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Signs Of Water Found On Distant Planets
nphillips writes "According to this article at CNN, an Italian team has found evidence of water on three planetary systems. The team used a 32-meter radio telescope to search for water maser emissions, telltale microwaves which could indicate water in a planet's atmosphere when it is bathed in the infrared light of its star."
Cause if it does, then Europa and Mars have water on them and we've known that for a LONG TIME.
So there's water there. When are we gonna drive our suburbans there? We need to be expending more energy on propulsion solutions and less on looking for places we can't get to.
Always going forward, 'cause we can't find reverse.
1) water maser emissions? Geez, what's next, they can smell it from here?
2) how far away are these planets? Are they far enough away that by the time these "maser emissions" get to us that the water is gone?
Its cool they found a method for finding water on other planets, but its no surprise that their is water, what earth was the only planet in the universe to be hit by a comet ;)
water is the first step to creating life... well, life as we know it: bacteria, viruses, microscopic plant life
this is a really interesting find
Those Italians are so fond of their wansy pansy "aqua minerale" and stupid diet food. Give
that R&D money to our Irish astronomers and they will find planets with beer and whiskey.
Some ppl really think we're the only planet with living beings? The universe is endless (or REALLY big at least), why would we be alone, or be the only planet which has water?
I bet those wacky Ice Pirates are already on their way to this planet! We need to write Congress to encourage them to build a spaceship to beat them to it!
C - A language that combines the speed of assembly with the ease of use of assembly.
Based on the symmetry principal one would have to presume the existance of one thing: tiki bars.
Looks a little like Jupiter, if you ask me ....
note: the Italian team was unable to find signs of interstellar beer, which signifies that there is indeed no intelligent life out there.
Quote the article: Hugh Jones, of Liverpool John Moores University, said it could be an exciting first step in the search for signs of life on other planets.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I'd be a little more convinced there was life on these planets if they found a water slide!
Or hey, why not look for people walking around and shit like that!
Nobel prize here I come!
Eh wrong. Keep looking for at all the planets you can for signs of life. That's the fastest way to get a look at new propulsion systems. Here's my reasoning:
When we find them, beam them transmissions of Britney Spears Pepsi Commericals, Back Street Boys, and American Idol. They'll use their fancy propulsion systems to come over here to say hi...
Extra bonus, we'll probably get to see their fancy ray guns shortly their after as they wipe us from the slate of universal existence...
Yet another reason for "And don't forget to bring a towel!"
in the universe combined in a gravitational well, hydrogen and oxygen. Given that we've found water on tens of our solar system objects (Mars, comets, Europa, etc), the only surprising thing would be to not find water in another solar system.
A. Rightmann
What use is a propulsion system without a place to propell to?
Oh, I know, you can cruise up and down the galacy on saturday night.
You gotta have both.
Kinda like every 16 year old's problem.
You can't get a job cause you don't have a car. You can't buy a car cause you don't have a job.
You can't get a chick cause you don't have a car or a job.
Might as well get high.
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Give that R&D money to our Irish astronomers and they will find planets with beer and whiskey.
I have no idea how you go about finding planets equipped with beer and whisky but I'm willing to give it a go.
"I have opinions of my own, strong opinions, but I don't always agree with them." -- George H. W. Bush
Read Rare Earth, it shows that water has been found on some distant planets (or variations thereof). My personal take is that life is out there, but in extremaphile form (simple life forms that can exist in extremely hot/cold environments, live off sulfur, etc...)
Another CNN 'science' article about some guy who *MAY* have found something that *COULD* be important. *POSSIBLE* *MAYBE* *SORTA* *KINDA*
They're always so eager to publish anything by anyone in a lab coat who's in need of funding.
And of course there's nothing informative to explain what the story means.
Ie; What the hell is a maser? What does it emit? Am I the only one reading CNN that isn't an astrophysisist?
And inevitably, a few days later, they publish a 'follow-up' article which retracts everything they said. "Meteor to hit earth in 3 days!" "Another Moon Found" "Meteor actually not going to hit earth" "Moon is really dog-doo on a stick"
Meh.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
The story was very short on details. It looks like a promising discovery, but hard to tell from the brief article. Does anyone have a reference with more details?
Well if you drink too much, you either fall flat on your face, staring into a planet;
That's how I found planet Earth! Don't quite remember where I came from... I do remember that planets smell kind of funny. And they have bits of sausage on them. And cucumber. Definately cucumber. Well known scientific fact.
"I have opinions of my own, strong opinions, but I don't always agree with them." -- George H. W. Bush
Does anyone really grok in fullness the implications of water on another planet?
I just walked right into it here on Earth.
...more planets for the RIAA to spread their tentacles to, when they're finished with us.
-- Even if a god did exist, why the fsck should I worship it?
The latest issue of Sky and Telescope (subscription print version) has an excellent article on H20 as a ubiquitous phenomena in the universe.
Excellent read re: this topic.
that0s an easy one, let's talk to Miguel Alcubierre so he can build us a warp drive, funding? mmm, i think that every country together can cooperate on this one
Ie; What the hell is a maser? What does it emit? Am I the only one reading CNN that isn't an astrophysisist?
A "maser" is the microwave equivalent of a laser, operating on rotational energy states instead of vibrational states or electron shell jumps. Ammonia is what was used in the first maser built on earth, but other chemicals work too.
Maser action occurs naturally under various conditions. The one I remember reading about was maser emissions from the outer envelopes of (if I recall correctly) red giant stars, as these are cool enough to have molecular matter instead of plasma in the outermost layers.
Detection of a water maser in a distant star system definitely indicates that water is there. Whether it's in the upper atmospheres of planets or just in the outer layers of the host star is another question.
It's a misdirection so they can steal your arctic circle candy!
Couldn't pass up a few more barrels.
in our Sun, twice as common as Carbon, though dwarfed, it is true, by the amount of hydrogen and helium. I suspect other solar systems have similar ratios.
A. Rightmann
MASER = Microwave Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation
What's that? Well, it's a laser, only in the microwave part of the spectrum.
In water, this part of the spectrum corresponds
to vibrational and rotational motion of the water molecules.
What happens is that the water absorbs this star radiation, and get excited to a high energy level,
where it remains for some time.
After a while the excited water molecule will re-emit some of this energy as a photon (light particle).
Ok, so so far not much has happened. Light in, light out.
Here's the thing: Stimulated emission.
The photon that the water molecule emitted can stimulate other water molecules in the excited state to emit their photons.
This starts a chain reaction, and you get a burst of photons of identical wavelength and phase.
Natural "Lasing" or "Masing" is rather uncommon, because you need a constant supply of energy to sustain the emission.
(In this case, supplied by the star)
But apart from that, you can make nearly anything do this, given the right amount of energy.
What the hell is a maser? Microwave Amplification by Stimulation Emission of Radiation.
What does it emit? Photons. Actually, if you don't know which particle some phenomenon emits, answering "photons" gives you the best chance to be right.
Am I the only one reading CNN that isn't an astrophysisist? Probably. This is Slashdot. Those of us who do not hold a degree in astrophysics could, if we wanted to, but then again we don't and couldn't care less, but that has never kept our mouths shut about anything, has it? Just assume every post starts with a virtual IANAA, except were noticed otherwise.
Great! Now Bush has a reason to push the space program. New places to go and destroy the environment.
Invalid Checksum. Retrying.
Why is water a "must have" for there to be life on a planet? Is it not possible that a different form of life than us humans are used to could exist without it. Can anyone explain this to me?
So...
:), and a not-so-rare element oxygen also, is anyone surprised they got together, made some water, and got trapped in this planet's gravity field?
there's water in the atmosphere of this silly planet; not lakes, streams, and rivers. We have hydrogen, the most abundant substance in the universe (baryonic anyway
CNN really sucks about things like this. The New Scientist article is much better.
The books posit life evolving on the surface of a neutron star. Some of the consequences include an almost unimaginable difference in timescales - a few minutes in our perception are equivalent to centuries of time on the surface of the neutron star, and the very process of studying the evolving intelligent life their ends up motivating that life's progress into high technology and space travel. I won't give away much more of the books, but I'll suggest it as some of the best Mind Candy I've read in a while.
Main Entry: maser
Pronunciation: 'mA-z&r
Function: noun
Etymology: microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation
Date: 1955
: a device or object that emits coherent microwave radiation produced by the natural oscillations of atoms or molecules between energy levels
...and that's the way the cookie crumbles.
I just love these information packed articles that Slashdot points to.
Come'on! If your going to put up a topic that is worthy of Slashdot, atleast refer to a story that actually has more information than the subject line!
Linux O Muerte!
We can strip-mine other planets later!
Dihydrous monoxide is poisonous, corrosive, and gives off microwave energy?!? Maybe we're better off without it - it sounds really dangerous.
no intelligent life here on Earth.
Dammit, I had the lens cap on again.
There is running water at my ex-wife's house, it doesnt't mean there is life there, or it can sustain
life their, quite the opposite.
There are reportedly 100 plus "extrasolar" planets now listed somewhere. The jury is also still out on the sunspot theory for that recent find. The original finders are reportedly investigating further and don't agree with "sunpots." Right at the moment I think the Italian announcement may be the ONLY disucssion regarding an extrasolar planet that is using apparently direct evidence. The majority of these planets are identified indirectly through the effects they reportedly have on their respective stars.
Presently the most likely kind of planet that would be detected beyond the solar system will be very large and likely have an excentric orbit, or else orbit very close to the parent star. This is merely a limitation imposed by the available methods for finding them, which are best suited for finding massive planets orbiting relatively small stars. Another few years and astronomers may be imaging or otherwise detecting smaller, earthlike planets, but not yet.
I think the single most important lesson that the detection of all these new planets provides is directed to the nature of our own system. Initially we knew the sun was pretty average as stars go. The most reasonable view would be that statistically the solar system as a whole was likely to be pretty average as well, but we were stuck with a sample of one, which is not very helpful since we live here. The place is important to us, but is it unique in the universe or boringly typical? Physically it is now begining to look as if our home system is very average. This implies interesting things about the occurrence of life in the universe, but offers a worrisome view of the presence or absence of intelligence.
Life is likely to be common. The more we know about it, the more it appears that life might be nearly inevitable and that at least bacterial-level life might be common, an average trait of average solar systems. For instance, the jury is still out on Mars, but each new piece of evidence seems to make it more possible, if not yet probable that bacteria-like forms may live or have lived there. The recent discussion about the nature of apparent biogenic magnetite in Martian meteorites, is interesting and suggestive, though non-life-based processes that are non-existent, or very, very uncommon, on earth still cannot be ruled out. However, if two local planets do indeed prove to have indigenous life, and if as the mounting data suggests, planets are common, then there is also a mounting likelihood that life is common throughout the universe. The flip side though is that the absence of evidence of other intelligence out there may mean that in the longer run, intelligence has yet to prove adaptive for life forms.
------ The only greater hazard to your liberty than n politicians is n+1 politicians.
Signs of feces were found on Uranus!
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Lalande 21185: No paper reporting a planet around this star has yet been published, although there was a "SORTA KINDA" statement made about 5 years ago.
Eps Eri: Is a maybe planet. See here
The planets around Upsilon Andromedae are however not in question. But it is not clear from the article that they are detecting masers on each (or any) of the planets. They should be able to detect clear periodic doppler signals as each of the planets orbits.
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Let's see, they called water a pre-biotic molecule, and the first extrasolar detection of it, when water is the most common substance in the universe (usually as h+ and hydroxyl ions), and we've found all sorts of amino acids and even proteins in interstellar dust clouds.
Who knows what the Italians found. The article doesn't mention which systems, whether they merely detected the presence of ice in the dust bands around these stars, or if they were able to isolate liquid water in the atmospheres of actual specific planets.
CNN needs a new science correspondant!
And ice? And some pretzels.
Cake or Death? Cake Please!
One thing that many people either neglect to considder, or know nothing about, is the fact that life requires chiral molecules, or in simpler words, molecules with specific shapes. Carbon is ideal for this, as it requires relatively low energies, yet is faily stable. But most importantly in this respect, the valence electrons in a carbon atom are arranged in a TETRAHEDRON. This is what enable long chains of carbon molecules to assume biologically active functions, such as metabolizing fuels, and what not. Silicon atoms do not do this, and therefore silicon based life as such, cannot exist.
We're trying to find out if there's life outside of the planet Earth. How do we plan on doing that?
Yes, we look for the telltale signs of a planet similar to our own. What if a planet has an oxygen atmosphere? What if it has water? What if the temperature was suitable for people like us?
But then what? I suppose we'll send radio waves there, hoping that there's someone developed enough that will hear us out, and send something back. Fantastic.
But what if there isn't life like that there? What if there's mass levels of forests, or oceans filled with derivatives of fish? What if there's only single celled life there, or creatures that wrap around the celebral cortex like in Star Trek 2?
How do we plan to prove that there's life there? I've heard that one looks for signs of methane (I don't exactly know why), or something else along that manner. But would anything like that be conclusive? Doubtful.
I seriously doubt we'd find anything using these methods, especially considering that we're limiting ourselves to planets like our own. Life, on the smallest scales, can exist anywhere. I presume the question here is, can it be made anywhere?
The only way to find out is to go there. Too bad that by doing so we'd be contaminating the atmosphere with bacteria of our own. Oh well. The mystery lives on.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
Didn't the earlier space missions eject their toiletries out of the craft into space? It had to end up somewhere...
I think I've said enough - phorm
So they find water, maybe good waves. Maybe even surfers, but not likely to find any intelligent life!
Engineering is the art of compromise.
a few minutes in our perception are equivalent to centuries of time on the surface of the neutron star
You have this backwards. Relativity tells us that a few minutes in a powerful gravitational field (such as a neutron star), would be centuries by our standards.
Actually, you're both right.
Gravitational time dilation makes time pass more slowly on the surface of a neutron star.
However, nuclear reactions are many, many orders of magnitude faster than chemical reactions.
The net result is that despite being at the bottom of a powerful gravity well, neutron star life, if it could exist, would think and evolve much, much faster than the biological life observing it.
Given that neutron stars are typically as old as most other celestial objects, a corollary is that if life on neutron stars is possible at all, it almost certainly exists and has evolved to any final stable state it's going to on every star capable of supporting it at all.
Now we need to find a way to actually go there... Then again we might never.
This would be a historic discovery -- the first detection of a prebiotic molecule in an extrasolar planet," Cristiano Cosmovici, of the Institute for Cosmic and Planetary Science in Rome, told New Scientist magazine on Wednesday.
Obviously a fake name and a troll article. I mean, c'mon, Mr Cosmovisci from the Cosmic institute? He could be called Mr. Troll Trollbert for all I care.
CNN = pwned by Italian pranksters..
Will code a sig generator for food