DailyDirt: Strange New Worlds

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

The universe is a big place, so it's possible to find pretty much anything you can think of -- if you're patient enough to scan the vastness of space. Here are just a few weird planets that astronomers have found recently. By the way, StumbleUpon can also recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.
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Filed Under: astronomy, kepler, orbit, planets, tatooine, telescope


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  • identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 22 Sep 2011 @ 5:03pm

    Coal planet?

    "The planet TrES-2b is so dark. How dark is it? It reflects less than 1 percent of the incident light from its parent star, and so it's darker than coal. (sorry, no joke here.)"

    I can't wait till they find a obsidian one! Hope the creepers don't follow

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • icon
    Dementia (profile), 22 Sep 2011 @ 6:58pm

    link to this | view in chronology ]

    • identicon
      Anonymous Coward, 22 Sep 2011 @ 7:01pm

      Re:

      thats last weeks news

      link to this | view in chronology ]

      • icon
        Michael Ho (profile), 22 Sep 2011 @ 10:51pm

        Re: Re:

        it's actually the twin of last week's news that was traveling faster than the speed of light... slightly older than last week's news now because of time dilation.

        link to this | view in chronology ]

    • icon
      i386 (profile), 23 Sep 2011 @ 12:00am

      Re:

      "and now we have particles moving faster than light"

      No we don't. Re-read the article and try to remove the sensationalist headlines. Pisses me off that media does this, because it results in people spreading it around as fact when it clearly is not. Note what the actual scientists who made this discovery said, not what else is written in the article. In short, no one knows how the neutrino's arrived 60 nanoseconds fast than light over that fairly vast distance. That has to be studied before we can factually say "we have particles moving faster than light". Most likely, they aren't. There are other ways this could have happened. One idea of many is perhaps there is an unmeasured bowing/flexing of the earth that caused the illusion of the particles arriving sooner than light would have. The amount of time they arrived sooner was so infinitesimally small, the bow/flex of the earth (if that was the cause) would only need to be equally infinitesimally small to cause the delay. Again, that's just one of many possible causes, all more likely than the neutrinos actually traveling faster than the speed of light.

      link to this | view in chronology ]

      • identicon
        MAC, 23 Sep 2011 @ 8:10am

        Re: Re: Neutrinos

        Or it could be:
        neutrions have no mass.
        Mass increases as you approach the speed of light.
        This is the limiting factor, at the speed of light you have infinite mass so it would take infinite energy to push past it which is impossible.
        But wait, neutrinos have no mass so the mass increase effect of near light speed does not apply.
        Yes, this is possible but now it needs to be confirmed.

        link to this | view in chronology ]

  • icon
    Jimr (profile), 23 Sep 2011 @ 6:25am

    Thank goodness it just "free agent" planets floating around the universe and not a moon that has been blasted from obrit and through space from a 'nuclear' event on the moon's surface.

    I would hate to see the weekly misadventures of "free agent" MOON floating around the universe.

    link to this | view in chronology ]


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