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Microlensing Uncovers Earth-Like Planet
smooth wombat writes "Using a new technique called gravitational microlensing, a team of astronomers have discovered the smallest Earth-like planet circling a star 20,000 light years away in the constellation Sagittarius. Unfortunately the planet takes ten years to circle the red dwarf and has a surface temperature estimated at -220 C which means it's just a larger version of Pluto so the chance of finding life on this planet is essentially zero."
Unfortunately the planet takes ten years to circle the red dwarf and has a surface temperature estimated at -220 C which means it's just a larger version of Pluto so the chance of finding life on this planet is essentially zero.
So it's earth-like how?
In what way, then, is it earth-like?
Sorry to carp, but it's stuff like this, especially in 'science' articles, that drives me to distraction.
From TFA (boldface mine):Umm...wouldn't that be the textbook definition of solid ? In the absence of any information as to the composition of the 'frozen liquid, the term 'frozen liquid' could apply equally well to any terrestrial planet.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Cold...inhospitable...sounds like Earth to me.
so does anyone know what is "earthlike" about a planet that is too cold to live on?
I'm guessing it has to do with the observed spectrum from the planet indicating the right checmical components...
music - http://www.subatomicglue.com
The more novel thing (to me) would be discovering the ruins of ancient (chronologically speaking) civilization on a planet like that.
So its earthlike in the fact that it is a planet, earth sized, and orbitting a sun? Thats like saying I'm hung like Ron Jeremy, in the fact that we both have a penis and are ugly as sin.
I tend to think the chances of us finding life on anything 20,000 life years away is essentially zero.
Of course, it could be very earth-like if global warming causes a catastrophic "snowball earth" effect.
Unfortunately the planet takes ten years to circle the red dwarf and has a surface temperature estimated at -220 C which means it's just a larger version of Pluto so the chance of finding life on this planet is essentially zero.
It's especially unfortunate given the ease of a mission requiring us to travel 20,000 light years from Earth, then survive 57.3 Kelvin temperatutes.
Unlike all the gas-giant, Jupiter-like planets we've seen so far. It's very difficult to spot tiny, Earth-sized objects from so far away. We may not find this new planet very hospitable but it's still an important discovery.
...Earth-like or Pluto-like?
TFA says it's more Pluto-like. 5x the mass of Earth and -220 degrees. But "Earth-like" is scattered rather too liberally throughout the article.
Seems just a bit sensationalist to me.
I think they emphasize "earth-like" because up till now, all the discovered exoplanets have been gas giants, as opposed to solid planets. It's even in the same order of magnitude with earth, only 5 times bigger. Gas giants are hundreds of times bigger than earth.
... they mean that Apple is already preparing to ship 125,000 iPods, and there won't be enough to satisfy the demand.
Other than that, it doesn't sound too Earth-like to me.
No life... lucky us. Otherwise we'd need to build up an expedition to go and nuke 'em till they glow. And boy would that be expensive!
What are we going to do tomorrow night? The same thing we do every night, Pinky. Try to take over the world!
Quote:
So, by all means, let's just stop looking then. That's the easy solution. Seriously though, I hate when people think like this. Maybe by looking out into deep space, we'll discover some new method for easily detecting life which we can then apply to Mars. That is unlikely, but still, science is about exploring, not just throwing down the hat at something silly like a problem that we can't quite answer yet.
Whomever said that hopefully isn't a scientist and/or working on this project.
-Jesse
Nothing says "unprofessional job" like wrinkles in your duct tape.
So let's say we are classifying planets according to their ability to support humans. Let's just say Earth is class, oh, M. Is this planet class M? Certainly not! No human could survive in -220 Celsius! Far from being like earth. Ok I'm done being uber trekie :)
"Just call me Girly Blank"
It's small. Most every planet discovered so far has been an object with very large mass - enough to perturb the host star. Gravitational lensing allowed these scientists to detect a planet with much smaller mass. The cool thing is that these astronomers are finding new ways with current land-based technology to image distant small planets around stars. With these advances, some day we may well find a planet giving off a telltale spectroscopic oxygen signature - a real indicator of life. So, baby steps first I guess.
it must be "mostly harmless"
Recent simulations of planet formation suggest that bodies with an Earth-like mass are abundant.
The headline should have been: Earth like (similar mass) Planet uncovered.
What we need is some sort of descriptor like, oh I don't know, let's say 'M' class for Earth like - in the sense that we can live on it as we do here on Earth.
I'll thin I'll trade mark :M Class". None of you have heard of that before - have you?
Come on, read a few posts on Slashdot on Intelligent Design and you will know that there is no chance involved here. Absense or precense of life is by design and only those not graced by Kansas education falsly believes otherwise.
1. It is closer in mass and size to earth than to (example) Jupiter.
2. Its density is closer to that of earth than to, say, a neutron star.
3. It is made of matter and not anti-matter.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
...Proxima Centauri is our neighbour and humans only recently diverged from the other apes. Earth-like is really just a literal translation of the Latin elements of the technically correct word which is "terrestrial".
-- SIGFPE
This style of reporting is beyond annoying. I'd much rather have this story presented like it is "Using the microlensing technique first predicted by Albert Einstein in 1912, a team of astronomers have discovered a rocky planet about 5 times the mass of the earth some 25,000 light years away. It orbits a red dwarf....." Personally I was more intriqued by Albert Einsteins' involvement than the idiotic claims of the planet being "Earth-like" but.....not.
www.brownsauce.org
It's sad to see that BBC is now following suit of PMSNBC and CNN in creating fluffy, repetetetive, 'sound-byte' laden articles like this one. You could probably sum this all up in one paragraph, about like the blurb on the top of the page here is.
Bummer.
do() || do_not();
Since I am related to the guy interviewed for the ESO Press Release I feel obliged to link to it.
0 3-06.html
:)
http://www.eso.org/outreach/press-rel/pr-2006/pr-
I have not read the BBC article. But this is the official PR document. It's nice having relatives in the field. I had this news days ago.
----------------- Oink. Moo. rarr! -----------------
Well, if you mean life, as in Jessica Alba, you're correct.
But that's a tad provincial, limited, humdrum, some might say. We know very little about chemistry at 50 degrees Kelvin. Maybe there are some chemical reactions that don't go at all at our room temperature, but run just fine at 50K.
Might be a tad slow, but who says life has to run at our speed?
Isn't anyone going to make a Red Dwarf reference?
" . . .has a surface temperature estimated at -220 C which means . . . the chance of finding life on this planet is essentially zero."
Obviously these researchers have never met my ex-wife.
What?
"surface temperature estimated at -220 C ... so the chance of finding life on this planet is essentially zero"
I am sure the little green men on that planet are saying the same thing about our 32 C planet. "There is no way anything could live on a planet above -100 C."
I remember seeing an article about a satellite orbiting Mars couldn't tell that Earth was a habitable planet. If true, how can they be any more confident of their assessment of a planet several lightyears from here?
Read about this in my national newspaper, which would have gone to press about 12 hours ago. New Zealand Herald.
Is there a non-chronological context for the word "ancient?"
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
Uh, melting point varies with pressure and a couple other factors that depend on your PVT model. You can melt pretty much any material if you set the conditions correctly, regardless of wether the decomposition temperature is below the MP at 1 atm or not. The liquid phase may not be very accessible, but it's always there.
Also, you need a better example, since Sucrose (the molecule people mean when they say 'sugar' without a qualifier) has a MP of 191 degrees centigrade at 1 atm, i.e. it has a viable liquid phase pre-decomposition. Perhaps you're thinking of Glucose or Ribose?
You could make an argument that 'frozen liquid' would refer to an amorphous (non-crystalline/glassy) structured solid only, as these result from a skipping of the phase formation bit of solidification to just lock the structure of the liquid into solid form. However, I think it's more likely that the writers of the article just skipped the materials phase of their education, locking the structure of their brains into a void-filled physics-oriented glass. Or they just, you know, made the intellectual equivalent of a typo. Whichever.
...it's really a sad day for America when we require a goddamn ACT OF CONGRESS to make our DVD players work properly. ~
I can't believe most everyone here is up in arms because the term "earthlike" was used. That basically refers to mass, and is technically correct in it's field. Remember, astronomers refer to anything above helium as "metals." But it leads so many to say "Nothing to see here, there's no giant trees or sea monsters on that planet." How jaded do you have to be to have ridiculous expectations like that?
That astronomers can detect that planet at all is a phenomenal acheivement. Before this, the only extrasolar planets that could be detected had large masses in close orbits, a rather extreme situation. But here's something quite outside that class. So its parameters aren't inside the "habitable zone." It's the first discovery of its kind. The attitude I'm seeing here is like someone claiming poker is no fun because they haven't been dealt a royal flush on their first hand. It's the process, more than this particular result, that should inspire amazement.
And it was seen at 20,000 light years away. That really, really far, a galactic distance! That means there are a lot of stars potentially obnservable using this technique. Even if the alignment is relatively rare, with billions of stars to try, perhaps sooner or later one or two will prove themselves to be more interesting to this unreasonably demanding crowd. But then I'm sure the discovery will be discounted if the alien civilization hasn't developed Linux.
In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.
Somewhere in the Milky Way? Boom boom!
Deleted
Isn't that the one where they all board a NASA rocket, and Superman heaves them all up into space? Or, as Ted Baxter would say, "Syupahmahn"
Scientists have recently discovered "humans know jack shit and are egocentric idiots." this fact was based on stupid comments by scientists and doctors proclaiming something doesn't exist without any facts to support the argument. Dr. Know it All gave a rebuttal claiming, "I'll belive other forms of life exist when I see it." to that a philosopher replied, "You assume you're alive and intelligent. No evidence supports that conclusion."
The WOW! signal came from Sagittarius so I bet they are looking for aliens.
http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=318
Let's take a pedantic tour of the universe starting from the core of a star.
In your typical (not in a super-nova) star, fusion is only taking place in a small fraction of the stars volume.
About as much mass as is in stars is also floating around as a diffuse ionized gas in intergalactic space at a million degrees kelvin.
About 6 times as much mass as there is in both of these combined exists in the form of dark matter.
Finally, approximately 4 times as much mass as all of these combined exists in the form of dark energy.
So, the natural state of the universe is some kind of exotic matter. We are the froth on the surface of the lake of the universe. 5% (not hydrogen or helium gas) of 1/5th (not dark energy) of 1/7th (not dark matter) of the stuff out there.
Earthlike how?
Because when they look very closely, they can see hairy bipeds peering into monitors at the results from microlens telescopes apparently aimed at our planet.
They were just very much colder, hairy bipeds.
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Astronomers suggest name for this new planet of frozen liquid surface: Hoth.
The etymology of the name was not entirely clear at press time.
Despite all these posts from people bitching about how this planet isn't exactly the same as our own, it's the closed we've found so far, and is much more Earth-like than the rest. It is not a huge, hot gas giant like most of the other extrasolar planets discovered. It has a solid rocky surface, and is relatively small.
If they can detect planets like this now (especially at 25,000 light years! wow), it is only a matter of time before a planet that is truly Earth-like is discovered.
sudo eat my shorts
Anyone should know that each planet takes only one year to orbit it's star. It may take more or less earth years. But that's beside the point.
Man is the lowest-cost, 150-pound, nonlinear, all-purpose computer system which can be mass-produced by unskilled labor.
...it's really a sad day for America when we require a goddamn ACT OF CONGRESS to make our DVD players work properly. ~
The worst part is that the act of congress it to make them NOT work properly...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
It takes ten years for the planet to orbit its parent star, a common-or-garden red dwarf that lies about 28,000 light years from Earth, close to the centre of our Galaxy. P.S. I submitted this news today at 4 a.m. : 2006-01-25 04:10:30 Discovery of the smallest yet Earth-like planet (Science,Space) (rejected)
Man...Not only do we have to worry about little green men, and little grey men, but now we have to worry about the little Ice Men too...What's next?
--
"I think; therefore, I am libertarian."
sensors indicate a Class-M planet, with breathable air and humanoid lifeforms that speak English, having some kind of problem that can be solved in the next 45 minutes.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
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http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/astro-ph/pdf/0505/0505 451.pdf (microlensing "jovian" events)
x ?type=oddlyEnoughNews (Jacks/Ch/Bahr)
t ml (OGLE Early Warning System)
http://bulge.astro.princeton.edu/~ogle/ (OGLE - Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment)
http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/newsChannel.asp
http://www.astrouw.edu.pl/~ogle/ogle3/ews/ews.h
Perhaps it's how our Earth may look like in distant future. It would be interesting if any sign of existance of life once existed (if it ever existed) can be detected from this planet.
"Don't let fools fool you. They are the clever ones."
Back in about 1995, I was in Auckland finishing up my Princeton PhD, and travelled to the MOA telescope (a pre-existing .6m telescope) when they were setting up their new camera. I installed Linux on about 3 desktop computers in the dome. They had a rack-mounted Sun machine controlling the camera, and there was a pre-existing DOS computer which controlled telescope pointing.
A few points of interest/weirdnessess
MOA is a collaboration with Japanese, so all the Linux installs included Japanese language support, including Japanese xterm windows.
Communication between the Linux boxen and the DOS box was purely by creating/deleting files on a shared drive. E.g. the Linux box would put a file on the drive saying where to point, and then would busy-wait looking at the file until it disappeared, at which point it knew the telescope was now tracking the required location.
The camera would do 30 second exposures. The Sun box ran a little script to do an exposure, which would send commands to open the shutter, wait, close the shutter, and read the data. The exposure timing was done with a "sleep 30" command! I was *not* happy with that, but didn't convince people to change it.
Since then, they have built their own new 1.8m telescope, and likely replaced the camera, so the above information is out of date. I haven't had any involvement in the project other than that one trip.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
Don't forget, when discussing the surface of the earth, it's now frozen liquid magma. Not rock.
The days of the digital watch are numbered.
Microlensing Uncovers Earth-Like Planet
Wouldn't an "Earth-sized Planet" be a more accurate description?
The cool aspect of this article is not the "Earth-likeness" but the fact that astronomers are now able to infer the existence of smaller planets (not Giants as before) 20 000 light years away and can also determine their orbit patterns and most impressively their surface temperature.
Those astronomers are Polish! http://wiadomosci.gazeta.pl/wiadomosci/1,53600,313 1417.html
not really.
"Year" is a measurment of time, which, Einstein aside is essentially static.
Unless of course your notion of seconds changes as well.
Not only is it beyond annoying, it is downright wrong! This is an amazing result. The effective temperature of the planet may be low. But if it is 5 times (volume? radius?) as large as the Earth it will produce prodigous amounts of radiogenic heat. It's heat of formation will also be huge. It's internal temperature will be much higher than Earth's. If it has a similar composition to Earth there will definitely be active volcanism, perhaps plate tectonics. Maybe liquid metallic volcanism, who knows? The large size also suggests it might receive more cometary infall hence have more volatiles. It might have a huge insulating atmosphere or oceans. No, this is about the most interesting exoplanet discovery to date.
an ill wind that blows no good
he was referring to Microsoft employees.
I, for one, welcome our new Red Dwarf watching, icy veined Sagittarian overlords.
...and I, for one, welcome our new cold, cold, overlords!
The first observed gravitational microlensing effect was in 1993, and the theory was around long before 1986.
"I am sure that if you go into the charred remains of Reactor core number 4 chernobyl you will find plenty of life."
This is true, but does goatse really count as life?
Hrmmm...makes my head hurt.
"Using a new technique called gravitational microlensing (...)" Gravitational lensing itself was predicted by A. Einstein in 1919, and the effect of amplifying the magnitude of a single star by a massive lens was foreseen by F. Zwicky in 1937. Bohdan Paczynski introduced the concept of mass photometry (measuring the brightness of millions of stars, in order to increase the probability of detecting a microlensing event) in 1985. So, the method used to detect the icy planet mentioned in the article, is (at least) 20 years old. In astronomy, that's a lot of time.
Actually Martin is staff, not a student, but yes, it was a stupid question. We've detected this planet purely by its gravity - we know it's mass, position in the galaxy, and projected instantaeneous distance from its star, anything more is deduced from those three facts. We haven't isolated a single photon of light from its _star_, let alone the planet, so asking if it has life is pretty silly.
e ases.html
a ptive-hires.mp4o m-hires.mp4
If you plot mass versus orbital radius for all planets discovered so far, all 169 sit up in the high-mass/small-orbit corner, because most were found using a technique that can only find planets of that type. The closest match in weight to this planet has a 3-day orbit, rather than 10-year. That sensitivity region doesn't overlap the area on that diagram that the planets in our solar system cover - with larger orbits and smaller planets.
This new planet on the other hand, sits right in the middle of the region on that plot that our solar system covers - it's not quite like Earth, Neptune, or Pluto, but it would fit in perfectly.
We've done some nice raytraced movies showing how light is bent by the planet's gravity, distorting the face of the background star - that's how we found the planet. Have a look at:
http://planet.iap.fr/Media/OB05390other/press_rel
Especially:
http://planet.iap.fr/Media/OB05390figs/OB05390-ad
and
http://planet.iap.fr/Media/OB05390figs/OB05390-zo
The planet is shown as a small blue dot. These movies are exactly what you would have seen if you'd been using a telescope with nano-arcsecond seeing - roughly a quarter-million kilometers across...
Andrew Williams
(another author on the Nature paper)
Is -220C around the Grave Digger's Bum range, or does it go all the way to Witch's Teat?
Chemical reactions indeed happen in rocks. It just takes a looooooooooooooong time. Think - you don't know what other life is out there, again you have no clue! Don't limit your thoughts. Some people believe existence as we know it was created in 7 days, now that is imagination.
Maybe I got it wrong and it was the sun people out to warm earth. Thought there was an ice planet invasion one too.
For just a second, I thought Microsoft had discovered a new planet...
Ad Astra Per Asper
This is a really neat demonstration of the power of microlensing for planet finding. Though it's not the first, nor even the second, planet to be found this way (see for example http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/astro-ph/0505451 and http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/astro-ph/0505451), it really does show how microlensing can find small planets pretty far away from their host stars. It'll be a very good technique for determining the frequency of planets as small as the Earth. As for finding life on the microlensing discovered planets (using the future Terrestrial Planet Finder mission [http://planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov/TPF/tpf_index.cfm ] for example to search for biosignatures in their spectra), it'll be very difficult. The majority of these planets are going to be very far away from us (where there is the highest probability of finding a lens) and, by selection, they're going to have a second bright star very close by on the sky that will be difficult to coronagraph out. The microlensing planets are really all going to be one-shot deals where you have no hope of following them up in the foreseeable future. I think planets found by transits (the upcoming Kepler mission [http://kepler.nasa.gov/]) or by astrometry (the upcoming Space Interferometry Mission [http://sim.jpl.nasa.gov/]) will be much better bets for searching for life.
In 20'000 years the chances to find a life on the very planet we are linving in (Earth) are extremly close to zero.
Handwave all you want, but the laws of physics and chemistry say that life is not possible in liquid lead or liquid methane.
There is really no evidence either for- or against it. The objective standpoint is that we just don't know. It may be scary to have nothing to hold on to, but we should grow more comfortable with it since it will benefit us in the longer run. The wise man knows he don't know.
There are indications that with our present knowledge, we can't model life to fit those conditions, but we also know scientists have been surprised before, to find life in the most harsh conditions on earth. However, we have nothing to conclude with. Since history has shown science to be wrong on all accounts, it's not likely to be all right now either. In all of science there is always room for progress of understanding and developing from our current crude models in all areas of science.
Likely, our very fundamental models will have to change, and this will broaden understanding even more. Just like the relativity model and quantuum mechanics have revolutionized hi-tech science and manufacturing in the last decades.
As everything else argued over, it depends of your definition of life. Are viruses life, or just self-replicating molecules?
The "laws of physics" are not some laws constraining our universe, it's a model used by humans as an attempt to understand what's going on. To use it to litterally mean "laws", then dogma is created. This will only serve to hinder our progress of knowledge and discovery since it is constraining our consciousness.
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
And makes you think what "life" really means. There could be living streams of magnetically-controlled plasma inside our sun. Or amoeba consisting of suprafluid helium on Pluto.
"Life will find a way" should definitely be taken more broadly...
The laws of physics are constraining a shitload more than our consciousness. I'm sick of people using the ignorance of people 2000 years ago as sole justification for suggesting everything we know now is just as suspect.
When you know, then there's no point in investigating, right? That's why it's better to "not know". It's a state of mind, nothing to do with quantity of knowledge. It's hard to not be misunderstood, maybe "open mind" is a better and more accepted term?
I think you need to be fair here, and complete your reasoning. 2000 years in the future, if humans are still living and breathing on this planet, what view do you think the people will have on our science (assuming progress is not halted too much)?
We know the laws of physics to the extent that we can make numerical predictions accurate to tens of decimal places. And the greatest thing about modern physics? We also know the exact decimal place where we stop knowing.
I think science is great! As long as people are objective, and not using it as a sleeping-couch for making assumptions on the world. None of the greatest discoverers are those who are sceptics, but those who think bigger, investigating all perspectives, to find a larger frame of model.
The only dogma I can see is yours.
I'm not the one saying what is possible or impossible based on 1 sample of an earth-like planet (earth itself), and using that as a basis to make statements about where there might be life and not in the entire cosmos! There are words called "likely" and "earth-like life" that may come in handy in such situations.
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
Careful!
Science "knows" that gravity will hold me to my chair tomorrow the same as it does today.
If it suddenly stopped doing that then science will adjust to account for this change.
How true. There are two important parts of science: hypothesis and theory. It seems people confuse these two as one "science", but in reality they are separate. Hypothesises are untested and unproven claims, while theory is the conclusion of hypothesises backed up by successful experiments. The underlying reason being that theory should be much harder to squash under the test of time than the hypothesises, which are largely open-ended claims.
One hypothesis might include gravity stopping because of synchronization across the galactic core, or whatever. This is no threat to science since it is an unproved claim. Yet it is still part of the scientific method to hold such positions open to discussion.
If they were not, we wouldn't have quantuum mechanics today, or string-theory. Somewhere somebody must have begun working on that with very little basis other than a "hunch". The more people who dismiss such claims out of hand, without further research, this might slow down the progress of science.
So while I'd agreet that our current understanding of physics/chemisty says that life is not possible in liquid methane, _if_ we found it, we'd have to accept that fact and try and figure out why we were wrong.
If you are clear enough in your positions and statements, you can be wrong less. Much of what great geniuses predicted and claimed has come true, even though it had to be proven experimentally many decades, maybe hundred years after their death. This is one difference between good scientists and great scientists - To still have an open mind and be clear about the differences between hypothesises and theory, not getting lost and caged in the theoretic maze.
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
According to this and this and the list goes on, OGLE-2005-BLG-390Lb is five times the mass of Earth. That may be closer in mass to Earth than, say, Uranus (14.5 Earth masses), but it's a far cry from Earth-like as we know it.