Astronomy, the self-proclaimed Queen of Sciences, has removed itself so far from reality that its new con, the quest for extra-solar planets, beggars the imagination. In the hot summer months of August, 2004, the "Queen" revealed her backstreet ways when an announcement by American Astrocons about the discovery of not one, but two Earth-like extrasolar planets, the reflecting objects in solar systems which by logic have to exist but which, because of the limitations of telescopes, can never be seen, was rushed into the press to preempt a similar announcement of one extrasolar Earth-like planet just announced by European Astrocons.
Mirroring the Olympics, where judges had trouble figuring out how to score the athletes that came in first, the Americans attempted to blunt the European's announcement in advancement of the American announcement by claiming that their discovery had been submitted for scientific publications at least a week in advance of the European discovery, giving the Americans precedence in the international con game for reputation and resources.
Before we get too deeply into this con, let's look at the physical description of the American discovery. One planet is more than twenty-one times the mass of the Earth (What is mass? That which produces gravity. What is gravity? That which is produced by mass!) and here is the part that defies any belief whatsoever, it has an orbit of 2.64 days. That's pretty special. Not only do the sages of the universe know that the planet is moving around a star faster than it could possibly move around the star, after all, for a swirling mass of gas to obtain that velocity would mean that the gas would dissipate itself before it condensed into matter (the swirling mass of gas being another Astrocon to remove Newton's God as the provider of motion in the solar system rather than simply sitting down and figuring out what the current causes of that motion are), the sages also know that the planet has one side constantly facing the sun, meaning that it's sun side is blistering and its backside is freezing. However, life could form in the lukewarm band between the two areas, meaning that it would be clinging to a planet that was moving faster than a speeding light wave.
The other planet is less massive, only about 18 times the Earth's mass, and its revolution around its sun, a dim M class dwarf, is slower than the first planet, making the trip the Earth takes a year to make around the sun in just 2.8 days (Only one decimal? Not much to believe in there!). However, this planet is in a solar system where three other extrasolar gas class planets have already been discovered, making that solar system more like ours.
Which makes me wonder, more like ours than what? What in our solar system travels that fast? At any rate, this planet is too close to the star to support life, so that places the solar system to which it belongs in a situation far removed from the solar system of which the Earth is a part.
The Europeans, ever the more realistic in the con game of science, laid their claim to a planet with an orbit of 9.5 days, making their claim almost four times more believable, on the scale of cons, than the American discoveries.
These discoveries of extrasolar Earth-like planets trump the finding of the gas-like planets which are the feature of the cave drawings known as Newtonianism. Newton made the assumption that planets were uniformly made up of uniform particles so that he could use volume to measure gravity and then prove that gravity was proportional to the matter in the volume. When Newton's proof failed, and was later found to be totally inapplicable to anything in the solar system, the Astrocons of the time couldn't face admitting that their founding tenets were wrong, instead making the assumption that the proportionality of gravity to mass had been proven, even though the only way it could be proven was to assume Newton's error with respect to volume. They then used the unproven proportionality argument to demonstrate what the volume of the planets contained.
In short, they reversed Newton. Instead of computing the gravity in a planet and using it to predict the orbit of a body in the solar system, they assumed the failed prediction demonstrating proportionality, and said, we can use the orbits of the planets to see inside the planets, meaning they had found a way to discover that which could never be tested, the composition of the planets (at least until the Shoemaker-Levy-9 crashed into the Earth-like surface of the gas-like planet Jupiter). When the planet was big and its orbit said there wasn't much matter there, the matter became gas. When the planet was small, and the orbit said there was a lot of matter there, then the planet was made up of iron and other heavy stuff. This resulted in one set of planets being Earth-like and the other set being gas-like, all based on unproven, unprovable and more to the point for the Astrocon's ability to sustain their con, untestable, theory.
When the extrasolar planetary con was undertaken in the mid 1990s, the Astrocons knew it was going to be hard enough selling the notion that we could discover what we couldn't see, even with their success selling dark matter and black holes, both creatures of the Newtonian cave drawings. This resulted in waiting to sell the smaller, heavier, extrasolar planets to the uneducated market in favor of claiming discovery of the larger gas planets, which, even though they were as invisible as the smaller planets, would be more capable of being theoretically "seen" than the smaller planets.
How do our Astrocons go about "seeing" any planets at all?
Well, the number of ways are, as they say, legion, and they are all tied back directly to easily punctured theories about the way the objects in the universe move, the result of classifying the cause of any motion of the universe as being either the result of historical, no longer existing forces, the Big Bang and the swirling masses of gas, or the nonexistent and unanalyzable force of gravity, which is sourced as a property of matter, like color and hardness, rather than in some dynamic feature of what that matter is doing.
When we live in a world in which we are conned into thinking that there is no current force that causes the motion around us, we are totally ignorant of the world and of the universe that represents itself to us in movement. But that doesn't stop the con, that historical or property based force is causing current motion because we believe in the big lies first, and are compelled to believe in all the fantasies that follow.
The first bait in the extrasolar con was the supposed finding of a planetary formation in a gaseous disk surrounding the standard star Beta Pictoris. This was taken as confirmation of Laplace's swirling mass of gas hypothesis. With the bait taken, 1994 brought the announcement of the unambiguous discovery of planets around a pulsar. For those unfamiliar with the imagined objects that populate the universe like the dragons and demons populated the fringes of the maps of old, pulsars are deduced from radio signals discovered by the new radio signal technology developed during the Second World War to be a dense, rapidly spinning remnant of a supernova explosion, itself the result of the historical sighting of some stars brightening in the sky.
While this unambiguous finding was never confirmed, every one agreed that whatever was discovered couldn't support life because of the nature of the stars the unconfirmed discoveries orbited. However, with the ball rolling along nicely, a Jupiter-like planet was discovered a year later orbiting the sun-like star 51 Pegasi, opening the flood gates to the discovery of Jupiter-like planets wherever we looked. The 51 Pegasi discovery utilized the radial velocity method of "seeing" what we can't see.
The radial velocity method incorporates use of the Doppler Shift, and the red or blue shifts that supposedly demonstrate the motion of the stars. Hubble was the Astrocon that dreamed up the red shift which, because he was able to hobble together a batch of information that showed a larger red shift the further a star was from us, concluded that the universe was expanding. The fact that at the time Hubble was using the Newtonian spectrum, a cave drawing that had light lined up in the order white light came out of a prism, not only botching the order of frequency, but putting red as the longest frequency, rather than blue, at the end of the spectrum, led him to propose an expanding universe where is cobbled together data actually showed a contracting universe. Had Hubble been aware of Newton's botched cave drawing, he would have had to avoid a contracting universe by cobbling together blue shifts. Modern technology has shown without question that not only does white light not contain all colors, with frequency being lengthened by the material through which it passes, but that yellow is the shortest frequency, followed by red and green, with blue the longest.
While this merely reverses the nature of Hubble's expanding universe and the use of the Doppler shift to measure the existence of extrasolar planets, expanding the sample of stars beyond Hubble's select sample has demonstrated conclusively that the Doppler shift is not conclusive evidence of measurable distance. This has been publicly proclaimed by the Astrocon's prohibition within the Astrocon community of telescope time to anyone attempting to demonstrate that the red shift is anomalous and the prohibition of publishing any studies that result from those who have been able to obtain telescope readings, primarily in non cooperating European countries.
The radial velocity system, which uses the Doppler shift to measure changes in the velocity of a star, assumes, after assuming of course that the changes exist, that they result from some unseen mass causing the shift and that unseen mass is named a planet, it's mass calculated, it orbital velocity and rotation calculated, its probable ability to contain life calculated.
From a grain of rice we can see into the core of the cosmos!
Another method is Astrometric Measurement which is the displacement of the sun due to Jupiter's orbit as it would be measured from about 33 light-years away from the sun. This method should speak for itself, but it doesn't, with no one bothering to ask who made the measurement in the first place. Not only is there no way to measure a back and forth motion of the sun, there is no mention of such motion prior to the creation of this measuring tool. Indeed, how would anyone measure such a motion? There is no point of reference.
This argument doesn't apply to other stars, however, which can be imagined to move back and forth in place, the movement created by the tug of invisible masses which have to be extrasolar planets which have one side facing the sun, a two day orbit and a band of lukewarm weather, all nice touches to redirect our attention away from the tenuousness of the notion that what is claimed to being measured is actually being measured. After all, the Astrocons will deny that Jupiter causes sunspots in the same breath that they will claim it causes the nonmeasurable motion of the sun.
The third method is the Transit Method in which the apparently regular variation in the brightness of a star is produced by a planet transiting in front of the star, much the way the moon blots out the sun in an eclipse, with the exception that the moon is half a million miles away while the observed sun and planet are so far away that the only thing we can see is the light from the sun. Of all the methods, however, this would appear to be valid. There is no doubt that there are planets surrounding the stars we see, and that if we happened to see a star at the exact correct angle, a planet might blot out some of its light. The problem with the method is, well, Jupiter's orbit takes twelve years and we have only been finding these things, and apparently confirming them for eight years, which might explain the need for daily orbital periods.
Another way to "see" is Gravitational Microlensing, which means we are measuring light bending around unseen objects, the process being the controversial proof of relativity, which just about says all that needs to be said about it.
For the forward looking, interferometers, those devices that assume that light is like a water wave traveling through a nonexistent medium as a wave particle will capture the first images of extrasolar gas giants.
Note the term "images."
Our delusions become very real indeed.
3/23/05 News Flash
"Astronomers have caught their first direct glimpse of planets orbiting nearby stars detecting infrared light from two 'hot Jupiters' with the help of NASA's infrared Spitzer Space Telescope."
As is evident, these are American discoveries: U.S. telescopes, U.S. credit.
Well, let's take a "look" at these two "hot Jupiters."
The first one orbits a star in the constellation Pegasus, 153 light-years away. It is 4.7 million miles from the star (as opposed to Jupiter, which is 483 million miles away from the sun, and its year lasts 3.5 Earth days. The first extra-solar planet ever detected using the transit method, it's radius is 1.3 to 1.4 times the size of Jupiter, has a temperature of 1,574ºs Fahrenheit and its orbit is almost perfectly circular.
The second one, originally discovered by the wobble method, is in the constellation Lyra, 500 light-years away, approximately the size of Jupiter, 4 million miles from the star and 1,450ºs Fahrenheit.
Stop for a moment and savor these figures. They produce a picture that is physically impossible, and therefore empirically accurate.
How did the Astrocons "directly glimpse" these impossibilities?
First they picked stars that had been empirically proved to exist, and thus were facts.
Under the infrared method, the heat of the star and the planet is measured when the planet is beside the star. When the planet passes behind the star, the heat diminishes by the amount of heat produced by the planet. Subtract the heat when the planet is behind the star from the heat when the planet is beside the star and you have the heat of the star. Once the heat of the star is known, it can be subtracted from the total heat when the planet is beside the star to get the heat of the planet, and thus our intrepid adventurers are "seeing" the planet.
MORE NEWS 6/14/05: A third, this time rocky planet has been found orbiting Gliese 876 (which already has two gas giants orbiting it). This planet is about 7 times the size of Earth, is two million miles from the star and orbits in just under two days. These people as so deep in delusion that they blandly describe the physically impossible. For comparison, Mercury is about 35 million miles from the sun and travels at 108,000 miles per hour. This imagined planet is two million miles from a star that is described as anywhere from half to a third as "massive" as the sun, its seven and a half times the size of the Earth which would make it roughly twenty times the size of Mercury, and it moves at 273,200 mph. Even does Newtonian Mechanics an injustice.
ABSOLUTELY LAST UPDATE 7/14/05: In the race for reputation, the Cygnus planet has been found. The planet, the size of Jupiter, is in a 3 star system and is so close to one of the stars that it orbits it in 3.5 days. The unique thing about this "discovery" is that it, well, it would seem to invalidate the swirling mass of gas crap that is proposed for solar system formation. Don't worry about it though. I predict that there will be a new theory of solar system formation that applies to all three-star systems with planets the size of Jupiter orbiting close to one of the stars.
Peter Bros is the author of the 9 volume Copernican Series and is President of The Far Museum of Dallas, an actual history museum, which will house its collection of 50,000 rare Eastern Mediterranean manuscripts and artifacts together with actual history displays and tours in a full-sized replica of the Egyptian Temple at Dendera to be built in the Dallas Ft. Worth area. Email:peterbros@therealskeptic.com