New Planet found outside of our Solar System? How could it be possible?

Question

How could the Europeans know about something 170 trillion light years away???

My question wasn't disagreeing with the find. It was how they found it... I also ment 170 million...sorry

Answer 1

They looked. They calculated, they looked again, they calculated some more. It's only 20 light years away, that is in our backyard. It is only the 230th extra-solar planet to have been detected in the past dozen years or so. The difference is that this one appears to be rocky and about 5 times the weight of Earth. All the others have been gas giants. One famous astronomer (Patrick Moore) interviewed on radio the other day said that it was inevitable and more will almost certainly be found. What happens when we detect music coming from such a planet by radio? Hmmmm? Does the US Baptist Church collapse or does it make up another set of lies?

Answer 2

...The same way American, Chinese, Japanese, and other international people would know. And maybe they looked, too. That would do it, don't you think? Light is a wonderful thing. Oh and it isn't 170 trillion lightyears away. If it were, nobody would see it since according to the big bang theory the universe has not existed for that long and the light would not reach us for another 169.85 trillion years or so.

So it was in millions then. If you truly don't know how people find things in space, then you need to figure out a thing or two about astronomy. We are not in the stone age.

Sorry for my cynical attitude here, but that was a truly ridiculous question.

Answer 3

I believe it was 170 trillion miles away, not 170 trillion light years away. It's a big difference in the number because it's something like 2.4 billion miles per light year. Still a long way away, but there are telescopes powerful enough to detect things at that distance.

Answer 4

ok first of all it is not a trillion light years away..it is mearly 20.5 light years away. So if we could travel the speed of light, it would take us a little over 20 years to get there. They say that it may be inhabitable. It has a red dwarf star as it's source of light. Smaller than our sun but 10 times bigger than our moon. Half the side of this planet is of darkness and the other half is lit all the time. The red dwarf star gives off a dimmer light and a red glow. You ask how can they do this, well technology is amazing, is it not?

Answer 5

The find was pos­si­ble thanks to an in­stru­ment known as a spec­tro­graph on the Eu­ro­pe­an South­ern Ob­serv­a­to­ry’s 3.6-meter tel­e­scope at La Silla, Chil­e. The in­s­tru­ment, called the High Ac­cu­ra­cy Ra­di­al Ve­loc­i­ty for Plan­e­tary Search­er, is touted as one of the most suc­cess­ful tools for de­tecting exo­pla­n­ets to date.

Answer 6

It is simple, they use a chromatography technique to see the stars and observed any glimpse of a planet orbiting it, which result in a small decrease or increase in the sun overall radiation emission... As for the distance of the observation, we don't really need it to see it, but just use special calculation to infer the presence of another body. They are other detection techiques used to know if the planet is solid or a gas one, and others to know the atmosphere composition of the planet (like using radio telescopes)... Anyways, this is science...

Answer 7

Well, it's not 170 trillion light years away - it's only 20 light years.

Answer 8

Telescopes. They're generally used for seeing distant objects. The European Space Agency has quite a few of 'em.

Answer 9

With advance technology that every nation is using to try and look for these things. You should read the articles before you ask such a ignorant question

Answer 10

It's only 20.5 light-years away. They use HARPS (High Accuracy Radial Velocity for Planetary Searcher), perhaps the most precise spectrograph in the world.