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Scientists turned years of images into a spellbinding movie of a faraway stellar system in action. "In Terra inest virtus, quae Lunam del."
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Kepler rules! Yeah!
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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Absolutely fascinating! Soon we'll have AAOD along APOD. I would thought that these planets would be a bit more far away from each other.
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Quote: 129 light-years from Earth
Do I really have to call bullsh1t?
They can't even tell us if there are any sizeable objects in our own Oort cloud, but they can tell us all sorts about planets 129 light years away (omitting, of course, that they are WAY too big and WAY too bright).
God bless crass assumption, photoshop, and audience gullibility: the saviours of astronomy research grants.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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No, you don't.
Those planets are considerably larger than Oort cloud objects and brightly lit by their parent star. Oort cloud objects, so far, have been considerably smaller than planets, dark, not brightly lit by the Sun, and do not give off much in the way of infrared radiation so are far more difficult to detect.
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Dave Kreskowiak wrote: Those planets are considerably larger than Oort cloud objects
... Large enough to rip their sun apart, by the looks of them.Dave Kreskowiak wrote: and brightly lit by their parent star
... On the side that just happens to be facing toward us?
What's more likely is that they are far more distant objects, whose light trajectory is being affected by the spin if the large object between them and us.
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Mark_Wallace wrote: Large enough to rip their sun apart, by the looks of them.
The size of the glare doesn't really dictate the size of the planet.
Mark_Wallace wrote: On the side that just happens to be facing toward us?
That video looks to be looking down on the solar system, not edge on. There is no "side" of the planet that faces us. Since we're looking down on the system, what we see is only 1/4 of each planet being lit. The "top" half of each planet and only half of that is lit up by the parent star.
Mark_Wallace wrote: What's more likely is that they are far more distant objects, whose light trajectory is being affected by the spin if the large object between them and us.
Yeah, you're going to have to explain that one and provide documentation on the phenomenon. Yes, gravitational lensing is real, but I've never seen nor heard of it making a background object look exactly like it's orbiting a foreground star.
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In the video, they don't look like they're orbiting; they look like they're going through a short arc, which is being postulated as an orbit.
Looks like rotational lensing to me.
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The problem with rotational lensing is that you cannot have it in a single lens. You need multiple lenses to get the rotational effect. There isn't any evidence for a multiple lens setup near that star that I can find.
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It's a couple of hundred light years away, and we have absolutely no idea what is between us and it, or how temperature, gravity, and other, as-yet-unknown interference change the course/velocity/spin of the few photons that reach us.
Boldly declaring "THIS IS WHAT IT IS!" is not science; it's salesmanship.
Astronomy is not a science; it's guesswork that pays better than flipping burgers.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Quote: Boldly declaring "THIS IS WHAT IT IS!" is not science; it's salesmanship.
In the absence of any evidence for rotational lensing, that's what you're doing too.  You haven't provided any evidence for it but just declaring that's what it looks like to you. Go get the evidence for rotational lensing and we can change the conclusion.
If you don't know what's between us and that star, well, you have to go on the assumption that there's nothing there until you find evidence of what is.
That's the beauty of the scientific method.
They've got a leg up on you because there isn't, as yet, any evidence of rotational lensing. Until there is, "orbiting planets" is the best explanation of what's going on in the video. When and if the evidence for something else shows up, astronomers can come back to this image, reevaluate, and come up with a better model of what's going on.
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No.
I simply stated what I believe is a more possible cause of the effect (if it is indeed an effect of anything other than photoshop).
What I did not state is that it is an *ABSOLUTE FACT*, which is worthy of headlines (+ grants + tenure).
Don't fruggin' cast stones at me. Apply the same ascerbic eye to the statements from the con-men you appear happy to give credence to.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Wow. That escalated needlessly.
You want to give me evidence that they are "con-men driven by headlines, grants, and tenure" or do you just want to leave that as the baseless conservative talking point that it is?
Don't bother answering.
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Escalated? Jes' sayin', that's all.
Just look at their ever-changing claims, and how they're expressed.
It's like reading copy from car salesmen, but with longer words.
And I'm not the one making wild claims and trumpeting that they're absolute fact; I just put forward a conjecture, which was clearly phrased as a conjecture.
Try asking them for evidence, and the true reply should be "Oh, well we received 1,148 photons from kinda that direction, sorta, but we can't really be entirely sure which direction they came from, or what they were bounced around by, on the way", but they talk as if what they partially expound is graven in stone.
Real scientists don't inflate vague ideas to sound like they are the Word of God.
Car salesmen annoy me, too.
And don't get me started on insurance guys.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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It is a news source, not a scientific paper. And news articles that don't inflate ideas generally don't get as much attention. Scientific papers, on the other hand, do a much better job at expressing them as more of a probability with a given confidence level than news articles. But they're also harder to read.
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Granted, but quotes like:Quote: “It's just really cool that we can watch planets orbit other stars, and awesome to see by eye Keplerian motion in action,” says Wang.
... don't fill me with confidence, given that he has no solid proof of that he's looking at is what he says it is.
Even when raving about something, the phrasing should be along the lines of "If this is what we think it is, then it would be~~".
That's how scientists, rather than car salesmen, talk.
They'll probably decide it's something else, in a few months, and talk just as assertively about their new great discovery.
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Yeah! And the Earth is only 10,000 years old as well, so yah boo sucks to that! 
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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Hey!
Jehovah says that it's only 4,000 years old!
(One of those morons gave me a book, once, which claimed that Carl Sagan agreed with that figure!)
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Time is running out on a system that never had an unplanned downtime. I once went three days without Windows Update (or a Flash upgrade)
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Wow... That's a story - '93... what did I do back then? I think I was doing Turbo Pascal...
The sources must still be around here anywhere... *starts to search* 
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My 20 year old TP source is (or should be anyway) all on my NAS. I found and ripped the HDD from my parents old 486 a few years back. (Mildly surprised that the 20 year old drive was still readable; even if I had to find an old PC with a pata port because my USB-PATA dongle wouldn't connect to the relic for some reason.)
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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Note: I am very aware that a post like this can be seen as a political "statement:" I'm posting this here because it is, imho, tech industry news; I do not intend this post to be a political statement, or an "incitement" to political discussion, or argument (we do have the SoapBox for that).
Apple's Tim Cook and Google's Sundar Pichai comment: [^]
Reuters reports that holders of valid (green cards) from the seven "no entry" countries are being denied boarding: [^]
NYTimes reporting on tech industry reaction, and that H1-B visas are affected: [^] also reports on travelers being detained: [^]
Bloomberg reports that Google is recalling staff from abroad: [^]
«There is a spectrum, from "clearly desirable behaviour," to "possibly dodgy behavior that still makes some sense," to "clearly undesirable behavior." We try to make the latter into warnings or, better, errors. But stuff that is in the middle category you don’t want to restrict unless there is a clear way to work around it.» Eric Lippert, May 14, 2008
modified 28-Jan-17 23:42pm.
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Dogs that bark do not bite. He (D.T.) will come down to reality as soon the people who elected him will recognize the mistake 
modified 19-Jan-21 21:04pm.
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I agree that this is tech industry news, although a bit different than usual.
I just saw an interview with a Qualcomm executive on the local news channel. He voiced his concerns about their employees from any of those countries who may currently be abroad and those planning to go abroad on vacation.
The company I work for must have employees affected by this, so I expect there will be some sort of statement posted on our internal web site by Monday morning.
"When you don't know what you're doing it's best to do it quickly" - Jase #DuckDynasty
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While this may be industry news, I respectfully disagree with posting this here since any attempt to comment on and/or disagree with the opinions of those at the links will likely be considered soapbox material. Any attempt to correct some of the false information presented, would also likely turn into soapbox material.
In short, you are able to post opinion here without fear of substantive disagreement.
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