Talk:70 Virginis

Found this on the main page here:

Nice artist's conception [here|http://business.fortunecity.com/soros/98/70vir.html]

Unfortunately, all of the "Goldilocks" reports are based on

old data... If you read the 1996 paper by Geoff Marcy you

will find him using a parallax of ".112 (29 light years) &

a spectral type of G4V. This is where the often quoted

surface temperature of 80 degrees Celsius is derived. However,

that star is now known to be much farther away, & a subgiant.

[Hipparchos|http://astro.estec.esa.nl/Hipparcos/HIPcatalogueSearch.html] gives its

parallax as ".05522 (59 light years), which makes the

new planet far too hot to ever have liquid water, unless under

an atmosphere near the critical point of water.

Too bad for science fiction!

This isn't an encyclopedia article...I'm not sure what it is. Will we even want an article titled "70 Virginis"? --LMS

Yes, we probably will. It's an important player in the recent field of extrasolar planetary astronomy, which is what the entry above is actually kind of about. Tho' I agree it couldn't be phrased any worse this side of being done in mime. -- Paul Drye

Argh--wiki snobs!. Look, this information needs to be placed

somewhere, because there are now hundreds of wrong pages that

disregard it. I don't care if you want to rephrase it in fucking

Lojban, just don't remove something that is needed out of personal

prejudices of style! --graywyvern

Merry Christmas to you too. --Paul Drye

Personal preferenes of style? --MichaelTinkler

I removed it because it doesn't make sense to anyone who doesn't already know a fair bit about the subject (apparently). Why should Wikipedia tolerate nonsense? If you would like to rewrite it in a coherent paragraph or several, beginning with an explanation of what "70 Virginis" is, that would be grand. --LMS

I'll have a go when I get home to my books, Larry. I've been doing a lot of the other science-heavy star articles already, and I can puzzle out what pottymouth is trying to say. -- Paul Drye

Which puts me in mind of a book Asimov wrote on

ALPHA CENTAURI. Now, at that time what was known

about that star would not have filled an 8 1/2 by

11 sheet of note paper, so he managed to fill the

book with elementary explanations of, basically,

everything an uneducated person might have needed

to know in order to understand what the meager data

we had on this star might MEAN. Now, it seems to me

that anyone who gets as far as "70 Virginis" in a

wiki is going to know that this is a stellar designation,

& if someone else wants to put double brackets around

such jargon as "parallax" that might not be in a tiny

dictionary, that's one thing. And if you want to add

stuff you know besides this, that's even better. But

i added to the Wikipedia once before & my article did

not last three days & why must people who have nothing

better to do than compulsively check into "Recent Changes"

& meddle with other people's work, have to remove what

i wrote after not one hour has passed, is beyond me.

I will not contribute again.

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Wikipedia is a collaborative encyclopedia. We do not own our entries. See most common Wikipedia faux pas. --LMS