My, But That's a Big One

No. Not that. We're talking about exo-planets FKA "Extra-solar Planets"."

Newly Discovered Exoplanet 17 Times More Massive Than Earth

Okay, if you read the article it states--I kid you not--that the newly discovered exoplanet is "17 times heavier than our planet." Heavier? For whom are these people writing? I really feel like banging my forehead into my keyboard. Are we that mathematically and scientifically challenged to have mass wrongly conveyed as weight in order for people to understand just what has been discovered?

Sigh.

The discovery itself is interesting for a whole host of reasons.

I'll choose two for illustrative purposes:

Firstly, theorists weren't certain that a 'rocky' planet could have this much mass and mot be a gas giant..like say, Jupiter. Well, I wonder just how this theory(more like speculation) was arrived at. It's foolish to base prejudices on what we see in our little insignificant eight planet system. One has to believe that more massive rocky planets have yet to be discovered. It seems to me that--mathematics aside--since the new planet "Kepler-10c" has an orbit very close to it's star, that hydogen and helium would have literally gravitated to the more massive star than a close, less massive object. I'm sure that some variant of the inverse square equation would put that right.

Secondly, if the scientific community is correct about the age of Kepler-10c--a mere 3 billion years after the universe's 'creation'--, heavier elements were available for planetary formation and much more interesting forms of chemistry. Very early life, anyone? This doesn't really surprise me as really massive hot burning stars have very short lives indeed. Lots of supernovae equate to lots of heavier elements.

I'm sort of shocked that the astronomical community has such a parochial view of things. This Pale Blue Dot(much thanks to the late Carl Sagan) is truly inconsequential on the galactic scale, much less the universal. Provincialism it seems, is not only the purview of politicians and other assorted charlatans.

Please don't get me wrong. I hold the scientific community in the highest regard possible for human beings. Nature, on the other hand, humbles us all the time, and the surprises that this discovery illuminate serve to show us just how wedded our thinking is to this insignificant speck of the universe. That said, it's the only place we have. We make our stand right here. That, in a great many ways, is a shame.