Tatooine-like World Discovered
- Thread starter Wanderlust
- Start date
Which would make sense if the was a possibly barely habitable planet with a desert like surface, considering that's what most probably think of when they hear about Tatooine.
I know that's what I thought when I saw this news that we had "discovered" a planet likely to have a desert-like environment.
But then it turns out to just be an icy gas giant outside of the habitable zone that happens to orbit around a binary star system.
So there's really no relation between this planet and Tatooine other than the binary star system part.
I think saying this was a planetary systems with "twin suns like Tatooine had in Star Wars, though this planet is anything but a habitable desert planet" would be a bit more accurate than "Tatooine-like world."
One term describes the system as a whole, the angle the story takes describes the planet which is nothing like Tatooine.
I wonder why all the news stations from many different countries on which I watched this news called it Tattoine-like and mentioned Star Wars? The next star system from Earth (Alpha/Proxima Centauri) is a binary, possibly a triple system, and they are quite common. The diagram in the third post suggests this planet is about 1AU from its suns, and there are probably way more CO2, methane and other heat traps in its atmosphere than in ours. Should be boiling hot, not icy. It's also suggested by its 229 days orbit, it's mass is not far larger than earth's, and high temperatures should have increased the volume.
The planet's suns are less massive, and therefore cooler than our Sun. Even combined, their total luminosity is smaller. We have no knowledge about the planet's atmosphere so I don't know how "probably way more" can be justified as a statement. The whole Tatooine thing is just the way lazy news services like to spin items to attract interest of the ADHD public.
This.
And in the process they mis-represent the real "facts" of what's happened here.
And, to the above poster, the Centauri system of stars is binary but I don't think we've yet discovered any planets or signs of planets around it.
The masses of the stars are 0.69 and 0.2 of our Sun's mass (1 Ms) so their luminosities are approximately (M1/Ms)^4 and 0.23*(M2/Ms)^2.3 or 0.22 and 0.0057 Ls respectively compared to the Sun's Luminosity (1 Ls) (based on approximate mass-luminosity relationship equations for main sequence stars of between 0.43 and 2 Ms and greater than 0.43 Ms). Most of the radiant energy is from the 0.69 Ms star. At a distance of 65 million miles, the planet would receive about 0.22 * (93/65)^2 = 0.45 times as much energy as the Earth does at 93 million miles, or roughly the same as Mars.
I agree. As hype goes this is small potatoes.
Besides, orbiting both members of a binary star system is "like Tatooine", even if the lexicology police have a case that the phrase "Tatooine-like" should characterize the planet's climate. It wouldn't be the first time that a headline's brevity raised some eyebrows.
Yeah. It's not like there was an iconic scene that showed off this very fact or anything.
Yep. When we look for "earth-like" planets we're simply looking for planets that happen to orbit around a single-star.
No reason at all why naming a specific fictional planet with very well-known characteristics and properties should bring to mind those things but rather what that fictional planet's star-system was like.
Our mistake, "Tatooine-like planet" means "any-type of planet that orbits two stars" and not "desert-like planet that supports life even though that's the very thing that planet is known for as saying something is "like" something that's talking specifically about that thing and not the area around it."
If I eat something and say it is "cake-like" I don't mean that its a moist, flavorful and sweet baked good. I mean it's simply something that was cooked in a pan in the oven.
Lasagna, for example, is "cake like."
To most people who enjoyed the movie, it's not exactly an iconic scene, just like the "Khannnnn!!!!" scene in TWOK.
For all the people complaining, every article I saw was clear about it only being Tatootine like with regard to the binary system. In fact, nearly all of them also said it was nothing like Tatootine with respect to climate and habitability. I have never felt sorry for people who are misled by the title of an article because they fail to actually read the article. In today's world much of the time headlines are as much about marketing as they are anything else. This will not change any time.
Neither have I, but I do sometimes get aggravated for wasting my time reading articles about nothing of interest, just because the headline lied to me.
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I bet you are like me in that 9 times out of 10 you can spot those articles before you read em....yet you read em anyway.
That's very interesting, how I wish I can be a part of the group which help scientists discover new planets. The quest for human friendly planets in other solar systems has been enormous for decades in the U.S.. Last Dec., the Planet Hunters project released to ask for web users' assistance in discovering potential exoplanets. Now, Yale and the Planet Hunters have announced the finding of exoplanets that the Kepler team will be searching further into. Source of article:Citizen science racks up another win with Planet Hunters.
I am sorry, Purple Buddha... but I just don't get the point you're trying to make. Of course, I have trouble reading anything longer than 20 words.
.... just kidding
I agree with you completely!
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