
Scientists may have discovered the first planets outside the Milky Way - blueatlas
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/02/05/scientists-discover-the-first-planets-outside-the-milky-way/?hpid=hp_rhp-moretopstories2_sos-newplanets-6pm%3Ahomepage%2Fstory
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tekkk
_Dai estimated the distant galaxies contain 2,000 planets for every star. That
means trillions of planets probably reside there, he said, consistent with the
ratio of free-floating planets found in the Milky Way, which contains billions
of planets._

Huh. Sometimes it creeps on my mind how big the universe is and that
everything is meaningless, on large scale. How we are controlled by such
mundane things and neural pathways that follow some useless pattern but are
too strong for us to change by our own.

Oh well, guess I should get back to my drudgery.

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8bitsrule
A look at the original paper
([http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/aaa5fb](http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/aaa5fb))
tells us that they found "frequent Fe Kα line energy shifts observed in the
gravitationally lensed quasar RXJ 1131–1231 at a lens redshift of z = 0.295 or
3.8 billion lt-yr away."

Going from 'line energy shifts' to 'DISCOVERED PLANETS in ANOTHER GALAXY!!' is
way too big of a leap. This is click-bait science writing.

Getting people interested in good science is great, but slathering it in gooey
layers of sugary crap will eventually lead to people tuning out of anything
that doesn't SCREAM.

