{"id":35051,"date":"2011-05-08T15:43:23","date_gmt":"2011-05-08T15:43:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/dense-exoplanet-gets-the-lead-out-and-in-bad-astronomy\/"},"modified":"2011-05-08T15:43:23","modified_gmt":"2011-05-08T15:43:23","slug":"dense-exoplanet-gets-the-lead-out-and-in-bad-astronomy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/astronomy\/dense-exoplanet-gets-the-lead-out-and-in-bad-astronomy.php","title":{"rendered":"Dense exoplanet gets the lead out and in | Bad Astronomy"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Sometimes it pays to look over some older data and re-examine it. An exoplanet called 55 Cancri e was thought to have an orbit that was just 2.8 days long when it was discovered<\/a>. However, two researchers looked over the data<\/a> and realized they got a better fit if the orbit were actually only 0.73654 days — just under 18 hours!<\/em> This meant it orbited its star far closer than previously thought as well.<\/p>

And while that may be somewhat interesting, it’s the implications for the planet itself that make this orbital revision so cool. Or actually, hot. And dense.<\/p>

Right. As usual, there’s a story to tell here…<\/p>

The planet was discovered using the Doppler method: as it orbits its star, the gravity of the planet tugs on the star, causing a very small shift in the spectrum of starlight. The problem is getting enough observations to nail down the planet’s period; you can’t observe when it’s up during the day, and that cuts into the ability to get a good sampling of measurements. The discovery data gave a good fit at 2.8 days, so that’s what ...<\/p>

<\/a>
<\/a><\/p>

<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sometimes it pays to look over some older data and re-examine it. An exoplanet called 55 Cancri e was thought to have an orbit that was just 2.8 days long when it was discovered. However, two researchers looked over the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"limit_modified_date":"","last_modified_date":"","_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35051","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-astronomy"],"modified_by":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35051"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35051"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35051\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35051"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35051"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35051"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}