There are many things which can make people question dogma about astronomical phenomena. Go read about the reasons for dropping the Julian calender, sometime.

“If we assume a life-bearing planet that lacks a moon, and if we assume said life is intelligent… without a moon.. how screwed up would their astronomy be? They could almost certainly figure out that their planet was round.. but could they determine that their sun is not the center of the universe? (I would think that if there are other planets, they could eventually determine that they orbit their sun.)”

See Isaac Asimov’s non-fiction book ‘The Tragedy of the Moon’ (Mercury Press,1972) if you can find a copy somewhere. He discussed this & the similar qu. of what the implications for understanding astronomy if our Moon circled Venus instead at considerable & fascinating length. There are a couple of essays on that & a number on other things including ‘The World Ceres’ as in the dwarf planet -he called that too!
Well done BA.

Ah, the media … forever predictable… forever getting it wrong.

“If we assume a life-bearing planet that lacks a moon, and if we assume said life is intelligent… without a moon.. how screwed up would their astronomy be? They could almost certainly figure out that their planet was round.. but could they determine that their sun is not the center of the universe? (I would think that if there are other planets, they could eventually determine that they orbit their sun.)”

See Isaac Asimov’s non-fiction book ‘The Tragedy of the Moon’ (Mercury Press,1972)if youcanfind acopy somewhere. He discussed this & the similar qu. of what the implications for understanding astronomy if our Moon circled Venus instead at considerable & fascinating length. There are a couple of essays on that & a number on other things including ‘The World Ceres’ as in the dwarf planet -he called that too!
Well done BA.

Ah, the media … forever predictable… forever getting it wrong.

“Update: I called it.”

Good call - but Meyer et al also did back in Jan 2002.

Best to see:
http://www.aas.org/publications/baas/v33n4/aas199/1302.htm
so not to read out of context but…
“We report the discovery of a young star that appears to have a very unusual distribution of circumstellar dust. HD 113766…
A simple model of the excess emission from 4.8 through 60 microns suggests a range of blackbody temperatures from approx. 290 to 440 K… uggest that the dust is being continuously replentished through collisions of planetesimals. The extent of this hypothetical planetesimal belt would be from

MattFunke. I didn’t see the distance ref in your post. Didn’t see it online in other places - but ok.. 170 AU - call it better than 4 times as far as Pluto. I still think the period is going to be too long for intelligent life to make use of paralax. Even if they keep records, how likely is it to be “Oh, those ancients kept crappy records”, rather than accept that they might just be right?

MattFunke - good point. however, it occurs to me that we don’t know the distance between the two stars. I would suggest it’s significant, based on the fact that the dust rings formed at all. Thus, the period is likely to be measured in centuries - paralax may well be a non-issue for them.

Linus - sure - when the planet *forms*, it won’t have much water, and a bunch of that will probably outgas and blow away as it cools. But, given the ring of water here, I think the BA is right is suggesting a proliferation of comets. It cosmic short order, I think there’ll be plenty of water on that rock.

What’s interesting from this direction is there doesn’t seem to be any indication of other coalescences in the system (from what I’m reading) and just the one rocky belt - of rather limited mass. So, possibly *one* planet. And lots and lots of loose rocks running around like the drivers in Rome. If life forms, it’s going to be pretty hardy, having to deal with much more frequent bombardment than our ancestors did. I don’t know how many rocks were prevented from reaching the surface of my favorite pile of rock by the other orbiting bodies (moon, mars, etc), but I think the general scientific scientific consensus is “Lots” or maybe “Lots and lots”

BA - I don’t think it’s fair to put that ‘call’ on the chart with the other gold stars. That prediction was about as difficult as “The sun will come up tomorrow”, or “Lurchgs sleeps until noon on Saturday!”

Now, if you’d offered finer granularity - say “Wall Street Journal proclaims:” or “National Geographic headlines:”, I’d give you at least a red star. Dwarf.

Sure. There’s another star in their system, about 170 AU out. If the center of mass of these two stars lies well outside the bodies of either star, they ought to get some really interesting parallax measurements once they start taking them. Realizing that their star is not fixed would certainly help them to realize that they’re not in the center of things.