Exoplanets for Dummy Astronomy Students

Artist's conception of an exoplanet transiting its star

Our staffers spend a lot of time patrolling the niche sites where Leaf Group is stashing the old eHow.com content. They "specialize," so to speak, for a couple of reasons. First, the eHow content represents the largest cache of freelance dumbassery remaining in the wake of multiple google search-algorithm tweaks (e.g., Panda I), and second, that site's model was different. So-called contributors snagged "titles" from a feed and then, usually, reworded some supposedly knowledgeable person's online post that seemed to fit the topic. It didn't always work, though, as is well-illustrated by a Sciencing.com post, "Distances Between the Planets in the Milky Way," penned by Jordan Bruns.

Some "titles" in the eHow canon were pretty ambiguous, since they were harvested from search-engine queries written by people who weren't always sure what they were searching for. This one might fit that description; because the number of known planets outside our solar system is pretty small. In 2014, when Bruns (probably) wrote the post, there were fewer than 2000 known exoplanets. That, unfortunately, makes no difference: Jordan chose to interpret the question as, "How far apart are the planets in the solar system?" Yup, the idiot opened by telling his readers that,

"Our solar system within the Milky Way galaxy consists of eight planets and one dwarf planet..."

...gee, thanks, Jordan. Bruns isn't content with stopping there. No, he carefully recaps the mean orbital distances of each of the planets and then arithmetically derives the distance between any pair of neighbors through subtraction. Yup: that's all he does; and even then it takes him 407 words to spit that out, since he has to pad the text out to meet the minimum word count. We won't even give him credit for getting the arithmetic right...

The problem, of course, is that he hasn't answered the question. Hell, Bruns didn't even mention other planets in the Milky Way, even though that was part of the question! What's the matter with this communications major and sometime movie reviewer – he never watched Star Wars?

Well, Jordan, even though you were too lazy to think through the question, we did. We suspect the OQ wanted to know how far it is from Earth to the known exoplanets. Thousands of these planets have already been identified, and it's a safe bet that the number doesn't even scratch the surface. Suffice it to say, however, that none of them is next door: the distances from Earth are generally stated in parsecs (here's a continually-updated table of statistics).

Bruns couldn't even think outside the solar system he learned about in grade school, perhaps because his journey to a "communications" degree studiously avoided any science – even basic astronomy. Sad... sad to qualify for Dumbass of the Day on the basis of so little effort!

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