Re: [Traveller_TNE] Celestial Real Estate Overstock

On 20 Mar 2006 at 15:00, Peter Gray wrote:

> --- wrote:
>
> > Remember, the current detection methods select for large, close
> > planets. That rocky/icy planet was detectable because of a very rare
> > situation.

> > Untill we have more and larger scopes in space, we won't really know
> > what typical systems are like.

> Its not that rare. Detection of large planets depend upon the
> measurement of the wobble in the star's motion created by nearby
> gravitational attraction. The target star in this case is an M-class
> red dwarf with a mass between 0.2 and 0.5 solar. The smaller stellar
> mass would have allowed a greater degree of deviation caused by any
> planetary objects of significant size, including Earth-sized planets.

Yeah, but if it hadn't been for a *rare* gravitational lensing
effect, they'd have never seen it in at the distance it was at.

Unless we are talking about different planets.

> What I'm pointing out here is the fact that "anomaly" in astronomy is
> actually rather common. Find just a few of these worlds in any given
> statistical sample of space, and its rather likely they're
> everywhere.

Sure, there will be a lot of worlds like the ones we've discovered.
But we don't know what percentage of worlds out there will be like
them. The sample *is* biased towards them.

--
Leonard Erickson (aka shadow)
shadow at shadowgard dot com

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