Comments | chthonius: (без темы)

chthonius

(Untitled)

Jul 11, 2003 09:45

7200 light years away - in our own galaxy - there's a planet floating out there that's outlived its own star..a planet 12.6 billion years old. it's a gas giant, but in the first 10 billion years of its life, there could have been a smaller terrestrial planet orbiting between it & its star (before its star got caught in another's gravity well, ( Read more... )

Comments 6

curious eiresunrise July 11 2003, 07:08:55 UTC

Is Pluto doing something odd lately? Behaviour caused by something other than Charon?

Re: curious chthonius July 11 2003, 09:54:57 UTC

it's a tad warmer than it should be, even though the planet is moving further away from the sun. I added a link to this entry, and talked about it my previous (with a different link). :)

given the horrendously poor resolution of the planet to date, for all we know it could be a death star. ;)

I can imagine the team sent here now. thugfish July 11 2003, 10:07:31 UTC

They can have their own, highly advanced, reality tv series, Those Crazy Hairless Monkeys .
I'd watch.

muahdib July 11 2003, 10:46:49 UTC

There has been debate for many years about the existence of yet undiscovered planet or large mass out there. Perhaps that is a possibility.

infusco July 11 2003, 14:58:37 UTC

always was curious about Pluto ... that little iceball with its funny orbit. I was truly dismayed when I had learned that Voyager would finish with Neptune as I too would love to see what that little god of the underworld looks like. Or for that matter if it has more satelites than just Charon. Maybe one day, they'll build a single probe who's sole purpose it is to travel to pluto and set itself into orbit around it. Mind you, the latter may be unlikely ... many satelites and probes, to my knowledge, are mostly solar powered and, yeah, not much sunlight around there ( ... )

chthonius July 15 2003, 21:55:55 UTC

actually, there is a mission planned to go to Pluto in 2006: New Horizons.

*shrug* the true measure is how long it took to get from microscopic single-celled individual organisms to something that can start to explore its surrounding solar system - and that's about three and a half billion years. our species has only been around some 250 000 years - which is nothing when you're talking billions of years...so talking about sociological/technological growth is kinda irrlevant, given that the only bits that matter concerning this happened in the last hundred or so years, eh. :)

...and we are an anomoly - we're the only ones that we know of, remember?

regardless, even if it might take an extra billion years or two more than it took life on Earth to evolve something capable of (infantile) spaceflight, who cares? this gas giant out there had a 9 billion year head start on us, remember? that's not to say that life evolved on the gas giant - but for all we know, such a thing is possible - it's more that there's a chance that there was ( ... )