Joe Keller's "Requiem for Relativity" thread

Hi Marsrocks, to save you having to read through twenty pages of that thread. It started off about relativity but like a lot of threads here, it changed to Joe's ideas about a planet.

We've got a big ball of gas and dust, about a light year across. It starts to rotate and collapse, like an ice skater pulling her arms in, it gets faster and faster. It becomes unstable and throws off lumps of itself. Fine, it can also split very early on and form a binary pair of stars. These can spit of planetary gobbit of stuff, and the orbits would be stable if the two stars are far enough apart.

We can also have a "failed" binary system. Here one of the gas balls is too small to create anything other than a stunted brown dwarf. A little more massive than Jupiter but because of that, it pulls in to a smaller radius. It, perhaps, only splutters into fusion at periods.

Such a set up could explain how our solar system has its planets spread out. Up to now we have a lot of solar system with giant planets very close in to their parent suns. That may be just down to the problems of finding solar systems at the moment.

Joe's looking for a planet at about 180 astronomical units, way way out in the boonies. It's going to be dim! He thinks that the infamous green dot may be one of its moons. (Techy point:- is it a moon, or a planet? I'm not sure at all what to call it)

The next stage of the game, is to get time on a big telescope. The Bradford is hardly a toy but we really want to study this area of sky with at least a two metre job.

(Deleted image, due to my being a complete idiot at matching up star maps)

Stoat, thanks for that summary. The topic is very interesting.

You are correct that I am matching my points at a different location than where you originally suggested.

I have carefully checked my reference points again, and I am confident that I have found the best matchup.

The example below shows a side by side comparison of the second blinker I put up above. Note the numerous stars in alignment when I move my second image down to the lower right 1/4 of your line-marked image. I also had to enlarge (and brighten) the secondary image in the second and third blinkers to obtain the best match.

There are fifteen star-to-star matches shown in the comparison images below. These fifteen stars comprise my reference points for the match:

The six brightest stars form a hexagon, (outlined), which give identical matches, and the shape of the hexagon is also an exact match between the two images.
Four pairs of stars match up in each image shown in the colored boxes.
Another match is shown in the white circle.



Please recheck these matchups with these reference points in mind. I have even more matched points on the third blinker I posted. So, I am fairly confident of my match on that one as well.

Okay, here is the third blinker with the reference points I used to check it against, marked below:

Stoat, which green dot are you guys investigating?

I've marked six in the image below; is it one of these or some other dot?

1. green dot at the top.
2. almost light blue dot near #1.
3. tiny green vertical streak.
4. green dot and yellow dot side by side.
5. bright green dot near the bottom of the image.
6. another nearly light blue dot within the hexagon.


(See image in the post below)

Oops, found a seventh one in the lower right corner: