1. Joined
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    30 Nov '20 12:422 edits
    YouTube

    This is a ridiculously long video that's almost 2 hours long and to be honest I have only so far seen a tiny fraction of it but it explains a few interesting mysteries such as the recent discovery of an exoplanet that is so super-dense that currently nobody can be sure how it can be that dense and its pretty difficult to explain its huge density as well as its origins.
  2. Standard memberbunnyknight
    bunny knight
    planet Earth
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    01 Dec '20 03:03
    @humy
    So how dense is it? Denser than lead? Denser than tungsten?
  3. Joined
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    01 Dec '20 07:438 edits
    @bunnyknight said
    @humy
    So how dense is it? Denser than lead? Denser than tungsten?
    its about 37 g/cm3 (grams per cubic centimeter) which makes the planet denser than any known naturally occurring element! Which begs the question of; What the hell is it made of!?
    Compare that with lead which is about 11 g/cm3
    and that with tungsten and uranium which are about 19 g/cm3
    and that with osmium which is the densest naturally occurring known stable element with density of about 23 g/cm3

    ANYONE;
    Does anyone have a theory here about that?
    Do you think it could it be made of boring ordinary matter (i.e. just common chemical elements) but somehow super-compressed something a bit like the matter in a white dwarf except not nearly that compressed?
    Or do you think it could be made of some sort of wild 'exotic' matter completely unlike anything we currently know about or even ever merely speculated about!?
    Or perhaps you think it far more likely this is actually impossible for it to be THAT dense and a far more likely explanation is that there is either something wrong with the data or with our interpretation of that data and in fact that planet is simply not nearly that dense but actually has, despite that data, a much lower density that is well within the normal density range of most planets?
    Or what?
  4. Standard memberbunnyknight
    bunny knight
    planet Earth
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    01 Dec '20 14:55
    @humy
    How about a planet with a neutronium core, but spinning so rapidly that the centripetal force keeps most or its normal matter from getting sucked-in.
  5. Joined
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    01 Dec '20 15:441 edit
    @bunnyknight said
    @humy
    How about a planet with a neutronium core, but spinning so rapidly that the centripetal force keeps most or its normal matter from getting sucked-in.
    but then I assume centripetal force won't stop the more outer parts of the planet that are at and around the center of the polar regions from being sucked in. The planet would have to be flat-disc shaped and I doubt even that would work (although at least it would make the flatearthers happy if it did work).
  6. Joined
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    01 Dec '20 16:311 edit
    @humy said
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGZNhbSi_Q4

    This is a ridiculously long video that's almost 2 hours long and to be honest I have only so far seen a tiny fraction of it but it explains a few interesting mysteries such as the recent discovery of an exoplanet that is so super-dense that currently nobody can be sure how it can be that dense and its pretty difficult to explain its huge density as well as its origins.
    Naive question (did not watch the video): How are they measuring density here? Especially since this is so atypical (i.e. it lacks a comparably dense reference object), is it possible that the calculations were off by a lot?
  7. Joined
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    01 Dec '20 21:022 edits
    @wildgrass said
    How are they measuring density here?
    I tried to google the exoplanet by googling "Exoplanet LHS185B" because that is what the OP link seems to call it but google gave me nothing so it seems I cannot find a link that gives us details of how they measured its density. Anyone?
  8. Subscribersonhouse
    Fast and Curious
    slatington, pa, usa
    Joined
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    01 Dec '20 22:00
    @wildgrass
    I think they tell the size of the planet by the up and down swing of the light emission measured by telescopes. Then they know how far from the parent sun it is and the orbital velocity.

    So they can deduce the density from that.

    My guess is further measurements will reveal the density figures to be bogus but of course that is just my opinion.

    Maybe it is a collapsed star, a remanent of a nova.

    What sticks out to me is the density figure is less then double that of the heavies like Tungsten.

    If the density was say 10 times that of lead or uranium there could be a better argument for nova leftover but the numbers read out, maybe 50% higher than tungsten is definitely puzzling. Maybe a very small core of a collapsed star surrounded by asteroids and such crashing into the core over eons where most of the stuff is just rock and iron, the stuff of asteroids.

    For now, I would go with measurement error.

    I would think it would not be a core of uranium since that would seem to me to lead to an explosion.
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