BetaONE will rise again! - Solar System Similar To Ours Found

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An international team of planet hunters have found the closest thing yet to a solar system similar to our own out in space; a Jupiter-like planet orbiting its parent star in a Jupiter-like orbit.

RESEARCHERS WITH the Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT) in New South Wales, Australia detected a large planet orbiting HD 70642, a sun-like star situated 90 light-years from Earth out toward the Puppis constellation. The planetary find was announced Thursday in Paris at the ?Extrasolar Planets: Today and Tomorrow? conference.

Souce MSNBC http://www.msnbc.com/news/934038.asp

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Wondering wheather there would be human beings like us in the other solar systsem too

I really dont honestly believe that we are the only beings in this ever expanding universe. I mean really how much of space have we explored, like 1% if that.. One day we will discover whole new lives, new civilazations... sorry was having a Star Trek moment.

Quote:

Originally posted by Jarod888@Jul 4 2003, 12:39 PM
I mean really how much of space have we explored, like 1% if that..

More like 0%. All indications suggest space is infinite in size. It will never be possible to explore all of it. We have barely explored outside our own solar system in more detail than very broad observations on stars and a few large planets.

There would be something fundamentally wrong if in an infinite area, we were the only ones, and it seems foolish to assume this just because we havent seen other civilisations. It is very likely we will never have the technology to contact other civilisations out there.

Even if we could send a signal strong and targeted enough to be received by civilisations hundreds if not millions of light years away, we have to assume they are listening to us (which is unlikely considering our own civilisation can only scan a very tiny portion of the sky at a time), then we have to be listening to their reply. Unless life exists on relatively nearby solar systems, round-trip latency to contact them may be larger than the time humans have even existed on this planet.

Quote:

Originally posted by Zone-MR@Jul 4 2003, 09:32 AM
Unless life exists on relatively nearby solar systems, round-trip latency to contact them may be larger than the time humans have even existed on this planet.

Maybe not ?

_http://www.npl.washington.edu/AV/altvw81.html

All very interesting in theory, but there is nothing to suggest it can be accomplished in practice.

Quote:

All of this, for those of us who would like to go to the stars without the annoying limitations imposed by special relativity, appears to be too good to be true. "What's the catch?" we ask. As it turns out, there are two "catches" in the Alcubierre warp drive scheme. The first is that, while his warp metric is a valid solution of Einstein's equations of general relativity, we have no idea how to produce such a distortion of space-time. Its implementation would require the imposition of radical curvature on extended regions of space. Within our present state of knowledge, the only way of producing curved space is by using mass, and the masses we have available for works of engineering lead to negligible space curvature. Moreover, even if we could do engineering with mini black holes (which have lots of curved space near their surfaces) it is not clear how an Alcubierre warp could be produced.

Alcubierre has also pointed out a more fundamental problem with his warp drive. General relativity provides a procedure for determining how much energy density (energy per unit volume) is implicit in a given metric (or curvature of space-time). He shows that the energy density is negative, rather large, and proportional to the square of the velocity with which the warp moves forward. This means that the weak, strong, and dominant energy conditions of general relativity are violated, which can be taken as arguments against the possibility of creating a working Alcubierre drive. Alcubierre, following the lead of wormhole theorists, argues that quantum field theory permits the existence of regions of negative energy density under special circumstances, and cites the Casimir effect as an example. Thus, the situation for the Alcubierre drive is similar to that of stable wormholes: they are solutions to the equations of general relativity, but one would need "exotic matter" with negative mass-energy to actually produce them, and we have none at the moment.

I am all for the speculation about possibilities such as this, who knows, one day it might become a reality, but with our present understanding of the universe and laws of physics we have no way to put these theories into practice.