We aren't.
Finding life in our supposedly dead neighbour planet would be fantastic, finding that even basic life is present in more than one place in our solar system bodes well it's much more common than we think it is in the galaxy.
Exciting.
Our extraordinary observational prowess has far outstripped our theoretical models to explain these marvels.
We keep getting bushwhacked by nature, with hot Jupiters that supposedly migrated inward or Kuiper-belt-distant Jupiters that supposed migrated outward or stars too big to have formed planets, and our response to this and every other dope slap has been to finesse the very models that keep surprising us with failure after failure. Surrender Dorothy!
The accretion model for planet formation is an utter failure that needs replacement by a gravitational instability (GI) model occurring at L4/L5 (Trojan) Lagrangian points around the smaller B-stars in binary star systems, which are the only stable locations in solar systems (solitary or binary) where vortexes can form leading to GI.
Astronomer's recognize that most stars form as multiples, and yet most planets surround solitary stars, but that's not because the multiple star systems break up, but because close-binary star systems merge in luminous red novae (LRNe) to form solitary stars.
The asymmetry of 'Trojan planet' orbits (gravitationally bound to the A-star and unbound to the B-star) results in secular (core-collapse) perturbation which causes the Trojan planets to spiral out, while the close-binary solar pairs to spiral in (leading to stellar merger). And core-collapse perturbation can strand planets born in the stellar realm in low hot orbits or can lift them 10s or 100s of AU from their former close-binary pairs, and objects formed by GI in Trojan points can run the size gamut from super-earths to dwarf stars. Finally, the kidney-bean shape of L4/L5 Lagrangian points tend to cause vortexes to bifurcate prior to gravitational collapse, tending to form Trojan pairs, like Venus-Earth, Jupiter-Saturn and Uranus-Neptune.
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