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Artemisia wrote:

Don Alexander wrote:Why would you want to go there? It's four ice giants wayyyy far out from there star.

But, yeah, that's a swell animation. Looks like that system has been observed very regularly.

For some reason, I couldn't figure out what Jotun had to do with this...

Jotun: the ice giants of Norse mythology.

Error of Logic wrote:

Artemisia wrote:

Don Alexander wrote:Why would you want to go there? It's four ice giants wayyyy far out from there star.

But, yeah, that's a swell animation. Looks like that system has been observed very regularly.

For some reason, I couldn't figure out what Jotun had to do with this...

Jotun: the ice giants of Norse mythology.

No, I get that...I just...I'm confused I guess.

I mentioned "ice giants" which is indeed the correct astrophysical term for planets like Uranus and Neptune.

Okay, so what you're saying is that it is a terrestrial planet that orbits out about where Neptune is in our planet?

..... now I'm confused.

The planets in this system are all significantly more massive than Jupiter. Therefore, I concede that I might even be wrong in calling them ice giants, since they are likely to be much more similar to Jupiter than to Uranus/Neptune, despite their distance from their host star.

And, anyway, the whole Jotun joke wasn't mine.

My comment was essentially saying "No sense in going here, these planets (or any hypothetical moons) aren't habitable anyway, so who cares."

Also, your last word should probably be "solar system" or so, not "planet". ;)

One of the problems still plaguing us in searching for planets is that the only ones we can detect right now are huge gas or ice giants. If this has changed someone please correct me, but afaik, we detect planets by noticing the distortion they produce when they pass between their sun and us. No earth sized rockball is anywhere near large enough to cause a detectable distortion. So far.

Sorry, you have another think coming! You seem to be at least ten years out of date...

There are three main methods of detecting exoplanets:

Radial velocity: Taking multiple high resolution spectra of the host star allows detection of the "wobble" as the star-planet system revolves around its center of mass. Excepting the weird case of pulsar planets, this was the method that discovered exoplanets. Best for massive, close-in planets ("hot Jupiters").

Transit method: What you mentioned. Dimming in photometric light curve as planet passes in front of its host star. Extremely successfully used by the Kepler space telescope. Again, large, close-in planets are easiest to detect.

Direct imaging: Such as the HR 8799 system. Works best with large, very young planets (and stars), as they are still hot and contracting, yielding a good contrast in the near-infrared (i.e., the planet is not as much "outshone" by its host star.)

While all these methods work best on gas giants, only direct imaging has so far only been able to detect these.

The famous Proxima Centauri b is a good exmple for a nearly Earth-mass planet detected by radial velocity measurements.

Kepler has detected planets down to the size, roughly, of Earth's Moon.

Thank you Don, and don't worry; my ego is not harmed in the least and my curiousity is piqued.

Can you explain something on the list of exoplanets you gave? The mass and radius sections: are those numbers multipliers, as in "so many times bigger than Earth", or do they stand for some ridiculously big number like "2.5 Megajacksons"? I'm fascinated by astrophysics in much the same way a chimpanzee is fascinated by a nintendo ds.

M_J and R_J are mass and radius in units of Jupiter's mass and radius. So, all of those directly imaged planets are real heavyweights.

So!!!

Have any of you mayhaps been recently experiencing a flood of unsolicited popup ads for stuff like online casinos, virus scareware, bitcoin investing, and even outright PORN?

Because not only I have, but also my mom. I use Opera, she uses Chrome. The things pop up, full screen, switching to that from the page one was looking at. So far I've not noticed any truly malicious intent, but of course I'm not going to click on anything on these pages. They sometimes don't come for many hours, and then they pop up once a minute...

I've tried searching for some of the domain names in Google, only resulting in bunches of pages advertising their malware removal tools (which are often enough just Trojans themselves). Couldn't find any valuable information like news articles.

I have antivirus software running (Avira) and also use Spybot Search & Destroy. I started with Microsoft's Malware Removal Tool (at least a trusted source). On my mom's computer, it claimed one find but when it was finished it showed nothing. Spybot? Nothing. Avira found one suspicious file named (approximately) $XYZ123!.exe, but I don't know where it was exactly. I removed it let's see if that helps... Scans on my own computers are still running (since noon...).

So, anyone have any clue? I'm wondering if we both actually some webpage open which is causing this, and it's actually not something which has nested itself in the computers. If it's the latter, I wonder how, I'm very careful about this stuff, and while I've updated a bunch of programs recently, my "infestation" preceeds that, and anyway I can't imagine a legit program installer would carry such baggage.

ussually on imgur or a few other websites my page will suddenly shoot to THIS IS GOOGLE YOU HAVE WON THINGS page. doenst happen with every website but a few of them. Has me worried if its something on my computer

I have not had this. I hope you can figure out the cause tho.

How many threads can I revive while I'm still around?

Clearly, all of them.

Go for it