Another case of putting the cart before the horse when it comes to grandiose claims of scientific discovery? According to a social networker at a Torino astrophysics conference, purported Earth-like planet Gliese 581(g) may no longer exist. However, before we consider the possibility that Nero used the Red Matter and imploded the planet a la Vulcan, it is suggested that additional data and some further analysis puts the entire planet’s existence into question.
From Dynamics of Cats (Scienceblogs.com):
IAU 276 The Astrophysics of Planetary Systems: Formation, Structure, and Dynamical Evolution just got underway in Torino, Italy (good week to be in Italy – meeting in Sardinia also, Wish I Was There).Ray Jay reports on social networks:
”We cannot confirm it [Gliese 581g] in our HARPS data” – Francesco Pepe (Geneva team) at IAU 276 in Torino.”
This is interesting, but not totally surprising.
It will be very interesting to see the HARPS paper, and how this shakes out.
Gliese 581g could still be there, it could be in the orbit reported, but this needs some more work.
PS: additional oral reports from the meeting.
HARPS statement is stronger than “we don’t see it” – they find that if they force a solution they get a negative signal appearing, implying the planet is not there, not just that they are not sensitive to it.
50% more data since 2008 published series.
Oh well, this will affect probably zero percent of the Earth’s population, yet the story made a pretty good press release and provided some excitement in preparation for the Torino conference. Even yesterday, DiscoveryNews is considering the possibility of “intelligent life” on this planet…whoa!
As I’m sure you’ve heard by now, there may be a new kid on the liveable planet block, Gliese 581g. This is the first exoplanet that has the potential to have a solid surface and that is in the habitable zone around its star where liquid water can exist. We all immediately thought, “could there be life?” and one SETI researcher claims to have a possible signal.
Can anyone come up with some parallels to climate science and the urge to run to the press?
I have one, as Carl Wunsch succinctly reacts to a request for a press quote about the new Phil Jones’ climate cooling paper in Nature last month:
“The problem in climate science is that things are hyped, then they’re picked up and exaggerated, sometimes by these crazy bloggers, and you get senators and congressmen talking about it on the floor of the House and Senate.”
“The wider community is trying to make climate science go faster than it can. Science has a natural rhythm, and you can’t make people think faster or more effectively by saying “you’ve got to know the answer by next week.” Things get re-thought, people find bugs in the research. We can hope for breakthroughs, but it will probably take years to realize that they’ve happened. When I get calls from the press, it starts to make me uneasy, since the best they’ll get is a comment from off the top of my head. When I get a request for a comment from a colleague, I take the paper home, skim it, put it aside, read it again, think about it. And even then, sometimes there are papers I didn’t quite appreciate. So these instant off the top of the head reactions don’t do the science any good and don’t do the public any good.”
I wonder who are those “crazy bloggers“?
If Yale PHD Astronomer Flandern were correct: http://metaresearch.org/cosmology/speed_of_gravity.asp
then it could be possible to travel many times faster than the speed of light, provided an electromagnetic gravity producing engine could be developed. In other words, as many in the minority observing the evidence believe, “they” have already done it.
http://www.stantonfriedman.com/
If an alien planet had been discovered 75 years ago, there’d probably have been speculation along the lines of whether an alien civilisation would have overcome the rise of totalitarianism.
If an alien planet had been discovered 25 years ago, there’d probably have been speculation along the lines of whether an alien civilisation would have solved the problem of nuclear war.
Now we’ll probably have speculation as to whether the hypothetical Gliesans will have beaten their addiction to fossil fuels and made their transition to a low-carbon economy.
If we discover another alien world in 50 years’ time, the speculation will probably be about how their civilisation will have avoided being wiped out by ice ages.
pesadia says:
October 12, 2010 at 12:43 pm
I have just had the same nasty experience as David S
The TV cable guy?
So we go from planet, to habitable zone planet, to Earthlike planet, to 100% chance of life, to signals from the planet, to planet does not exist all within the space of one month.
What a waste of time, money, and other resources.
First of all, considering its orbital period (well under 80 days to orbit the star), the planet would be tidally locked to the star. Imagine if Earth had one side constantly facing the sun and one side constantly in darkness. There probably wouldn’t be much life here even though the “average” temperature would probably be about the same that it is now.
Second, if the planet had no magnetic field, it probably had no atmosphere. No atmosphere means no liquid water on the surface no matter what the temperature.
It is my personal suspicion that all of this hype was generated because someone’s research grant was at an end and they needed a new one.
Wow – that was quick. Only a few weeks between the planet’s discovery and its annihilation because of (its) global warming.
It just goes to show that AGW is even more dangerous than we thought.
The more likely explanation is that what was detected was a large sunspot on Gliese 581, which has now disappeared. This sort of report has happened before.
But the phenomenon of running to the press before any sort of peer review of the data is an out-of-control firestorm through science and has got to be quenched before it takes down science itself in the public perception.
This leads me to “John A’s Scientific Rule of Thumb”: The stronger and more decisive the press release, the less likely that the scientific report’s conclusions are true.
I went to a colloquium on Monday given by the chair of “The Astronomy and Astrophysics Decadal Survey.”
He spent the first half of the 75 minute presentation explaining the process especially the independence of the subcommittees. The last half dealt with the programs themselves. One of the things mentioned was that GJ 581g was tidally locked and therefore less likely to support life During the Q&A someone asked how we knew this. He apologized for this not being his field and therefore not being able to answer the question in detail, but indicated as he understood it measurements somewhat supported that theory.
During the first part of the talk he indicated that programs which had been proposed burt not started were not automatically grand-fathered in. When asked what he
would like to see from the next decade. He replied that he would like to have something discovered which was totally unsuspected, and have the people of that time look back with hindsight and wonder, “How could they have missed that! All the signs were there.”
Much of the talk was about how imperfect our knowledge is in so many areas of astronomy and astrophysics.
Does this mean that Pluto is a planet again?
Someone gotto go there to verify!. Is this a “PLANET GATE”?
Any suspects?
John A says:
October 12, 2010 at 2:10 pm
“The stronger and more decisive the press release…….”
_______
Careful there John A. It was press & release that got he 10:10 mob into trouble.
The whole planet was just a statistical inference anyway. I’m not surprised by this and I doubt the original discoverers will be. The people who claimed its existence did acknowledge that there could be some errors in their data and more work needed to be done. I think they aired sufficient caution. The problem I think is the gap between how the media and the public perceive science and what is actually going on in science.
elmer says: {October 12, 2010 at 12:38 pm}
“Perfect, when we screw this planet it will only take us 20 years to move to this new planet. Oh yeah first we have to figure out how to travel at THE SPEED OF LIGHT!!!”
Don’t forget that we would also have to figure out how to stop while going the speed of light.
Interesting.
Not only is there no empirical evidence of water on the surface, and not only is there no empirical evidence of it residing in the habitable zone, and not only is there on empirical evidence that it is of the correct size for life to exist, turns out that there is no empirical evidence that it exists at all!
Sound strangely like climate science?
The undiscovered planet is yet another proof that people who report on science, not to mention some scientists, have no clue how science works. All of them view science as a scavenger hunt in a giant hotel where you open door after door until The Truth jumps out at you. They assume that The Truth will be wholly and fully recognized by the lucky fool who happens to open the right door. Because it is The Truth, don’t ya’ know?
This type of story also pulls the heart-strings of scientists who yearn for a different, better planet than our own. This is fun: Space.com linkie
Nothing like “carefully” parsing your statements in the literature and then going willy-nilly with the press release. I’ve seen this a few times in the climate literature…
Well easy come; easy go.
If you believe in Drake’s equation, then you would think that there was an infinite amount of intelligent life planets out there.
Well lets say up to but not including 12 times the number of stars in the universe; that’s a lot of planets to be making tours of the earth.
I assume that everybody is familar with the fourth grade science question on “Are YOU Smarter than a Fifth Grader ?”
And the question is:- “Why is the sky black instead of white ?” With a near infinity of bright stars, the sky should be white shouldn’t it (talking night sky here) ? Something to do with those ever increasing number of stars with magnitude, not keeping up with their rate of separation from us.
So you see infinity times zero can still come out closer to zero than to infinity; so none of those infinite number of inteligences out there might be close enough to ever get to know.
There’s one little problem that Drake’s equation doesn’t address; well it really doesn’t address anything really does it; it gives no experimentally observed values for even one of its many factors; let alone for all of them; and then there are all of those missing factors that aren’t even a part of Drake’s equation.
They are well known to biologists though; well biological chemists. The statistical improbabilities of the spontaneous occurrence of the many steps in the chemical synthesis starting from the primordial soup and ending up with even DNA; let alone something that probably looks more like a lobster, than a human.
Many of the chemical synthesis steps that are necessary to get to the building blocks of life (as we know it) are also known to be energetically disadvantaged when it comes to the probability of occurrence. And the ones that are energetically favored in the synthesis are known in some critical cases to lead to dead ends, and not to living materials.
I believe I am correct in saying that all of chemical and biological science with its many ingenious and intricate synthesis processes; has so far never succeeded in the synthesis from basic materials of some of the essential ingredients of a living self replicating and evolving molecule. So you multiply Drake’s set of infinities, with biological chemistry’s set of near zeros; and there’s no reason to believe that you get a one, rather than a zero.
At least we know that Carl Sagan went to his eternity having never obtained one single binary digit of scientific evidence of life originating outside of a thin shell about +/- 20 km thick about mean sea level on planet earth. What a waste.
But then we have a planet of dreamers who are sure that we will encounter more advanced intelligent life; that already have solved the great problems that plague us. Which is very nice for us; because then we don’t have to work on solving them for ourselves; something smarter will come along and help us out. Well you see, if they are smarter than us; why the hell would they do something as dumb as helping idiots like us to work out our problems. They can’t wait for us to blow ourselves to Kingdom come; or deliberately shut down all the life preserving phenomena on the planet; like food and energy. I’m sure that those outer zone folks have solved a lot of problems; I’d bet that they solved Fermat’s Last Theorem; just like we did (no not me). I’ll also bet, that just like us; they have not yet discovered Fermat’s proof of Fermat’s last theorem; because we sure as hell haven’t; and its an incontrovertible certainty that Fermat never came up with the crazy proof that we have (which I think is still considered a proof).
Well the Aztecs believed that tearing the living heart out of their victims and eating it; would cause the gods to keep the maize coming, and life would be great. And there are plenty of Aztecs still living among us today (some very nice pretty ones too). So we haven’t really come very far have we.
So Nyet on Gliese 581; it was really nice not knowing you !!
I think we should find intelligent life on earth before speculating about intelligent life elsewhere in the universe.
Speculation is lots of fun, and with government grants available to fund it, pays well. More over, as the game is played now, speculation is not subject to falsification.
Physical experimentation is difficult, and if not done over and over again, is and should be looked upon with skepticism, and is subject to falsification by more physical experimentation.
Much nicer to have papers judged by a mutual admiration society rather than by skeptics.
We are no longer living in an era where extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
That’s okay, I wasn’t planning on visiting anyway.
☺
I propose we name the first life supporting planet we discover “Godot”.
And I was all excited about Cold Fusion, too.
BFL says:
October 12, 2010 at 1:31 pm
“If Yale PHD Astronomer Flandern were correct: then it could be possible to travel many times faster than the speed of light, provided an electromagnetic gravity producing engine could be developed. In other words, as many in the minority observing the evidence believe, “they” have already done it.”
My feelings exactly. To that end, I have been working on such a device, off and on, for the last 20 years. If ” they” can do it I can. Roman candle rocket science is a waste of time and money and is too dangerous. pg
As I have been very interested in science of all disciplines for a large proportion of my 72 years I find it quite sad to see the manner in which the pursuit of excellence in scientific research is now being corrupted.
There is now a quite rapidly declining respect for science amongst the general public who in today’s world, lavishly finance the science disciplines through their taxes.
The utter corruption of much of what is claimed to be and passes for so called Climate Science has been the triggering point for this downward trend in the public’s respect for all science disciplines.
The respect for science is steadily being whittled away as the public increasingly sees the open pursuit for power, wealth and prestige accompanied by a lack of integrity and accountability by a large proportion of those who today go under the label of “scientists” but whom are increasingly seen by the public as having their snouts very deep in the publicly funded trough.
Unless there is a great house cleaning by the scientific profession itself and soon, respect for science of all types will continue to decline until the end result where publicly funded resources for science simply dries up with serious follow on consequences for science, scientists and the advancement of our society.
A severe financially imposed limit on publicly funded resources for scientific research will discipline science in ways, sometimes very severe, that this current generation of scientists in all their hubris, will hardly be able to comprehend.
The tax paying public at large are not stupid and they are slowly waking up to the fact that their hard earned monies are being splashed around in great quantities to fund some very, very shonky and at this stage completely unaccountable so called scientists and science.
The “discovery” of this Earth type planet and all the accompanying media hoo haa and now the sudden “un-discovery” of that same planet is just another example of lavishly public funded research for what turns out to be little more than a platform for publicity seeking scientists, all of which just breeds even more cynicism in the public’s mind.
The sheer hubris and in a lot of cases, the corruption and total lack of any accountability of so much of today’s science and scientists are steadily leading to science’s downfall as a respected profession.