>The only assumption SETI makes is that aliens wouldn't disguise their radio emissions as natural sources.

there's a secondary hidden assumption there: that aliens wouldn't use encryption when transmitting (which would make their transmissions sound like random background noise.)

but we use encryption and its considered commonplace.

i'm all for searching for signs of life but without some grown-up logic employed i'm dubious that anything will come of these activities.

The fact that he is saying "can't" in this situation is pretty disingenuous. The probability of a planet of it's size forming around a star that small are just very small but not impossible.

This wouldn't even be something entirely new if you throw in all star types into the mix. We have discovered planets orbiting neutron stars before that likely formed after the star collapsed into its neutron dense state.

But again, it's not refuting anything. The probability is still very small that saying "it wouldn't" form isn't necessarily a lie but we shouldn't always deal in absolutes when it comes to this stuff.

They lit 31 engines, a world record. The last time someone tried 30 they blew up four rockets in a row, the second one destroying the launch facility.

>IIRC it also started development before the BE-4

They were kind of playing around with ideas before BE-4, but real design didn't start until around the same time.

>if we ignore that a full flow staged combustion engine also has an oxygen-rich side

We'd have to. It's amazing to me that a modern company absolutely flush with cash is having serious issues designing roughly a methane variant of what's just a dual-chamber version of what was at the time a 25+ year-old engine. Something's been very wrong at BO. I'm just hoping now that Bezos is actively involved they can clean up their act.

The answer is dump it back in the ocean. I get you don't like that answer, but that's the answer.

And you can pull a practically unlimited amount of water out of the oceans. Any amount humans can conceivably need.

I hear a lot about desalination. Nobody answers the question about salt really.

What if you don't have the water to ship around?

"This planet should not exist based on our current understanding of planet formation."

- Carnegie Science astronomer Shubham Kanodia

​

"I disagree."

- A random on Reddit

Disclaimer: I am too lazy to read the article. This is all just prior knowledge.

The only assumption SETI makes is that aliens wouldn't disguise their radio emissions as natural sources. You don't need to understand the signal to realize that it wasn't produced by any known natural phenomenon, and wasn't random.

An ai could quickly filter through the signals, eliminating any that have an obvious natural cause, passing the potentially interesting ones on to people.

Maybe it doesn't even belong to the solar system so that it doesn't have to comply with formation theories, and it was just a caught rogue planet.

When i read their press thing i thought it sounded like something might be up. It went from LET.GO we got the engines to we got lots of and lot more testing to do

BO couldn’t send two PERFECT rocket engines? Like you know this is the most important thing as everyone as talked about ULA being beholden to BO. And delays and many other things.

So this is a huge red flag to me. The fact launchs go from 2 this a year a few more in 24 then every two weeks makes me think ULA is seeing that a year or two or more to get things right. Not a good sign

why ULA went with BO has never really made sense can anyone tell me why?

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Look, the last time a guy visited forbidden planet, he wound up as a kooky doctor who had the lasagna on a flight out of Chicago 30 years later

>I think calling it "forbidden" is very hyperbolic

Yes well, it is space.com

I don't think it refutes anything, its just an anomaly. Basically physics tells us that due to the size of the star a planet should have a near impossible probability of forming.

But here we are looking at one so it just adds more mystery to how things in the macro scale work.

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Kanodia explained in the statement. "Based on our nominal current understanding of planet formation, TOI-5205b should not exist; it is a 'forbidden' planet."

From the article

My first sentence is just my general complaint about space journalism that the word "size" is not clear because it could mean several things that are very different.

The paper itself admits that this could be the extreme end of our current models given known uncertainties and variabilities and therefore not "forbidden", but yeah, if they find a bunch of them, then we'll have to start tweaking models more.

In other words, good paper, bad headline and slightly hyperbolic article, as is typical for science journalism.

Well the objection isn’t any size relation but that under current models a Jupiter-type planet that close to this type of star “should” have boiled away before properly forming.

Ergo begs the question is this some Goldilocks scenario that is astronomically rare… or are we going to start finding these by the dozens and need to update our models.

Headline still very clickbait but the actual naming tracks with science’s bad habit of bad names getting out into the public sphere minus context.

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You don't even really need consciousness, pfft

The idea that the ULA would be able to pump out 2 full new rockets consistently each month and have enough demand for it in a world where SpaceX can profitable launch mass to orbit for far less seems wildly unrealistic

Space and astrophysics are way more interesting than these headlines (for those who study and understand more of it). If these headlines grab one kids attention and makes them turn to study it as a career path or hobby then it's done its job. We don't want dense scientific papers to have to also attract the next wave of scientists, that's what these bait headlines are for. For example in these posts the headline brings you in. To either learn more or educate people on the actual science. It's a win/win.

A white dwarf is a dead star that lost much of its mass though, so it's not really comparable. Gas giants will never form around a white dwarf, although secondary rocky planets might.

same vibe as this

But even so, the definition of brown dwarf isn't necessarily set in stone. It definitely can't fuse normal hydrogen, but do you define the lower limit by the physical process, by formation mechanism, or by observational feasibility?

• Physical process: must be fusing deuterium? It's a nice physical process to define by. However, it's basically impossible to tell observationally whether a (potential) brown dwarf is burning deuterium. There are no outward signs. You can often measure mass, and the deuterium burning mass is approximately 13 Jupiter masses, but it depends on metallicity and age. Therefore, if you find an object that's around the limit, you're not sure what to call it without knowing metallicity or age, which is harder to do. Additionally, an older 13 M_J brown dwarf won't be fusing deuterium anymore, so does that mean it started as a brown dwarf and then became a planet when it burned all the deuterium in its core? That's not very satisfying.

• Formation mechanism: formed via disk instability/gravitational collapse (as opposed to core accretion)? There is very likely overlap in masses between high-mass core accretion objects and low-mass gravitational collapse objects. You could therefore have like a 10 M_J brown dwarf via gravitational collapse that has never fused deuterium, but a 15 M_J planet formed via core accretion that fuses deuterium. That's not very satisfying either to have an overlap in mass ranges.

• Observational: use 13 M_J as your cutoff? It's reasonable since that is generally the most observational characteristic that can somewhat distinguish the above scenarios. However, that means some your brown dwarfs formed via core accretion, while some planets formed via gravitational collapse. Similarly, it means that some of your brown dwarfs never fused deuterium, and some of your planets do fuse deuterium. Physically, it doesn't make sense to have either, but observationally, it's a very nice cutoff. Still, this isn't very satisfying either.

As far as I'm aware as a PhD in astronomy in exoplanets, there's not really an agreed-upon consensus among these three choices of definition.

Why don't they just use the software from the nostromo?