{"id":6932,"date":"2015-11-01T09:20:54","date_gmt":"2015-11-01T16:20:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/BigJimIndustries.com\/wordpress\/?p=6932"},"modified":"2015-11-10T09:25:58","modified_gmt":"2015-11-10T16:25:58","slug":"our-position-is-correct-except-no-alderaan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2015\/11\/01\/our-position-is-correct-except-no-alderaan\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;Our position is correct, except, no Alderaan. &#8220;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em><a href=\"http:\/\/news.nationalgeographic.com\/2015\/10\/151028-planet-disappears-alpha-centauri-astronomy-science\/\" target=\"_blank\">from National Geographic<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n<h1>Poof! The Planet Closest To Our Solar System Just Vanished<\/h1>\n<p><em>The disappearance of Alpha Centauri Bb raises questions for planet hunters looking for Earth-sized alien worlds.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>By\u00a0Devin Powell,\u00a0for National Geographic<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"image-replace\" src=\"http:\/\/news.nationalgeographic.com\/content\/dam\/news\/2015\/10\/28\/planetdisappears.ngsversion.1446136201776.adapt.1190.1.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"480\" height=\"auto&quot;\" \/><small class=\"media__caption--credit\">PHOTOGRAPH BY REUTERS\u00a0<\/small><\/p>\n<p>Scientists just made a planet disappear. According to a new study, Alpha Centauri Bb, a world in the nearest star system to us, was merely a ghost in the data.<\/p>\n<p>The planet, thought to be perhaps similar in mass to Earth, was\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/news.nationalgeographic.com\/news\/2012\/10\/121017-alpha-centauri-new-planet-science-space-udry\/\" target=\"_blank\">hailed as a \u201clandmark<\/a>\u201d when it was\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/nature\/journal\/v491\/n7423\/full\/nature11572.html\" target=\"_blank\">announced<\/a>\u00a0in 2012 in the journal\u00a0<i>Nature.<\/i>\u00a0The discovery got people excited about finding neighboring worlds that might harbor life in the Alpha Centauri system 4.3 light-years away\u2014already home to science fiction characters such as the Transformers and the creatures of\u00a0<i>Avatar<\/i>.<\/p>\n<p>This particular alien world wouldn&#8217;t have been a good place to look for life, though. It would have been roughly a tenth the distance to its star that Mercury is to the sun, with a scorchingly hot surface probably covered in molten rock.<\/p>\n<p>Now it will serve as a cautionary tale for\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/news.nationalgeographic.com\/news\/2013\/130102-top-exoplanet-discovery-space-science\/\">planet hunters<\/a>, a reminder that planets as small as Earth are hard to find. Distinguishing subtle clues from background noise is incredibly difficult, as shown in a\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/1510.05598\" target=\"_blank\">new paper<\/a>\u00a0r<a href=\"http:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/1510.05598\" target=\"_blank\">ecently\u00a0<\/a>posted at arXiv.org and due to appear in the\u00a0<i>Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society<\/i>.<\/p>\n<p>Even the team that originally reported the planet agrees. \u201cThis is really good work,\u201d said Xavier Dumusque of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. \u201cWe are not 100 percent sure, but probably the planet is not there.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>[ <a href=\"http:\/\/news.nationalgeographic.com\/2015\/10\/151028-planet-disappears-alpha-centauri-astronomy-science\/\" target=\"_blank\">click to continue reading at NatGeo<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>from National Geographic Poof! The Planet Closest To Our Solar System Just Vanished The disappearance of Alpha Centauri Bb raises questions for planet hunters looking for Earth-sized alien worlds. By\u00a0Devin Powell,\u00a0for National Geographic PHOTOGRAPH BY REUTERS\u00a0 Scientists just made a planet disappear. According to a new study, Alpha Centauri Bb, a world in the nearest [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6932","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-weirdness"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6932","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6932"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6932\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6932"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6932"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6932"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}