### Back in the News!

My collaborators and I recently discovered a pair of exoplanet pairs. Each pair orbits a subgiant star, or a "retired A star" as I've taken to calling them. And each pair is pretty special in that the planets are interacting with eachother because they are close enough to (strongly) feel each other's gravitational tugs, in addition to the tug of their parent stars.

One of the pairs, cleverly named HD200964b and HD200964c, are extremely close to one another. Astronomers like to quantify the closeness of planets (and moons) by the ratio of their orbital periods. The HD200964 planetary system has a period ratio of 4:3---the outer planet completes 3 orbits for every 4 orbits of the inner planet. The precise ratio of periods---exactly 4 to 3, as opposed to say 4.5 to 2.7---is no accident. The only way for the planets to get along is for them to do the old 4-to-3 step, a precise set of dance moves that allows them to stay stable over long periods of time. Otherwise, one of the planets would most likely have been ejected from the system long ago. The other pair of planets orbits a star somewhat more romantically named 24 Sextanis, and they do the two-step; the outer planet completes one orbit for every 2 orbits of the inner planet.

Caltech put out a press release for the new discoveries, which got picked up by a few news outlets. Most are Astronomy-related publications, but I am in Google news!

Check it out!

The paper is on the arXiv preprint server if you'd like to get the straight dope on the system.

blissful_e said…
Yea! :)
Karin said…
Nice! Great picture of you too!
Leah Bennett said…

### On the Height of J.J. Barea

Dallas Mavericks point guard J.J. Barea standing between two very tall people (from: Picassa user photoasisphoto).

Congrats to the Dallas Mavericks, who beat the Miami Heat tonight in game six to win the NBA championship.

Okay, with that out of the way, just how tall is the busy-footed Maverick point guard J.J. Barea? He's listed as 6-foot on NBA.com, but no one, not even the sports casters, believes that he can possibly be that tall. He looks like a super-fast Hobbit out there. But could that just be relative scaling, with him standing next to a bunch of extremely tall people? People on Yahoo! Answers think so---I know because I've been Google searching "J.J. Barea Height" for the past 15 minutes.

So I decided to find a photo and settle the issue once and for all.

I then used the basketball as my metric. Wikipedia states that an NBA basketball is 29.5 inches in circumfe…

### Finding Blissful Clarity by Tuning Out

It's been a minute since I've posted here. My last post was back in April, so it has actually been something like 193,000 minutes, but I like how the kids say "it's been a minute," so I'll stick with that.
As I've said before, I use this space to work out the truths in my life. Writing is a valuable way of taking the non-linear jumble of thoughts in my head and linearizing them by putting them down on the page. In short, writing helps me figure things out. However, logical thinking is not the only way of knowing the world. Another way is to recognize, listen to, and trust one's emotions. Yes, emotions are important for figuring things out.
Back in April, when I last posted here, my emotions were largely characterized by fear, sadness, anger, frustration, confusion and despair. I say largely, because this is what I was feeling on large scales; the world outside of my immediate influence. On smaller scales, where my wife, children and friends reside, I…

### The Force is strong with this one...

Last night we were reviewing multiplication tables with Owen. The family fired off doublets of numbers and Owen confidently multiplied away. In the middle of the review Owen stopped and said, "I noticed something. 2 times 2 is 4. If you subtract 1 it's 3. That's equal to taking 2 and adding 1, and then taking 2 and subtracting 1, and multiplying. So 1 times 3 is 2 times 2 minus 1."

I have to admit, that I didn't quite get it at first. I asked him to repeat with another number and he did with six: "6 times 6 is 36. 36 minus 1 is 35. That's the same as 6-1 times 6+1, which is 35."

Ummmmm....wait. Huh? Lemme see...oh. OH! WOW! Owen figured out

x^2 - 1 = (x - 1) (x +1)

So $6 \times 8 = 7 \times 7 - 1 = (7-1) (7+1) = 48$. That's actually pretty handy!

You can see it in the image above. Look at the elements perpendicular to the diagonal. There's 48 bracketing 49, 35 bracketing 36, etc... After a bit more thought we…