Forbidden Donut

Between things like this & the LHC its an exciting time for science. I just wish the smartest minds in the world got more money to spend so we can advance further, I love space & I love science. All I watch on TV are the documentary channels on satelite TV. Programs like Horizon on the bbc, fantastic.

Some facts, the picture is a star and orbiting planet some 500 light years away. The planet is 3,106 trillion miles away and approximately 8x the size of Jupiter, but 11x further from its sun than Neptune is from ours.

That's pretty sweet. Sadly, I don't find it too impressive. Unless we find that this planet supports some form of life, it seems to me that we have more planets to explore than we can manage to right now.

The technology used to discover the planet, that is something I find very impressive.

huzzah from articles ganked from the Astronomy Picture of the Day without citation /biggrin.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":D" border="0" alt="biggrin.gif" />

Check it daily, learn it, love it.

That shit's off the heezy though. The planet is 8 times the size of Jupiter and the star is only a few million years old. It's entirely within the realm of reason to suspect there could be terrestrial planets in that solar system.

Before, we were only able to infer an extrasolar planet's existence from it's gravitational influences on the star. This is the first photo of an extra solar planet to come forward to the mainstream scientific community. And it kicks ass.

It's massive enough to potentially become a star itself, which makes it a wonderful case study for the ways that binary star systems form.

it sickens me knowing i will die before finding out if sentient life exists on these alien galaxies

speaking of the LHC have any experiments been done since its coming out?

I believe the first particles will collide at maximum speed next week, if I remember what I read correctly.

Then we will see if God exists or something.

/seriously, the scientists don't even know what they're trying to find out, they just know that they'll find something out.

Well, they do have specific things they're looking for. The energy released by the collisions should be enough for them to disprove/study a lot of particles that only exist in theory at the moment.

They are hoping to find quarks. In all honesty, they don't know if anything will happen for sure. There should be energy output (if splitting an atom released as much energy as it did, how much energy will smaller particles release?).

Seriously, there is a part of the machine that just looks for things to appear. They don't know what they should be looking for, so they added a piece of equipment that looks for anything (known or unknown).

I guess I could've been more specific. Yeah they want to find certain things, but they have no clue what's actually gonna happen. It's just a big honking experiment to look more closely at sub-atomic particles behaving in a very specific way.

i would sleep better knowing that string theory could be empirically supported...i can't wait for them to start smashing. if i were an onsite researcher i would totally be jacking off right now

i love large hadron collider

WFT, they have to be losing sleep over the excitement... once in a lifetime opportunities await. Now we will see if it will open mini-black holes and destroy the world. /laugh.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":lol:" border="0" alt="laugh.gif" />

Probably not going to make a black hole. But there is an infinitesimal chance. At least France will be one of the first to go /tongue.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":P" border="0" alt="tongue.gif" />

[attachment=3:steelin.jpg]