waitaminute

The media is filled with news of the discoveries of extra solar planets and especially the rocky planets in habitable zones. The mass of these planets are quoted at multiple masses of the earth. My question is wouldn't moons orbiting these planets be included in the mass quote? I mean the wobble dection method would only view the planets and its moons as a single mass, right? Frank

I don't want to sound argumentative but you'd be surprise how when an idea is explained, many find it suddenly obivious, but never would have thought up the idea themselves. LOL Wow Enthalpy, great post and wonderful cites, thanks for the info.

Who said anything about scientist being collectively dim? As for the second comment; I wouldn't put too much credence in following the status quo. It usually pays to follow your nose or gut feeling.

Well heat doesn't transfer instantly so there maybe a way to manage the hot plasma without a magnetic field, I mean other fusion reaction systems have to deal with that kind of heat as well, albeit radiated heat, where the walls of other fusion reactor proposals don't make contact with the plasma. So if heat is conducted out of the system it might create onion layers where temperature toward the walls of the chamber are cooler than temperatures at its center.

Well...A chamber made of thick titanium backed up with walls of lead say 50 to 100 feet thick which are then encased in re-enforced concrete walls 50 to 100 feet thick? Then perhaps heavy hydrogen is needed?

I have a question: Stars fuse hydrogen not heavy hydrogen. There is equilibrium between the energy released from fusion and the pressure created by gravity. My understanding is what keeps all of the hydrogen from reacting or fusing is the temperature in the sun is too low to cause fusion, but as hydrogen migrates toward the center of the sun gravity brings hydrogen atoms close enough together for quantum tunneling to fuse the protons. If my understanding of fusion in a star is correct then couldn't a scaled down version of a sun be constructed? Where a hefty chamber contains ordinary hydrogen under very high pressure and therefore density and a small plutonium filament is detonated to cause fusion. The temperature of the system rises to heat the hydrogen in the chamber to create very high pressures where hydrogen can get close enough for quantum mechanical tunneling to cause more fusion. The amount or rate of fusion could be controlled by releasing or absorbing heat from the system. Eventually the chamber burns all of the hydrogen and the system has to be re-initialized. The idea seems simple so where is my thinking wrong?