Hold a grain of sand at arms length......

No, I announce ninja edits when I make em.

I really have trouble getting on board with stellar wobble as being a reasonable way to find earth sized, goldilocks zone exoplanets. It just seems like the data would be so infinitesimal and cHa0t!¢ that it would be pretty much impossible to tease out the nature of all nine (yes 9) planets in this solar system from another stellar system.

All 9 planets orbiting at different time frames with different orbital resonances... Plus not knowing what angle of the plane of the system being observed, and how much any or all planets in said system may vary from said plane. It's just all way too many variables. We might be able to say, "Yes, that star has wobbles indicative of a planetary system, but we do not have enough data to determine the nature of any of the planets."

I just had a thought about how the angles between our solar system and another stellar system would change over time as each star orbited the Milky Way, rendering long term transit observations pointless. If you did just happen to line up with the 0.018 degrees where Neptune would transit our sun once in its 165 earthyear orbit, would you still be lined up for a transit four orbits later to be able to spot the pattern? Probably not, but that math is beyond my smooth brain.

 

Probably why so many of the exoplanets we've discovered are massive Hot Jupiters with 11 Earth-day orbits. Easy peasy

 

Go nerds!

 

I would agree with this. Science is never "done." It sometimes reaches resting points until new data and observations come along that cause us to question theories. Newton's Theory of Gravity was disproven by the orbit of Mercury but it is actually still used by rocket scientists where applicable to calculate trajectories in real world applications such as using Jupiter to slingshot a Voyager probe further out into the solar system.

 

Heretic!!! Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!

 

Exactly. Dark matter is a good example

 

Holy hell I had no idea that our sun comprises 99.8% of the matter of our solar system. I would have guessed 10%. I mean, you look at all the crap just in the kuiper belt alone...

 

I feel like that’s disingenuous. We KNOW through observation and experimentation a great deal about the fundamental workings of the universe. All the way down to quantum mechanics. We utilize its effects every day. Of course there are things we still need to figure out, like gravity and dark matter/energy…but we are at the point of trying to puncture through to the base fabric and beyond. That’s pretty fucking awesome imho

Check out the pbs space time YouTube channel for some (somewhat) up to date and (semi) easy to grasp vids on where we are with theoretical physics

 

I’d take a guess that a great deal of its matter is at its inner few layers to the core

 

Cortez, I've no fuckin clue.
Reading this thread, I'm thinking....fucker copied and pasted this info.
Wait, no...
Y'all some smart mofo'rs.

 

Well from a scientific standpoint... thats called hypothesis.

 

Ahem…where’s the 9th planet?

 

I agree with that sentiment, but look at what they THINK they know. How often has time proven them wrong? I'd say way closer to 100% than any value less than that amount. If the universe is truly infinite, they will always be wrong if stating some phenomenon is an absolute.

What I see in the astrophysicist's world is a bunch of conjecture based upon the study of symptoms made manifest by larger fundamentals. Since they don't understand those fundamentals - gravity, et al - they are merely guessing as to the cause of the symptoms.
Their cause, to understand the nature of the universe, is an admirable pursuit. I do see that some hold back on making any claims, but that doesn't stop others from taking that research and making wild speculations or condemning counterpoints. Next thing you know, they're off and running calling the hypothesis of these observed phenomenon theories and arguing over who's protocols were better suited to determine the validity of the theory, which it isn't, yet. They get all twisted up in their own pocket protectors that they seem to forget that their slide rules don't have the capability to make calculations based on infinity. Might as well be priests from different religions arguing about "the word".

I'm sayin' that they are all utilizing the best tools available to make as good a guess as possible but there's no way to really know without actually being there.

 

It's the pinpoint on the right.

 

That was never intuitive to me either, given the illustrations we're shown. The pictures are so far from scale. But the asteroid belt, Kuiper, and even the Oort cloud are basically a rounding error.

Doing some reading, the asteroid belt and the Kuiper don't even get close to Earth's mass. That's pretty wild.

 

The more we know, the less we know...

 

Jesus fuck no one told me I was going to need a microscope!

 

Telescope. You're gonna need a telescope...

And then there's figuring out where, exactly, you have to point the damn thing in order to find what you're looking for. And then, are you really looking at it or have you found some other celestial orb in linear proximity?

Did you take too much time lining things up on the correct spot only to find the Earth rotated a couple seconds of minutes of degrees and Pluto is no longer in your field of view? Yup. Happens all the time, every time. You almost have to ambush the image by "guessing" where it's gonna be before it gets there...unless you have one of those "cheater" tracking motors on your mount.

but it's not really worth the investment just to see a large "contested" rock orbiting our Sun every 237 years.

 

you’re thinking of infinity from a human perspective. Infinity can be defined mathematically. the size of the universe doesn’t matter to its laws. It is driven by them. And fundamental particles do not experience time so it does not matter what size the universe is.

also I am of the opinion that sir roger pensrose is correct in that we are living in a cyclic universe not a multiverse. I have a suspicion we will find unification through a combination of constructor theory, information theory, geometric unity, and string theory.