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Alien Atmosphere Hubbled
b-side.org writes "Yahoo! News has a story on yon giant hubble mirrorscope thingy locating an alien, mostly sodium, atmosphere. X10.com popunder ads also included free of charge." Mm....let's mix that atmosphere with water. T cuts in: This turns out to be the major discovery hinted at a few days ago.
Could you possibly have chosen a more incoherent and factually incorrect submission for posting? The atmosphere is not mostly sodium as "b-side.org" seemingly just guessed. The reason sodium was measured is because it is relatively easy to detect. NASA has a more informative story.
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what has it been restricted to? the outer ring because of the lower amount of radiation?
1) we have only found mant Jovian planets because our technology make them easiest to find and Terran type planets would have to be implyed in minuet almost imperceptable shifts in the angle of light coming from the Jovian planet as the terren planet passes it in orbit.
2) Moons around Jovian planets may also house life....moons tend to be made of Rock and most Jovian planets found have been 10-50 times the size of Jupider so those size plantes could easily house an earth sized moon.
3) the Universe is a huge undefinable place.
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Wired also has a story on this article here.
Shh.
OK, if they are viewing the star's light through the atmosphere, and using the differrence to detect the composition of the atmosphere, then it's absorption. And anything that would "block" wavelengths, means the absorption would increase, and provide a reading showing that it would have more sodium, not less. Am I wrong? Maybe I am wrong, but the more I think about it, the more I feel the statement above just doesn't add up. Seems this reporter may be the typical reporter reporting on a subject she may not actually comprehend - and she's the one that's supposed to be informing us!
I, for one (and mostly all), cannot wait for NASA's next space telescope, the Next Generation Space Telescope (NGST), to take flight. This telescope will answer many questions we currently have. Unfortunately, this will not take place until 2009, but it's still nice to think about :)
Unfortunately no. It turns out most planets are Jovian
You mean that we've seen. Hubble is limited, and is only catching the larger planets, which will pretty much limit it to the Jovians, and most of those much larger than our own. It's likely that we wouldn't see Earth with Hubble from the distance Hubble is currently finding planets. That hardly means Earth doesn't exist.
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We certainly are. The only planets in our own Solar System that lack atmospheres are Mercury and Pluto, assuming you're among those that still count Pluto as a planet and not a gargantuan comet.
If you mean other planetary systems, then we have no data to say one way or another. We have no techniques for detecting extra-Solar planets smaller than Jupiter.
If a solar system is capable of having a Jupiter type planet, what about an Earth type planet? It isn't THAT far of a stretch.
If by "Earth type planet" you mean a relatively small rocky body rather than a gas giant, you're probably right. If you mean a planet capable of supporting life as we know it, then it is a bit of a stretch, at least in the planetary systems we've actually observed. If Jupiter were much closer to the Sun than it is, conditions on Earth would be far different than they are -- that is, if Earth existed at all. It may well be that it was Jupiter's influence that prevented a planet from forming where the asteroid belt is now. The Jupiter-like planets we've seen in other systems are generally far closer to the Sun than Jupiter is. No terrestrial planets are likely to exist inside their orbits. Outside their orbits it would be too cold for liquid water to exist.
And the brethren went away edified.
How amusing. I submitted this earlier and got it rejected. oh well.
This link I was using has a nice story attached. Also for more general info about extra solar planets try Jean Schneider's here or its mirror here.
I'm getting funky time outs all over the place, so its hard to tell whether or not things are up. Unless you guys have gotten so good at slashdotting a site that you do it BEFORE a site has been posted. ;)
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There is a layer of sodium in the earths atmosphere at an altitude of ~90km. This has been used to create artifical guide stars for adaptive optics systems.
Adaptive optics systems compensate for distortion by the atmosphere increasing the resolution of ground based telescopes. To do this they need a bright point source (star) close to the object you are looking at to measure the distortions (the closer the better so that you are looking through the same bit of atmosphere). Using natural guide stars only a small fraction of the sky is close enough to a sufficiently bright star. Laser guide stars are not in regular use yet, but have been tested. A sodium laser is used to stimulate emission from a point in the sodium layer in the atmosphere creating an artificial guide star which is above the turbulent layers that cause distortion. This will allow astronomers to use adaptive optics for objects anywhere on the sky.
For those of you who, like me, could only vaguely remember that Mozilla introduced some nifty popup-nuking setting but couldn't remember how to turn it on, here it is:
[From the Release Notes for Mozilla 0.9.4]
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I'm reading Isaac Asimov's Extraterrestrial civilizations (1979), and he ends up with 530 000 "planets in our galaxy on which a technological civilization is now in being". Tho I dislike his use of the principle of mediocrity so much, the rest of the stuff is very well argued. Given the massive planets found so far, I'm sure he'd reduce his 1 300 000 000 "number of 2nd-generation, population I, sunlike stars in our galaxy with a useful ecosphere and an Earthlike planet circling it within that ecosphere."
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Sites in Europe or USA, both have a French language version. They have a 26page PDF detailing it.
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There isn't a major effect, because with the instrumentation we have, all we can see is planets as big as Jupiter or bigger, and usually in orbits closer to the sun than Venus. So we're only able to see uninhabitable planets in solar systems rather unlike ours, and this doesn't say much about the prevalence of solar systems like ours.
It does finally settle one 300-year old astronomical debate: whether planet formation happens in freak accidents such as near-collisions between stars, or as a normal part of star formation. Astronomers strongly leaned towards the latter hypothesis, because calculations and computer simulations don't show the near-collision scenario as leaving planets in stable orbits, while it is fairly easy to get a star with planets to condense from a simulated gas & dust cloud. Now that we know lots of stars do have some sort of planet, freak accident theories are definitely ruled out.
Not because they aren't there, but because they are very hard to detect with current technology (doppler shifts, light curves). The easy planets to find are very large (big doppler shifts) and fast- orbits of months or less.