[HN Gopher] Wasp-193B, a giant planet with a density similar to ...
___________________________________________________________________
Wasp-193B, a giant planet with a density similar to that of cotton
candy
Author : geox
Score : 86 points
Date : 2024-05-14 13:20 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.exotic.uliege.be)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.exotic.uliege.be)
| dberg wrote:
| Here I was thinking this was a new LLM with 193B parameters.
| spacemanspiff01 wrote:
| Maybe it is, somewhere I'd the depths of the void there is a
| giant planet sized llm, with cotton candy neurons.
| dhosek wrote:
| In an infinite universe, everything exists, it just takes
| forever to reach it.
| BenjiWiebe wrote:
| In an infinite string of ones, does a two exist?
| htrp wrote:
| Matryoshka Brain....
| qaq wrote:
| same :)
| world2vec wrote:
| Actually a pretty cool name (and model size) for a locally run
| LLM.
| msikora wrote:
| Yep, same!
| dylan604 wrote:
| I recognized the WASP prefix. It's a pretty cool program[0].
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_Angle_Search_for_Planets
|
| The software to detect the transits seems like a fun challenge.
| Locating each star in each of the images taken, then comparing
| their brightness in each one. Seems simple enough until you
| then realize your literally dealing with astronomically large
| numbers.
| JackFr wrote:
| I love SPECULOOS as a network of robotic telescopes.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speculaas
| throwup238 wrote:
| That raises some very important questions: what is the cotton-
| candy/human crush depth equivalent? How much buoyancy would I
| have?
|
| Like, can I swim in this cotton candy planet? How deep can I get
| in the cotton candy clouds or will I just sink and get candy
| crushed?
| lostlogin wrote:
| > candy crushed
|
| Someone was going to make the candy crush joke.
| paulkrush wrote:
| Maybe earth could look like this if we put enough satellites in
| orbit.
| nanomonkey wrote:
| I'm imagining an orbital trailer park for nanorobots, with
| wispy power cords and network cables trailing all over the
| place as everyone participates in one big LAN party.
| onion2k wrote:
| _Exactly how a planet can inflate so much is a question that no
| existing theory of planetary formation can yet answer._
|
| Is there a reason to limit theories to natural formation? An
| alien race could have built it as a hydrogen storage tank or
| something.
| jdiff wrote:
| Because of all the things humanity has learned about the
| universe, none of them has turned out to be aliens or evidence
| of aliens. You can theorize it all you want, but so far every
| time the universe has just turned out to be a big, strange
| place.
| RHSman2 wrote:
| Aren't we the evidence for aliens?
| klyrs wrote:
| Until evidence to the contrary is found, it is not reasonable
| to assume that aliens are going around making planets. I say
| no, we have no reason to make such an assumption. If we think
| we've done a good job enumerating all of the ways that a planet
| can naturally form, that would provide reason to suspect that
| we've missed something. But pinning it on aliens capable of
| planet-scale engineering is quite the jump.
|
| For example, rather than a hydrogen storage tank, perhaps this
| was once a primordial rogue planet, a frozen ball of hydrogen
| hurtling through space. If it was then captured by a star's
| gravity well, and gently warmed by its newfound environment, it
| could expand into the anomaly we see today. Perhaps in another
| hundred years, we'll see that it's shedding its gas into a ring
| around the star. This sounds improbable, but I find it less
| incredible than immediately jumping to intelligent life.
| netbioserror wrote:
| The idea of a planet 1.5x the size of Jupiter, but 1/7th the
| mass...is very unintuitive from a gravitational perspective.
| Maybe it's spinning so ungodly fast that centrifugal forces are
| keeping it puffed out?
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| I wonder if it's physically possible to start with a situation
| that you're describing and end up with a toroidal planet.
| itishappy wrote:
| Yes and no. It's possible, but it's not a stable
| configuration, so it's unlikely to form naturally.
|
| https://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2014/02/torusearth.html
| rangerelf wrote:
| I thought there wasn't such thing as a "centrifugal force" :-|
| ordu wrote:
| In an inertial frame of reference there is not. In a rotating
| frame of reference there funny forces like centrifugal and a
| Coriolis force.
| NKosmatos wrote:
| The density mentioned (0.059 grams per cubic centimeter) is the
| overall density of the planet. Most probably it has a much much
| denser core, solid or thick super hot fluid, like all gas giants.
| It doesn't mean that the whole planet has the same cotton candy
| density (0.05 grams per cubic centimeter) from the top layers
| down to the core ;-)
|
| On the funny side of this, what would happen if we kept adding
| cotton candies at an empty/isolated place in space? After some
| critical mass, the cotton candies would collapse under their own
| weight/mass and a new asteroid would be created. If we kept
| adding even more candies a further collapse would create a new
| planet :-)
|
| Imagine stacking/accumulating different materials. A planet made
| just of bananas, a planet made of only water, a planet from
| rice...
|
| /note to self - check if there is such a planet simulator
| available
| keithly wrote:
| Or a planet made of a mole of moles... https://what-
| if.xkcd.com/4/
| piker wrote:
| > You might notice that we're ignoring the pockets of space
| between the moles. In a moment, you'll see why.
|
| Lol!
| TrainedMonkey wrote:
| You might enjoy a mole of moles - https://what-if.xkcd.com/4/
| hbrav wrote:
| As you added more and more cotton candy you would begin to
| compress the centre under the pressure, and you would get some
| heating from this. I think there's a good change you would melt
| and cotton candy and eventually it would re-solidify into an
| enormous boiled sweet core, with a diffuse envelope of cotton
| candy around it.
| prox wrote:
| Would love to see a simulation of that haha
| harry_ord wrote:
| A project for future odd ball people/groups
| datameta wrote:
| They outer layer would be an excellent insulator.
| _boffin_ wrote:
| I'm sensing a new XKCD--how much cotton candy would it take
| until it becomes an asteroid and what would the core be after.
| roywiggins wrote:
| "Carl Sagan's Cosmos: 'The Meat Planet'"
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZP7K9SycELA
| tuanx5 wrote:
| Sounds like you should visit Magrathea for a designer planet!
| euroderf wrote:
| This sounds like a task for one of the Culture's GSVs.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| What's the minimum material density necessary for a collapse
| such as this? Is it possible to have a planet with a core of
| solid oxygen, for example?
| pixl97 wrote:
| I mean, when we talk about the Jovian planet we believe it
| has a core of solid metal hydrogen, the only real problem
| getting an oxygen planet is there is much more
| hydrogen/helium in the universe so that's what it's going to
| be made out of.
| Rumudiez wrote:
| the Katamari game series plays on this idea of creating themed
| planets by rolling up everyday objects on Earth
| jon_richards wrote:
| What fascinates me is that if you had _enough_ cotton candy, it
| would be a black hole. I don 't mean it would collapse into a
| black hole, I mean even at a uniform density of 0.05 grams per
| cubic centimeter, it would _already be_ a black hole.
|
| We're so used to surface area scaling at r^2 and volume scaling
| at r^3 and the weird effects that can have (never scale up an
| exothermic reaction), but the maximum amount of matter that can
| exist in a volume without creating a black hole scales by r^1.
| Even with cotton candy, that r^3 is going to out-scale r^1 at
| some point.
|
| It's an interesting thought experiment for algorithm complexity
| as well. Can you actually retrieve an element from an array in
| constant time regardless of the size of the array? In the
| extreme case, the drive containing the array must have r
| proportional to the size of the array to avoid becoming a black
| hole. Assuming the query and element travel along the drive at
| the speed of light, retrieving the element still takes time
| proportional to the size of the array.
| lainga wrote:
| I have struggled to find an established name for this value.
| I thought it would be something called the "Schwarzschild
| density", but no luck. Famously, the [someone's
| name??]-density of the observable universe just happens to be
| very close to the density that would tip the universe over
| into being a very large black hole
| littlestymaar wrote:
| But given that the universe is expanding, if we're close to
| this density doesn't that mean that the density used to be
| higher than the threshold at some point?
| pixl97 wrote:
| This is why when talking about the big bang physicists
| talk about the inflation field at the start of it. The
| primitives in the pre microsecond universe have to be
| different from a black hole otherwise there's no way to
| un black hole yourself.
| jon_richards wrote:
| Wouldn't it just be the inverse of the Schwarzschild
| radius? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwarzschild_radius
| dTal wrote:
| Worth noting that even setting aside weird black hole
| physics, in the real world the amount of storage available
| given some information density and some maximum constant
| access latency is bound in r^3 by the speed of light, and
| therefore array access is not _really_ constant time but
| O([?]n). This isn 't some abstract ivory tower thing but the
| way computers actually work - due to cache hierarchies you
| will find that working with a 100 byte array is much faster
| than working with a 100 megabyte array, which is much faster
| than working with a 100 terabyte array. Every time the data
| gets larger, it gets further away...
| Finnucane wrote:
| A giant planet actually made of cotton candy would be way more
| interesting.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| Clearly it's a hollow sphere world.
| nico wrote:
| I thought this was an announcement of an LLM model called Wasp
| that had 193B parameters
|
| Was happy when I clicked the link and it was about a newly
| discovered planet 1200 light years from Earth
| chimpanzee wrote:
| The article doesn't mention this, but the planet is often
| speculated to be the home planet of the Klowns.
|
| https://youtu.be/plUXguATsTQ
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_Klowns_from_Outer_Space
| abecedarius wrote:
| How do you get an object of 44 Earth masses with the average
| density of styrofoam?
|
| The obvious starting point I guess is a core of very light
| elements, and a really really extended atmosphere. But an
| atmosphere thins out exponentially, more steeply the higher the
| gravity. So for an atmosphere to help much, those 40ish Earth
| masses of hypothesized core need to be spread out a whole lot
| already. It seems like a difficult planetary engineering problem
| -- spin it up almost to bursting?
|
| So taking that to be too silly, the core must be only a small
| fraction of the mass: a big gas cloud with a nugget in the
| center. I'm not sure that could work, but it's what I'd try to
| work out next.
| jameshart wrote:
| Dyson sphere around a neutron star.
| perihelions wrote:
| It's basically explained in the article: it's probably just
| very hot--the atmospheric scale height[0] is proportional to
| temperature. The open question (per the article) is _why_ it
| got so hot, because they don 't have a model for that. ( _" It
| certainly requires a significant deposit of energy deep into
| the planet's interior, but the details of the mechanism are not
| yet understood.""_)
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale_height
| jandrese wrote:
| Maybe it is something like a small planet that has a giant ring
| complex that happens to be aligned perpendicular to us?
| astrolx wrote:
| Usually, you would see the sign of this in the data - because
| we can actually detect the gap between the planet and eventual
| rings. But if the gap is extremely small, then it could be a
| possibility.
| ck2 wrote:
| It's weird to me they can make such assessments with confidence
| when we didn't even know the density/composition of Jupiter to
| any certainty until Hubble was around just in time to observe
| Shoemaker-Levy plow into it and eject enough surface matter
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_Shoemaker%E2%80%93Levy_9...
| cdelsolar wrote:
| We've known the mass and the size of Jupiter since way before
| the shoemaker-levy impact.
| astrolx wrote:
| AFAIK the Shoemaker-Levy impact was useful for other studies,
| but not so for the density/mass of Jupiter (also as per your
| link).
|
| Jupiter is full of surprises still (mostly about its interior).
| However, the assessments made in this article about the mass
| and radius of the planet are using very basic physical laws
| (mostly Kepler laws from the 1600s).
| abc_lisper wrote:
| Or it could be alien made. Like a dyson sphere - but a planet,
| with solar capture on the shell. Build everything without all the
| mass, add magnetic shoes and other tech to make living in 0g a
| reality.
| cedws wrote:
| >In data taken between 2006 and 2008, and again from 2011 to
| 2012, the WASP-South observatory detected periodic transits, or
| dips in light, from the star WASP-193. Astronomers determined
| that the star's periodic dips in brightness were consistent with
| a planet passing in front of the star every 6.25 days. The
| scientists measured the amount of light the planet blocked with
| each transit, which gave them an estimate of the planet's size.
|
| I'm not a physicist nor astronomer so I apologise if I sound
| arrogantly dismissive about something I am clueless about. But
| how can they be so confident about something from a single
| measurement? Couldn't there be other things causing dips in
| light, like dust clouds/asteroids also passing in front of the
| star at the same time? It seems like a flimsy way of figuring the
| size of another astronomical body.
| feoren wrote:
| When we think about making an observation with a telescope, we
| might think of someone in a crow's nest looking at a far away
| island, and think: it could be debris, it could be a boat, it
| could be a smudge on the telescope, it could be a whale, etc.
| etc. There are several reasons why this intuition breaks down
| looking at the stars.
|
| For one, astronomical systems are _extremely_ regular. The same
| thing will happen, over and over, almost the exact same way,
| millions or billions of times before anything appreciably
| changes. It 's extremely rare to find a system that is in the
| midst of significant change. We do find them, of course, and
| study them, but we do so after passing over countless "boring"
| areas of the sky.
|
| This regularity means that anything we look at is extremely
| likely to be in a very stable configuration, and we can use our
| knowledge of orbital mechanics to rule out all sorts of things
| like weird dust clouds orbiting the star, which would not be
| stable (or would look very different if they were). Realize
| also that we stare at these systems (or at least check up on
| them periodically) for _years_ at a time -- in this case they
| said 2006 to 2008, and again 2011 to 2012. So we can easily
| rule out some random thing passing between our telescope and
| the star precisely every 6.25 days for 3 years. It must be
| something stably orbiting the star.
|
| We can also use the exact shape of the "light profile" to be
| pretty certain about the shape of the object passing in front
| of it. Over dozens or hundreds of observations, we see the same
| characteristic dip in light at the exact same period every
| time, and it matches the shape of a circle passing in front of
| another circle. It doesn't happen immediately, because the
| planet spends a bit of time only partly obscuring the star, and
| we can use this to discern that it is roughly circular in
| shape. We use this profile and the amount of reduction to
| calculate the size of the planet. Asteroids would be far too
| small to detect (we can't even detect all the asteroids in our
| own solar system!)
|
| Also realize that when they say "light", they're usually
| looking at a whole spectrum of light. It's not one number that
| dips, it's a whole waveform that subtly changes. A dust cloud
| would be partly transparent, differently for different
| wavelengths, and change the light in a different way. In the
| extreme cases we can even use this to guess whether the planet
| might have an atmosphere, because it changes the waveform
| differently at its edges.
|
| Space is also _really_ empty. A bird might pass in front of
| your telescope on land, but in space, it 's almost certain that
| _nothing_ is going to randomly pass between you and what you
| 're looking at, even over years.
|
| And finally, even with all this, they spend _years_ analyzing
| the data before they can be confident enough to make claims
| like this. There is a _lot_ of data and a _lot_ of time spent
| on it, and it 's the culmination of many different lines of
| evidence. It's certainly not "flimsy".
| RHSman2 wrote:
| How very well explained
| sniggers wrote:
| IANAPNA either, but a solid object like a planet blocks light
| differently than dust clouds. Dust clouds, even dense ones,
| still allow some wavelengths through that planets do not. I
| would guess that's what allows them to be confident that it's a
| planet.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-05-14 23:02 UTC)