Recently Discovered Habitable World May Not Exist

mcantor 15 years ago |

This is basically irrelevant to the linked post, but I have to ask: Was I the only one who felt crushed, betrayed and crestfallen upon making the terrible realization that space doesn't actually look like all of the awesome "photos" floating around? Like the Eagle Nebula's "Pillars of Creation" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eagle_Nebula). Sure, that's technically what it "looks like," but the colors are all determined by the artistic license of whoever processed the X-ray information and composite photographs of light in the nonvisible spectrum.

Drat. :-(

gojomo 15 years ago | |

Just pretend your own eyes were more highly evolved, such that the spectacular synthetic colors of these photos are just a pale imitation of what your super-eyes could discern. After all, our eyes' visible range is merely what's proven useful for our native habitat.

mcantor 15 years ago | | |

That's a good point. Maybe in another million years or so, my descendants will be space-faring badasses who have evolved hydrogen-sulphur-oxygen-vision because you don't want to run into a nascent galaxy while you're making an interstellar Taco Bell run at faster than the speed of light, and they will see space the way it looks in the Hubble photos, like God intended.

That makes me feel a little better.

sigstoat 15 years ago | |

Folks should keep this in mind when they get agitated about the possibility of NASA getting rid of Hubble. Basically all of your pretty space pictures are false color, so it doesn't matter which space telescope produces them.

windsurfer 15 years ago | | |

How are the hubble's images any more "false color" than my digital SLR?

gaius 15 years ago | | |

Because when you assign a visible colour to a particular invisible wavelength, you can choose whatever colour you like. If you went there and looked with the naked eye, you'd see just black.

mcantor 15 years ago | | |

Exactly. Since when is space less awesome than we think it is?

InclinedPlane 15 years ago | | |

You wouldn't just see black, you'd see a different set of colors, generally more muted than the false-color pictures from telescopes.

sigstoat 15 years ago | | |

i don't think there is a single instrument on Hubble which is confined to the human visible portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, or any subset thereof. and i'd be amazed if duplicating the color response curves of the human eye was a design consideration.

unlike your DSLR (unless you popped the IR filter off of it).

InclinedPlane 15 years ago | |

The "pillars of creation" image does not contain x-ray data, I believe you misread something out of that wiki article in believing so. The particular image is not true color, but it's also not just a photoshop job, it represents a very real view of the Eagle nebula, just not one your human eyes could see.

For an actual true color (for humans) image of the Eagle nebula, try this: http://eaglenebula.net/astronomy/astrophotos/The_Eagle_Nebul...

rflrob 15 years ago |

Well darn. I looked at the data they'd published saying they'd found the planet, and while it seemed tenuous to me, I should've gone on record somewhere saying so. On the other hand, I'm not a planetary astronomer, so my I'm not really qualified to tell what is strong data or not, so I just trusted the reviewers.

robryan 15 years ago |

The dangers of coming out with these findings before they have been properly verified. With the size of the deviations in star velocity they are trying to detect right on the edge of our current capability.

code_duck 15 years ago |

Well, that's confusing.

The comments on that site are even more confusing.

NHQ 15 years ago |

Maybe it shifted behind the star when they looked...?

danparsonson 15 years ago | |

Since they're inferring the (non-)existence of the planet by observing the motion of the star... that wouldn't matter.

InclinedPlane 15 years ago |

The title is a bit overdramatic given the actual situation.

One team detected has produced evidence of a particular planet, another team has attempted to corroborate that evidence and could not, though their instruments are not sensitive enough to rule out said planet. And thus we await more data.

This is a tempest in a teapot.

devmonk 15 years ago |

Shhh! Nasa was all excited.

Towle_ 15 years ago |

Quick! Somebody, anybody: who owns the AAAS? Is it the Rockefellers? The Rothschilds?

They're keeping ALL the habitable planets to themselves, I tell you.