Monday, December 30, 2013

Two Brown Dwarfs And An EXO!!

 
There is something very exciting going on only a little over six light years from Sol.  Two Brown Dwarfs in a binary orbit seem to be harboring an exoplanet.   Exciting point one....Brown Dwarfs and in a binary orbit.  

Brown Dwarf stars are a curious animal.  First for a star, they are tiny.  For the most part hardly larger than a gas giant planet, in Luhman 16AB case, astronomers determined that the mass of these brown dwarfs is about 40 times that of Jupiter,  but very much smaller than a star.  Plus they are miserly with their energy putting out mostly infrared energy, some even so cool that if you could stand in the gravity, you could walk on the surface for the most part barefoot.  

But to find two in a binary orbit is a bit rare.  Whats more, it would seem that there is a planet in the mix as well.  

Discovered by astronomers using NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) spacecraft, Luhman 16AB is threefold more interesting as this system is only 6.6 light years away from Earth.  If further investigation confirms the previous findings, Luhman 16AB's planet would be the closest exoplanet yet discovered. 

More available on the Dvice.com article HERE

6 comments:

kallamis said...

So lets build a gigantic ship, and go check it out. I'm tired of all the research stuff. Lets just get going already. We'll never know for sure about things till we get out there, so lets go.

Beam Me Up said...

Preachin to the choir Kall. All for it. Not sure (hell who am I kidding, I ain't never gonna)if I could go, but it needs doing. Ships will need to be big and fast in able to just get the data back in a timely manner. Matter of fact, I suspect that such ships would be a one way and just sending back data as they go.

I thought you might give me hell for the title...}:>

kallamis said...

Wow, didnt even catch that actually. Life is just too busy again at moment. But yeah, we need to do something. I wouldn't be exactly happy about it, but in the game I run, the first thing I did in setting up the game was to send out ships to other systems. They were all operated by robots that remained offline until they were nearing their destination, or they were activated by an emergency.
I would much rather be on the ship myself, even if I never made it there, but I would settle for even that kind of ship being launched right now.

Beam Me Up said...

That is the way it will have to be done in my guesstimation. Even in the earlier games run on a single server with mail updates, I would always send out small cheap exploratory ships that would tell me where the resources were and the baddies wern't. That would tell me where I had to put my resources. I liked mining better than warship building...I never had enough resources when it was warships all the time. Damn things cost to much.

kallamis said...

Same thing on kindle called Colony Attack. I'm trying that one out at the moment, but don't think I will be recommending it out here. It's like a cut down version of those types of space building games. In this one, you send out a fighter, and a barge, and you get about 1200 or so of titanium, or power, you get the idea. But, if you send out something like 2 barges, and a whole lot of fighters, and corvettes, and a couple frigates, you might get around 7-10,000 back. But, you run the risk of an ambush by 65,000 fighters, 3500 bombers, 1500 corvettes, and you get the hint. Happened to me numerous times already.

kallamis said...

Okay, I went to my kindle and looked up the ambush report. Here are the exact numbers.
ME= 100 fighters, 40 corvettes,10 frigates, 1 battleship and 3 barges.
AMBUSH FLEET = 25,960 fighters, 2,246 corvettes, 14,148 bombers, 554 frigates, 71 battle ships, and 51 carriers.
This is what I got hit with when I went to an asteroid field to harvest it.