{"id":20145,"date":"2015-12-20T16:46:31","date_gmt":"2015-12-21T00:46:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2015\/12\/super-earth-in-outer-solar-system-is-incredibly-unlikely"},"modified":"2017-06-04T20:17:22","modified_gmt":"2017-06-05T03:17:22","slug":"super-earth-in-outer-solar-system-is-incredibly-unlikely","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2015\/12\/super-earth-in-outer-solar-system-is-incredibly-unlikely","title":{"rendered":"Super-Earth In Outer Solar System Is Incredibly Unlikely"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\\'blog-photo\\' href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/super-earth-in-outer-solar-system-is-incredibly-unlikely.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>How an innocent plea for collegial comments turned into a global news flap about a possible Super-Earth on our solar system\u2019s outer fringes.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p>The odds that our solar system harbors a super-Earth on its outer fringes are longer than the chances of winning a state lottery (or at least 200 million to one), says a University of Hawaii planetary scientist. In fact, the recent news flap over the potential detection of a rocky planet in a very long solar orbit was greatly exaggerated, the lead author of the scientific paper which resulted in the controversy now says.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe never claim a super-Earth; we state it can\u2019t necessarily be ruled out on the basis of our data alone, but the much more likely explanation is a much more nearby icy-body,\u201d Wouter Vlemmings, a radio and submillimeter astronomer at Sweden\u2019s Chalmers University of Technology, told me.<\/p>\n<p>But Jonathan Williams, a longtime submillimeter astronomer and planetary scientist at the University of Hawaii in Manoa, who was not involved in the observations, couldn\u2019t disagree more, particularly since super-Earths are thought to have masses that range from between 1 to 10 times that of Earth.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.forbes.com\/sites\/brucedorminey\/2015\/12\/20\/super-earth-in-outer-solar-system-is-incredibly-unlikely\/\" target=\"_blank\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>How an innocent plea for collegial comments turned into a global news flap about a possible Super-Earth on our solar system\u2019s outer fringes. The odds that our solar system harbors a super-Earth on its outer fringes are longer than the chances of winning a state lottery (or at least 200 million to one), says a [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":380,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20145","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20145","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/380"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20145"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20145\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":68981,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20145\/revisions\/68981"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20145"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20145"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20145"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}