14/02: The word of the day is
…inexorable:
The news of the day is: orbiting OGLE-2006-BLG-109L, a red dwarf in Scorpius, some 5,000 light years distant, there are two gas giants: one smaller than Jupiter, and one smaller than Saturn, in a larger orbit. So minus the terrestrial stuff further in (which we can’t detect… yet), it looks a bit like our system, albeit on a smaller scale. Naturally enough, the press is calling it a mini-solar system.
About that distance, those orbital sizes and those masses: the technique is a new trick: gravitational microlensing to find exoplanets. It’s sensitive, good for stuff like this.
Caution, of course, is warranted. We must pile educated guess on educated guess to get a picture of what this system looks like. But add the interesting observation that system formation so far does seem to fill in planets wherever there’s room, and it’s reasonable to guess there may be some terrestrial rocks in there. So Seager’s word still works for me. It really is starting to look that way.
Right now in exoplanets we are on an inexorable path to finding other Earths.
—Sara Seager, MIT
The news of the day is: orbiting OGLE-2006-BLG-109L, a red dwarf in Scorpius, some 5,000 light years distant, there are two gas giants: one smaller than Jupiter, and one smaller than Saturn, in a larger orbit. So minus the terrestrial stuff further in (which we can’t detect… yet), it looks a bit like our system, albeit on a smaller scale. Naturally enough, the press is calling it a mini-solar system.
About that distance, those orbital sizes and those masses: the technique is a new trick: gravitational microlensing to find exoplanets. It’s sensitive, good for stuff like this.
Caution, of course, is warranted. We must pile educated guess on educated guess to get a picture of what this system looks like. But add the interesting observation that system formation so far does seem to fill in planets wherever there’s room, and it’s reasonable to guess there may be some terrestrial rocks in there. So Seager’s word still works for me. It really is starting to look that way.
