It’s fun speculation, but the resolution of our telescopes is still too crappy to make an survey of neighboring planets/solar systems that’s actually any good. I kind of tune out new planet discoveries these days.
You don’t often hear new things about our sun however.
Depends on what you mean by “actually any good” I guess. While direct imaging of exoplanets is limited (though improving), alternate methods like radial velocity and transit detection are wildly successful at detecting and confirming the presence of exoplanets. It’s not like we have any shortage of detected, confirmed worlds around other stars. Here’s a favorite visualization:
(Tone indicates orbital speed. Shorter orbital period = higher pitch)
Now if your point is that we’re much better at detecting some types of worlds/systems than others (specifically, larger worlds closer to their parent stars are much easier to pick up) then that’s true. We don’t have a representative population sample, so we do have to carefully account for the biases in our detection methods when trying to make broad statements about “typical” solar systems.
I love asking Vin real questions. Us lay-persons should ask to try and understand how the mechanics of our solar system works and we should be lucky when he explains it.
My question though is this: Assuming our suns status (that is “sol”) is unique – can we quantify that? Can we then look for that? And is that status of our very average star something we can look for?
I sometimes feel like I am that crazy undergraduate student in Vin’s astronomy 101 class his University makes him teach.
I’m not totally sure what you mean on this one. If there’s some specific unusual thing that makes our sun less active then yes, that ought to be quantizable. It’s a matter of figuring out what it is, and we may need to wait for a future generation of instruments and techniques to get a clear enough view of other stars to allow us to pin down exactly what that is. From a distance, there’s not really anything unusual about our sun as G-type stars go, that study above is the first intimation I’ve seen that there may be something quirky going on.
Thank God for Kepler (the man and the space telescope). Really looking forward to what James Webb comes up with.
We need to land on the sun and take samples. And before you call me stupid, we would land at night to be safe.
I’m sure the Trump administration is all over this.
The whole construction of this telescope has had so many issues due to shitty contractors IIRC. I hope the thing actually works once it goes into space.