{"id":1545,"date":"2007-06-29T08:29:25","date_gmt":"2007-06-29T08:29:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2007\/06\/29\/good-news-from-outer-space-1\/"},"modified":"2007-06-29T08:29:25","modified_gmt":"2007-06-29T08:29:25","slug":"good-news-from-outer-space-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2007\/06\/29\/good-news-from-outer-space-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Good News From Outer Space"},"content":{"rendered":"

Steinn checks in from his Mediterranean vacation with not one<\/a>, not two<\/a>, but three<\/a> reports from the conference on Extreme Solar Systems, and a hint of maybe more to come.<\/p>\n

The big news here, as far as I can see, is that they’re starting to find more low mass planets, and more planets with long orbital periods. These are both the result of technical improvements– the sensitivity of the planet-finding techniques has improved as people get more practice, enabling more low-mass detections, and as Steinn puts it, “things are piling up at multi-year periods as the searches go on for long enough to have senstivity out there.” The “hot Jupiter” model is looking less like the norm, and quoting Steinn again, “I don’t think the “Rare Earth” hypothesis is holding up well, the pieces of the argument are being dismantled wholesale as we find more systems and gain more understanding.”<\/p>\n

This is good news not just because it increases the chances of finding Earth-like planets elsewhere that may hold life (I’m not naive enough to think we’ll get to those planets any time soon, but it would just be cool to know that aliens exist), but because it helps cut off a whole line of annoying anthropic\/ design arguments. If we were stuck with a universe in which all the extrasolar planetary systems we know of preclude Earth-like planets, then our solar system starts to look pretty weird, and that fuels armchair philosophizing about Our Place in the Universe. The more typical we look, the happier I’ll be.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Steinn checks in from his Mediterranean vacation with not one, not two, but three reports from the conference on Extreme Solar Systems, and a hint of maybe more to come. The big news here, as far as I can see, is that they’re starting to find more low mass planets, and more planets with long… Continue reading Good News From Outer Space<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,33,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1545","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-astronomy","category-in_the_news","category-science","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1545","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1545"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1545\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1545"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1545"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1545"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}