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Planetary Formation Sim Suggests Many Water Worlds
StefanJ writes "Researchers at the University of Washington -- supported by the NASA's Astrobiology Institute, its Planetary Atmospheres program, and Intel -- have come up with a new simulation of planetary formation that suggests that not only are terrestrial planets (small, rocky worlds, as opposed to gas giants) are common, but that water worlds (the subset of terrestrials that have sufficient water to support Life As We Know It) may be plentiful as well.
A key factor as to how 'wet' a planetary system's terrestrial worlds get: The eccentricity of the orbits of the system's jovian worlds.
It will be a while before we have telescopes good enough to actually see terrestrial planets and spec out their atmospheric composition, allowing us to reality-check these simulations. But it's still cool to play with sims like this. I can't wait for the home version!
(Emergency backup link to Science Daily article based on the press release.)"
Did the sim come with built in monsters/disasters?
Albert Einstein -
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.
Ok. Was it just me? I could have sworn the article was going to be about SimEarth 2 from the headline.
you love sims like this? I find it pretty doubtful you've ever used a sim like this in any "home version." this isn't simfarm. it like doesn't have any snazzy openGL renderings of planets being born, one star system at a time, making a picture of the galaxy you can zoom around in by holding down the control- and meta-keys as modifiers of axis. It's a big and ugly number crunching beast that spits out some probabilities. fun, if you know what the numbers mean, but mostly worthless to an outsider.
though i suppose someone could write a GUI front end that just takes the probability matrix it spits out and generate a random solar system based on the numbers, along with total mass, etc etc. But I could do that now with some guesses at the numbers and it wouldn't be much different...
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
From the article: "It currently is impossible to detect Earthlike planets around other stars."
As I am not overly familiar with astronomy, why is this the case?
... because the are also much bigger, meaning that the G force will be much higher. Not that it makes life impossible, but it will create enourmous presures. For life forms on such a planet it would be very difficult to explore space, I guess. Simply, because the escape speed will be very high as well.
We have 2/3's of a watery planet right here, that we are yet to explore in great detail.
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
Reading the article I can't help but think of all the stellar systems around as archipels of islands spread in a huge ocean. The other islands near ours might be inhabited, too ? That's one more reason to start sending "smoke signals". Or perhaps the current electromagnetic madness we emit permanently might suffice ?
Maybe we deserve this world ?
I'd love to see a series of sims run on a modified Earth model - each sim run with only 1 parameter changed, and then examined to see what would happen to life as we know it, here on Earth.
For instance, play with the Earth's mass, water content, distance from the Sun, or mass of its satellite. It would be interesting to have an educated guess as to how much each of these values could differ from reality before Earth wouldn't be Earth anymore, and how things would change as we approached those limits.
So, this is not based in reality _quite yet_. There is only one data point!
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
The formation of water worlds would seem to hinge on the relative abundances of H, O, and C as well as the ability of other heavier elements to bind these crucial light elements. The inner system of a forming star seems like a hostile place for hydrogen. Between the hot accreting planets, their low gravitiation pull, and stellar winds, I'd bet that its too easy for a small rocky inner world to lose all its hydrogen and other volatiles.
Assuming that hydrogen is retained (locked up in the rocks), it then becomes a matter of the C-O balance. If carbon is too prevalent, it will scavenge all the oxygen from the atmosphere and lead to a CO2/hydrocarbon atmosphere (other things, like FE also scavenge oxygen). Only if there is enough oxygen will you get water.
I wonder how accurately the sim modelled the balance of elements and chemical reaction cycles.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
In terms of elements, I don't think I'd bother playing with oxygen or CO2 levels as they are altered by life - and I think it would be beyond our current modelling skills to change the initial chemical balances and model how life WOULD have developed, given that our ability to model the existing atmosphere pretty much sucks.
Changing the star type, planet core rotation and composition, etc would be interesting though.
Glbsnoop: On this one simulated planet, these "humans" have created a simulator to see how likely earthlike planets are to form! Isn't that rich?
Qlbthrx: Very amusing, Glb. Now turn off the computer and take out the trash.
Glbsnoop: Fine. CLICK
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
Like the Anonymous Coward notes, we live on a water-rich world.
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The press release doesn't give a lot to go on, but it suggests that some of the resulting worlds will indeed be huge, with great deep oceans. But there could be smaller worlds with oceans, big ones without, etc. An interesting mix . .
Stefan
'I find it pretty doubtful you've ever used a sim like this in any "home version."'
The daunting academic sims of yesteryear are the playthings of tomorrow.
Ever hear of ACCRETE? It was a very early (early 70s) I first read about it in an old Carl Sagan book. It blew my mind! I remember staring lovingly at the sample outputs in _The Cosmic Connection_ and wishing there were more. Ten years later, I was RUNNING ACCRETE on my home computer!
"Games" like Sim Life and Sim Earth would have been considered serious, powerful simulators a few years earlier. They were prettied up and given game elements (e.g., disasters), but they are based on serious stuff.
OTOH, dagnabbit, I'm no video-game generation chart-o-phobe. I wouldn't MIND seeing the results in the form of a spreadsheet, or plugging in the parameters on the command line.
Stefan
...the RPG Traveler as a kid. I've a hunch that my simulations were as accurate at these.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
This data just adds to the mystery of where are they. Fermi Paradox
By all that's reasonable, if life is common, and this data just increases that likelihood, then it's extremely likely that someone somewhere would have colonized the galaxy.
Of course there are only a few reasonable conclusions (reasonable as I see it anyway...)
1. We're the only "intelligent" life around. Meaning that life may be common but intelligence as we see it is such a long shot that we are the only or the first.
2. We're the only life around. Meaning that a unique combination of events combined to produce life on this planet.
3. We're not the only intelligent life but the other's haven't reached this neck of the galaxy yet.
4. We're not the only intelligent life but we're off limits for whatever reason.
Feel free to juggle the odds or toss in new ones...
Ward
. Silence! Be thankful thy species is unpalatable! .
Are any of those worlds "duplicates" of other worlds?
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
Let's use it for games!
It'd be fun in, say, a space strategy game to be able to create a realistic solar system from a random number seed. Now, presumably these simulations were run on a supercomputer and took hundreds of CPU hours to do... However, I'm guessing that if you do enough runs, you can look at the numbers and come up with a simple algorithm that would give fairly reasonable results. Honestly, I'd love to get my hands on their data, even if it does look like a spreadsheet.
Here come the Kevin Costner jokes...
SimEarth used to do this. It was just a game of course, but the models were quite detailed and realistic as far as they went, and you could learn a lot from it about the way these variables interacted. It even had classic models like Lovelock's Daisyworld .