The Universe Is Not Only Stranger Than We Imagine…
October 16th, 2012 - 8:50 am
Better than the man with three buttocks, it’s the planet with four suns.
This wasn’t the work of Hubble, by the way, but a crowdsourced astronomy site called Planet Hunters.
So they found the Twelve Colonies?
Wow, Asimov’s “Nightfall” in real life.
Thanks. I couldn’t remember the name of the story.
No, it’s not.
The system consists of two tightly coupled binaries about 1,000 AU apart, which is 25 times the distance from the Sun to Pluto.
The planet orbits one of the binary pairs at about 0.65 AU, with a “year” of about 130 days. So for about 40 days of each “year”, the planet and the distant pair are on opposite sides of the primary pair. All four of the stars are in the sky together, during “day”; half the planet faces away from all four, and is in “night”.
At the other end of the planet’s orbit, it would be between the two pairs, and all of it would be illuminated – the “Nightfall” condition. But it would only last for about 40 days.
Could be freakier. If it had three suns instead of four, you’d have all the otakus demanding to name it Namek.
Women, children, Triskelion’s bragging rights hardest hit.
Triskelion was a trinary. Get it together, Ed.
That was probably his point. 4 > 3. Thus the “3″ can’t brag anymore.
(Mikeski is assessed a 5 quatloo penalty for explaining the joke.)
Thank you. Your quatloos are in the mail.
I was pw0ned on that.
But no love for A. Centauri, which has a planet according to news reports today, and just over the back-yard fence?
If Barack Obama had four suns, they’d all want him to “invest” our money in four times as many green energy boondoggles.
BTW, the man with three buttocks probably has two… well, you get the picture.
A123 Files for Bankruptcy
Yet another failure of central planning–http://www.michigancapitolconfidential.com/17686
“Electric car battery-maker A123 Systems has filed for bankruptcy, according to Bloomberg News.”
“The company was promoted heavily by President Barack Obama and Michigan politicians and received hundreds of millions of dollars through federal “stimulus” and Michigan Economic Development Corp. programs.”
Three quatloos on the geezer.
What has six legs and two balls? Barry, Joe, and Hillary (she has the balls).
It’s not that weird.
There’s a tightly-coupled binary that the planet orbits. This itself isn’t that unusual. Then at a reported 1000AU (which would be 0.02 ly) from the near suns, there is another tightly-coupled binary. The two pair of binary stars, quite distant from each other, orbit a common center of mass. The planet that orbits one of the pair is probably not greatly affected by the distant stellar pair.
What Kevin M said.
For the technical details, here’s the abstract: http://arxiv.org/abs/1210.3612
… and the PDF of the full paper: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1210.3612v1