Another person that needs a physics refresher. The only thing that affects time is the speed that we are travelling. The faster you go, the slower time progresses. However it's strictly a relative thing. To someone travelling at the speed of light, time would seem to progress normally even though to someone standing still he would appear to be moving much slower. It has no real effect on allowing people to live longer. Under no circumstances does mass have anything to do with it, it's strictly the speed at which we're moving. Go read some Einstein, he's the one who figured it all out. BTW, it's called space-time "continuum".

The effective gravity at a given point on a planet is affected by four things: mass, distance from the centre of mass, rotation, and the gravitational pull of other bodies. In this case we need only consider mass and radius.

The effect of rotation on the apparent gravity at a point on a planet is negligable. I thought of this a long time ago during a brief obsession with physics. On Earth, it amounts to about 3.3 cm/s^2 at the equator. Thus, gravity certainly is lower at the equator due to Earth's rotation, but not dramatically so. At the poles, of course, rotation has no effect on gravity. This new planet likely rotates slower than Earth, too. It's proximity with its parent star might make it tidally locked -- like the moon is with Earth.

Radius and mass. According to the BBC article, the mass is 5x Earth's and the radius is 1.5x Earth's. Calculating its gravitational pull is not that difficult from there. Sparing you the equations, I'll just say that the result is that the planet's gravity is about 2.18x that of Earth's.


Regarding the bit of Relativity that showed up in this thread. . . time dilation is only a significant matter at exceptionally high velocities. An object travelling at Mach 10 (3.3 km/s or 2 miles per second) will lose one second every 520 years (give or take a few). Mass also increases with velocity, but the effect is similarily insigificant unless at extreme velocities.

Why would you presume that? As far as I know, proximity has no bearing on speed on rotation. It could be spinning around like crazy for all we know.



Again you're making presumptions. Earth has a core that is large composed of Iron, giving it a larger mass than the outlying crust and concentrating much of our planet's total mass in a small central area. If this new planet had it's mass more evenly distruted than ours, then those calculations wouldn't necessarily apply.

First of all, centrifical forces also decrease with radius, and while my micrometers/s^2 guess was a little low, the actual numbers are still relatively insignificant; the actual weight difference between the poles and the equator is only 0.5%



An outside observer will view the clock of someone on the plane moving at a rate of (1-v^2/c^2)^.5 relative to their own. At the same time, someone on the plane will see the clocks on the outside moving slower by the same ammount. Basically what this means is that every object in the universe moves through space-time at the speed of light; thus as your spacial velocity increases, your temporal velocity decreases. The tricky part, however, is that all motion is relative, so two people can each say that the other is moving while they themselves are stationary, and laws of phyics will remain valid for either point of view.



Actually, mass has a lot to do with it. You see there's this little thing called general relativity which states that gravity is indistiguishable from an accelerating reference plane, and as we learned in special relativity, objects in motion experience time at a slower rate.

In a specific sense, that is true. However, the proximity of a smaller mass to a larger mass has a large bearing on the likelihood that one or both bodies are tidally locked. Tidally locked bodies naturally have a slower rotation period than a non-locked body of the same mass would.

I'll tentatively agree to that. I do realize that mass distribution does affect what gravity will be at specific points on or near an object. However, I think it quite likely that the planet has a fairly dense core. Somehow it just makes sense that unless the planet is extremely young (a possibility, of course), an object of that mass is unlikely to have evenly distributed mass.


EDIT: I take it back, the planet is definitely not young. The estimated age of that solar system is only slightly younger than our own.

darn it...

Thought I had something going...



Belanos, my man, go easy on the replies... 3 in a row in 10 minutes? You can just put into one, or edit one.


No, I know about the space fabric/time theory with the sun bending stuff, and Einsteins theory of it all.




YYYYEEEESSSS!!!!! That must be where it is... I've never been on it, but it was in some incredibly lame physics video we watched, and it's grown into a standing joke. Frankly, despite it being designed by some famous guy, I'm not suprised it sucked.

As it stands, Quixen, you are pretty much my new hero, up there with Mystikmind and Kryo, but dude, what the floup is that picture, looks like something out of Vendetta, not that I saw the movie.

Has nothing to do with Vendetta the movie. I chose this particular avatar for several reasons. I love art work done in black and white. When making posts, I perfer someone to be able to refer to me and envision a face, not a symbol or a random picture of some celestial body, animal, car, or other miscellaneous item.

I chose this face due to the way he looks. To me personally, he comes across as being focused on whatever his objective might be. Many seem to think of the lead singer of the punk band "The Sex Pistols".

Anyway, the dark long hair and facial features also remind me of myself in my younger years.

In a nut shell, the Avatar "feels" right.

Don't know, I never saw the movie "The Ring".

Comments on breathing under pressure. I'm a scuba diver so I had to learn this.

1. Decompression sickness (the bends) is, as already stated, the effect of depressurizing too fast. However, there are other problems. One is nitrogen narcosis. At depths greater than 100 feet, nitrogen begins to act like a narcotic, you can get high off it. THe exact effect varies by person. Divers who go very deep often switch to a mix that replaces nitrogen with helium to avoid this. ALso, oxigen toxicity. Under pressure, oxigen becomes poisonous and will kill you. To avoid this, the diver must switch to a mixture with less oxigen. I remember watching a story about exploring the wreck of the Andrea Dora where the divers were breathing something like 5% oxigen.

Jacob, have you ever read The Deep Range by Arthur C. Clarke? you might enjoy it. it's about cowboys of the sea. also, i never realized that oxygen toxicity was a danger to diving. interesting.

I'm not really sure what you're getting at. You're always standing completely still relative to yourself, and that's all that matters

If the observer was moving close to the speed of light relative to you, your entire life would pass in a blink (actually this is only true if he made a round trip, otherwise you wouldn't be aging at all from his perspective; it has to do with the fact that the acceleration of turning his ship prevents his from claiming an intertial reference frame). Similarly, if you were somehow able to survive at the event horizon of a black hole, you'd seen the entire universe age and die in an instant.