Kevin's Watch

Scientists discover giant new planet orbiting two suns

Astronomers have discovered the largest planet outside our solar system orbiting two stars, at a distance that would make it potentially habitable for people, scientists announced on Monday.

A team of Nasa astronomers that made the discovery using the Kepler space telescope revealed the findings at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in San Diego, California.

The gaseous planet - dubbed Kepler-1647 b - is the size of Jupiter and has a wide orbit, revolving around its two stars in 1 107 days, or around three years.

"Cue: what's wrong with the Beninia project?"

"It won't work," Shalmaneser said.

Norman stole a glance at Rex. It was impossible to tell by looking whether the man's agitated condition was due to Chad's nonchalance or to the knowledge that using Shalmaneser in this fashion slowed his lightning reactions to a level close to the human, wasting precious time. Giving a machine the power to talk in ordinary English had meant funnelling everything through subsidiary installations which worked at less than a thousandth of the speed of light-writers.

"Cue: why not?" Chad said.

"The data given to me include unacceptable anomalies."

"Cue: would it be fair to say you don't believe in what you've been told about Beninia?"

There was a measurable pause. Rex took half a pace forward and started to say something about anthropocentric concepts compelling Shalmaneser to search his entire memory-banks.

"Yes. I don't believe it," the artificial voice announced.

"Hmmm..." Chad plucked at his beard. "Cue: what elements of the data are unacceptable? Be maximally specific."

Another, longer pause, as Shalmaneser examined everything he had ever been told which referred to the subject and discarded all but the most essential items.

"The human elements concerned with social interaction," he said at length. "Next, the-"

"Hold!" Chad snapped. Once more he tangled his fingers in his beard and tugged at it. "Cue: have you been taught the Shinka language?"

"Yes."

"Cue: is its given vocabulary among the anomalies that cause you to reject the data?"

"Yes."

All around, technicians began to exchange astonished stares. One or two of them dared to sketch a smile.

"Cue: are the living conditions described to you as obtaining in Beninia of a kind which lead you to expect different behaviour from the people there from what you've been told?"

"Yes."

"Cue: is the political relationship between Beninia and its neighbouring countries another of the anomalies?"

"Yes." Immediately-no delay.

"Cue: is the internal political structure of the country also anomalous?"

"Yes."

"Evaluate this, then," Chad said, frowning tremendously and staring at nothing. "Postulate that the data given you about Beninia are true. Cue: what would be necessary to reconcile them with everything else you know? In other words, what extra assumption do you have to make in order to accept and believe in Beninia?"

Rex jerked forward another half-pace like a marionette, his mouth open. All around the vault, which was now in dead silence except for the echo of Chad's voice and the soft humming of Shalmaneser's mental processes, Norman saw jaws drop correspondingly.

Obvious!

The pause, though, stretched, and stretched, until it was intolerable. One more second, Norman thought, and he was going to scream. And-

"That a force of unknown nature is acting on the population and causing them to behave differently from known patterns of human reaction under comparable circumstances elsewhere."

"Shal," Chad said softly, "such a force exists, and is at present being investigated by experts to determine its nature. I tell you three times!"

Cord Hurn wrote:Seven new planets have been discovered around the dwarf star Trappist-1. Several of these are potentially capable of supporting life.

https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/trappist1/

Cord Hurn wrote:

Cord Hurn wrote:Seven new planets have been discovered around the dwarf star Trappist-1. Several of these are potentially capable of supporting life.

https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/trappist1/

This is what I love about science: it just keeps making the world a more interesting place as each week goes by!

Vraith wrote:The only thing they have left is "starting life is really unlikely/complicated, odds incredibly low."
I'm betting that turns out to be wrong. There is a low but non-zero chance I'll live to see it found.
Finding other intelligence...that's less likely because of size and timing.But if the existence of life is shown to be greater than 1 per Universe---other intelligent life becomes nearly guaranteed.

In a paper released today, the LHCb collaboration announced the discovery of a new system of five particles all in a single analysis. The exceptionality of this discovery is that observing five new states all at once is a rather unique event.

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From the analysis of the trajectories and the energy left in the detector by all the particles in this final configuration, the LHCb collaboration could trace back the initial event - the decay of the _c0 - and its excited states. These particle states are named, according to the standard convention, _c(3000)0, _c(3050)0, _c(3066)0, _c(3090)0 and _c(3119)0. The numbers indicate their masses in megaelectronvolts (MeV), as measured by LHCb.

This discovery was made possible thanks to the specialised capabilities of the LHCb detector in the precise recognition of different types of particles and also thanks to the large dataset accumulated during the first and second runs of the Large Hadron Collider. These two ingredients allowed the five excited states to be identified with an overwhelming level of statistical significance - meaning that the discovery cannot be just a statistical fluke of data.