Well…the headline only says the planet is 6.9 times as big as Earth. Jupiter is at least that large, last time I checked, so without more context I also don’t know what is special about it.
I think that it’s more impressive to identify something that’s only 6.9x the size of earth, given that the smaller it is the harder it would be to detect.
I get what you mean but there’s almost 6,000 exoplanets in NASA’s catalog so one imagines it isn’t as huge of a deal to find a new one as it would have been when say, Hubble was new. To that end it presumably happens often enough that you wouldn’t get the meme’s scenario of a 50 year career vet getting all spiteful because a kid beat him to the punch.
They even have had surveys on citizen science sites like zooniverse where any of us could evaluate data from stars looking for the dips that could signify a potential planet. It’s all very cool, but I kind agree with all the data and technology we have now it’s way easier to find new ones.
For real. Confirming the existence of any exo planet is a huge technological feat and yet now it’s happening non stop. The first ever confirmed exo planet was 1995 and now we’ve got a catalog of almost 6,000 confirmed. Wild times!
I mean spotting it in only 3 days feels like a pretty big feat in of itself, unless this kid had access to a database on one particular star’s brightening and dimming or it’s potential weeble wobbling about, he did in 3 days what usually takes weeks at a minimum if it’s a planet the size of jupiter or bigger.
Is the planet special or is it a bait headline?
What a time to be alive
Well…the headline only says the planet is 6.9 times as big as Earth. Jupiter is at least that large, last time I checked, so without more context I also don’t know what is special about it.
I think that it’s more impressive to identify something that’s only 6.9x the size of earth, given that the smaller it is the harder it would be to detect.
I get what you mean but there’s almost 6,000 exoplanets in NASA’s catalog so one imagines it isn’t as huge of a deal to find a new one as it would have been when say, Hubble was new. To that end it presumably happens often enough that you wouldn’t get the meme’s scenario of a 50 year career vet getting all spiteful because a kid beat him to the punch.
They even have had surveys on citizen science sites like zooniverse where any of us could evaluate data from stars looking for the dips that could signify a potential planet. It’s all very cool, but I kind agree with all the data and technology we have now it’s way easier to find new ones.
Zooniverse is a very cool website for citizen science! For anyone interested: https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/mschwamb/planet-hunters-ngts
For real. Confirming the existence of any exo planet is a huge technological feat and yet now it’s happening non stop. The first ever confirmed exo planet was 1995 and now we’ve got a catalog of almost 6,000 confirmed. Wild times!
I mean spotting it in only 3 days feels like a pretty big feat in of itself, unless this kid had access to a database on one particular star’s brightening and dimming or it’s potential weeble wobbling about, he did in 3 days what usually takes weeks at a minimum if it’s a planet the size of jupiter or bigger.