Comments on: Least massive protoplanetary disk found

By: Tom Marking

Tom Marking — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 18:39:04 +0000

First of all, where did this abbreviation of the constellation to three letters come from? FN Tau? Isn’t it supposed to be FN Tauri?

Second of all, if the disk contains 0.01 solar masses then that’s still 10.5 Jupiter masses so I don’t know why they would claim that no Jupiter-sized planet could form in the system. That would only be true if more than 90 percent of the mass was somehow lost from the disk during planetary formation.

I’m a little bit curious how they estimate the age of the disk to 100,000 years. What are the signs that it was recently formed?

By: Christine P.

Christine P. — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 16:52:01 +0000

I’m glad I’m not the only one who groaned at that press release! I hope Ms. Petersen is right and it was a matter of translation, not a deliberate attempt to overhype a finding. We PR folks have enough of a challenge balancing scientists vs public as it is!

By: Alex

Alex — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 16:44:06 +0000

How would you feel if someone living around this star (say on planet gorp-9, the Appalachian trail planet) called our Sun “a G2V or Fatty Fat Fat Fat star”? Don’t call stars dinky, call them petite. We all know, the Sun is not fat, just Big hydrogen’d.

By: StevoR

StevoR — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 06:42:15 +0000

That’s supposed to read “*Give* it a few hundred million years though ..” of course. Sigh.

By: StevoR

StevoR — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 06:40:31 +0000

Well not yet anyway …
Ge it a few hundred million years though & you may have something habitable in places if not exactly like Earth …

By: Lab Lemming

Lab Lemming — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 23:32:01 +0000

Car jokers: Next time you see a Subaru car, look at the emblem- you will notice a pattern of stars.

Subaru is the Japanese name for a constellation- guess which one from the auto emblem…

As for Earth-like, I agree with bassmanpete, with the added caveat that since Earth took 30-50 million years to accrete, you can’t have an Earth-like planet in a disk that young.

By: StevoR

StevoR — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 07:44:03 +0000

After all, technically aren’t brown dwarfs neither quite stars nor quite planets butsomething in-between the twain?

Stars can fuse hydrogen and sustain reactions -even tehdimmestand leasymassive -but brown dwrafs can only shrink, fuse a small amount of deuterium perhaps then shiut down forever …

Superjovian planets - up to 80 x Jove if I recall right - are similar but can’t even manage to fuse deuterium … although there may be some overlap?

So we sometimes call brown dwarfs “stars” (even giving them spectral classes - L &T ) but they’re actually not - instead being either “failed stars” or “really successful Jupiters” depending on how you look at it…

Isn’t that right … ?