Little Green Morons

Hand-waving:

University of Arizona astronomer Michael Meyer led a Legacy Science Program with NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope to determine whether planetary systems like ours are common or rare in the Milky Way galaxy. Meyer and his colleagues found that at least 20 percent, and possibly as many as 60 percent, of stars similar to the sun are candidates for forming rocky planets.

So what technique did they use to arrive at such a dazzlingly inaccurate assumption?

The Spitzer telescope detects dust at a range of infrared wavelengths. The hottest dust, at temperatures more than 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, is detected at the shortest wavelengths, between 3.6 microns and 8 microns. Cool dust, about minus 380 degrees Fahrenheit, is detected at the longest wavelengths, between 70 microns and 160 microns. Warm dust, between minus 280 and 80 degrees Fahrenheit, can be traced at 24 micron wavelengths.

Because dust closer to the star is hotter than dust farther from the star, the warm dust likely traces material orbiting the star at distances comparable to distances between Earth and Jupiter around our star, the sun.

This is like seeing a single, distant cloud in the sky and then making a detailed weather forecast -- for next month.

These people aren't scientists, they're court magicians. They dance and cavort and perform minor tricks for the amusement of the unspeakable... in this case, the mass media and their credulous audience. It's an easy sell, because the same drooling dolts who swallowed whole the "theory" of anthropogenic global warming will have no problem digesting this little pseudo-science turd.

This is science not for the sake of knowledge, but for the sake of a full stomach. And that's not science at all. A 40% base field variability? That doesn't even qualify as a guess; that's just hot air. The only thing these astronomers have in common with the likes of Galileo, Newton, and Kepler is a shared species.

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(Hat-tip to Churt)