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28 New Planets Found Outside Solar System
elkcsr writes "The San Jose Mercury news reports on the phenomenal discovery of 28 new extra-solar planets out there in our galaxy. All of them are outside of the band scientists consider necessary for supporting life as we know it, but the solar systems analyzed should still be quite familiar to those of us in this neck of the woods. System layouts feature small rocky planets towards the star and gas giants further out. The biggest difference seen is a preference for elliptical orbits, instead of generally circular orbit we enjoy. ' For example, the team also described new details about one specific exoplanet, discovered two years ago. This planet, which circles the star Gliese 436, is thought to be half rock, half water. Its rocky core is surrounded by an amount of water compressed into a solid form at high pressures and low temperatures. It makes a short, 2.6-day orbit around Gliese 436. Based on its radius and density, scientists calculate that it has the mass of 22 Earths, making it slightly larger than Neptune. "The profound conclusion is, here we've found yet another type of planet that is already represented in our solar system," Marcy said.'"
If FTL travel ever comes about, we can see if there's different materials out there that we're not aware of. Too bad I won't live to see it.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
To gain some profit out of these annoyingly common planets. I patent the idea of large chunks of matter in the sky!
What confuses me, is why scientist believe that having conditions the same (or very close to) those on Earth is necessary for life. For all we know, life could be able to live at thousands of degrees hot. You just don't know.
And how many systems have we looked at? It seems with the rate we're finding new planets nowadays, we might be able to start narrowing down the possible values of fp
(Side note: I really wish Slashdot would allow <sub> and <sup> tags. I know only a subset of HTML is allowed to prevent abuse, but there's nothing harmful about subscripts and superscripts!)
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Can any astronomers out there clue us in? Is this just observational bias or are elliptical orbits more common than our more circular ones? I mean, I know it's likely a long way in the future, but that could be a small problem for our future colonization of the galaxy. It would certainly mean our new homes would likely be less than earth-like.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
An orbit in 2.6 days, huh? That's gotta be a record. Barely time to recover from the New Year's hangover before popping the cork again.
Surely he means 'hear'?
also:
You mean... ice?
Launchy.net changed my world.
Yet another type that's already represented? I guess it's not "another type," then.
Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
Because there will never be a single class of citizenry.
There will always be people that want to work and people that don't want to work.
There will always be people that will want to ask questions and people that will accept the status quo and care not to ask questions.
There will people who like Paris Hilton and people who care not to know what a Paris Hilton is.
Even if you have a closed community of like minded citizenry, they will be infiltrated either by spawn or outside influence allowed by spawn.
So screw those people what want welfare for lazy bums and want to feed hungry nations that can't solve their own civil wars. I want to see what is on other planets.
Duuh, it's like "why are you looking at other girls, when you haven't solved the issues with your current one?" I wonder :-P
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Cold water is denser than ice. So compressing H2O near its melting point actually tends to melt it rather than freeze it. Extremely high pressure can turn this back into solid state again.
Gliese 436 b is supposed to be at a surface temperature of 520 Kelvin. The phase diagram of H2O indicates that for certain "exotic" forms of ice to form at that temperature, you need more than 10^9 Pascals of pressure. It would be interesting to calculate the gravitational force on the surface of the planet, and at what depth pressures of 10^9 Pa can be created by gravity, from the known data about the mass and size of the planet.
4 terrestrial
4 gas giants
3 dwarfs
28 new dwarfs
--
39 planets total... until the next time we look up in the sky.
And in 5 years, those evil scientist, will do another meeting, and decide, half of them are no longer to be called planets.
and came out with a silly name like, outsiddy planets, or like
Like the injustice to Pluto
Whoever wrote the article doesn't know about the life that lives around volcanic vents deep in the ocean or the things living deep underground at extreme temps and pressures.
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
Oh, nevermind.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a yo-yo.-Enoch Root
"surrounded by an amount of water compressed into a solid form at high pressures and low temperatures."
You mean, "ice"?
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
They don't even know if the ones around here are girls are not, or who they've been with.
Did anyone else first read ".. 28 New Patents Found .." ?
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
We're surrounded!
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print "I, for one, welcome our new exo-planet overlords" * 28
Umm it's been ages since I took any astronomy course, but I thought Kepler figured out that *our* orbit was elliptical?
I assume the article meant "elliptical" in the qualitative sense, that their orbits "looked" like ellipses while our orbit "looks" like a circle.
How many planets is that after the downgrade?
think about it for a minute: - A planet needs to be at a precise distance from a star based on its chemical makeup. - A planet needs a trigger in order for life to emerge. - That life needs to be able to somehow sustain itself. - That life has to be able to survive celestial events. Odds that such a planet exists anywhere is astronomical. Earth is really one of a kind place.
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I fancy me a new planet to call my own.
Chemistry works the same way, regardless of which solar system you are in. While it might be possible that life exists on planets that are slightly colder or slightly warmer than Earth, the chances of it existing on places as cold as Pluto or as hot as Venus/Mercury are infinitesimally slim, because reaction speeds on the former are just too slow, and the high temperatures on the latter are not very conducive to the formation of complex molecules.
Also, water has some fairly unique properties that basically no other liquid has (for example, it's denser in liquid form than in solid form).
He means exactly what he said: they found a type of planet that had not previously been seen OUTSIDE the solar system. This is significant because it is evidence that our solar system is not unique.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Considering that we're finding so many planets, don't you think it's rather assuming of us to claim that Riyo Mori is really, truly, Miss Universe 2007?
I do.
TLF
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
Actually, so far, 241 extrasolar planets have been discovered.
Ben Hocking
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An AC with a legitimate question.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
Depends on the temperature and pressure. Under some conditions, it's possible to take common ice (Ice Ih, "one - H") and force it back into water by applying pressure to it. Hence the thin film of water underneath an ice-skater's skates, or under a thin blade or wire strung over an ice block. (As an interesting demonstration, you can take a piece of piano wire, put it over an ice block, and weight either end -- the wire will descend into the ice block without leaving a "cut" behind, because the water will re-freeze behind it, if it's cold enough.)
However, at other combinations of temperature and pressure, you can create other types of ice, many of which don't really resemble the "ice" that we commonly think of. IMO, we really shouldn't refer to these other forms of solidified water as "ice," instead reserving that term only for the common Ih state. But the rest of the physics community seems to disagree, and I suppose "ice" is less ponderous than "solid water" to write over and over.
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OK, so now we just locate the nearby Jump-Points and start enjoying some extra-solar, planet-side weekends!
SeqBox
"The profound conclusion is, here we've found yet another type of planet that is already represented in our solar system"
Dupe?
...depends very much on what you can see:
System layouts feature small rocky planets towards the star and gas giants further out. The biggest difference seen is a preference for elliptical orbits, instead of generally circular orbit we enjoy.Yeah, but that's because the state of the art can only detect rocky planets when they're really close to the star, but can detect gas giants when they're further out; and planets with elliptical orbits are much easier to find than circular orbits, so a disproportionate number of those appear.
Some of these solar systems could have a thousand earth-like habitable planets in the multiple A.U. range, and we wouldn't even know they were there.
> Why are we even LOOKING at other planets when we haven't solved the problems on our own?
n -The-Ground.html
Shit, mod me offtopic too but... The guy's damn right.
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If you count celebrations for the Vernal and Autumnal equinoxes you can just stay drunk all the time.
"Chemistry works the same way, regardless of which solar system you are in."
Prove it.
What is even more impressive to me, call it 241 or call it 249 planets, is the following:
* Consider a planet like mars that could one day be terraformed or colonized by people from Earth.
* Let's call that a planet suitable for life as we know it.
* Then there is Earth where we do already live.
What does that give us? 2 of 241 or 249 planets in the known universe that could possibly
harbour life as we know it. That is a startingly high percentage.
--- I do not moderate.
It's not that simple. Just being in the right band doesn't mean it'll be habitable, or that life developped... at the right time.
E.g., look at Venus. It's in the right band too, but it's hell. The slow rotation speed means it has almost no magnetic field, and the solar radiation stripped away all hydrogen. The result is a world without water, and with an atmosphere of almost pure CO2. (Well, ok, and a little nitrogen.)
E.g., look at Mars. We're finding that it used to have water, but the world is so small that it didn't manage to retain an atmosphere. Not only the low gravity means that gas has a hell of an easier time escaping, but the core already froze and it ended up without much of a magnetic field again. So solar winds helped strip it of whatever atmosphere it hadn't already lost.
Earth itself paints an even scarier story.
See, Earth started with an atmosphere of mosthly methane gas. That's a _very_ powerful greenhouse gas, about 200 times more potent than CO2. But that was ok because the sun also was a lot less hot. Without the methane, Earth would have been a deep frozen snowball and life would never have evolved.
But then the sun gradually got warmer, very gradually over billions of years. And Earth would have eventually become a hell worse than Venus.
Luckily some of these new (at the time) bacteria had started doing photosynthesis for a living, and turned the atmosphere into lots of oxygen and nitrogen, which doesn't quite act as greenhouse gasses.
And incidentally that _did_ cause the planet to turn into a deep frozen snowball in the process. Luckily a new batch of carbon got spewed into the atmosphere and thawed it again. It took some tens of millions of years for that to accumulate, though, because we're talking a _lot_ of carbon in the air to defrost as snowball Earth. As in, at least one estimate says 13% carbon dioxide. And that was the first scary skirting with complete extinction.
And from there it's been riding a bit of a thin line between turning into hell and turning into a snowball. E.g., if you look at the massive coal deposits from the Carboniferous era, they had to come from _somewhere_, and that somewhere is almost certainly the air. Without the right conditions for this (e.g., the lower sea levels and the recent event of plants whose wood couldn't be broken because bacteria which can digest lignin didn't yet exist), would Earth have eventually turned into Venus?
So basically if you look at it, 10% of the planets being in the right band still paints an over-optimistic picture. You also have to have the right conditions and the right timing. E.g., if the oxygen production had come a billion years later, Earth would now be pretty much the same as Venus.
Are we alone? Maybe not, but don't get that optimistic based on that 10% figure.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I always liked Sci-Fi stories where aliens had alien chemistry. There was one where creatures lived on the Sun with bodies formed of plasma shaped by intricately twisted magnetic fields. They were spacefaring, but one of the hazards was annoying chunks of cold dark matter in the orbital plane. (what was God thinking?) One touch was instant death for a Sun person. Another had inhabitants of Jupiter swimming in methane seas and smelting solid hydrogen for tools.
Wake me up when you find an http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class_M_planet/M-clas s planet.
By "high percentage", I assume you mean that if you multiply that out by the known stars in just our galaxy, you get an impressively large number. However, that percentage is no doubt quite low compared to its actual value. Currently, we have to be very lucky to detect a habitable planet. The James Webb Space Telescope will make it much easier. In 10-20 years (those are not nuclear fusion or AI "years", but are real years), I expect that percentage will be much larger (as will the total numbers).
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
For all we know, life could be able to live at thousands of degrees hot. You just don't know.
Sure we know. Life won't survive at thousands of degrees because organic molecules fall apart at those temperatures, unless it's based on some element we don't see in the periodic table. A few thousand degrees means a good part of an eV per particle. Most chemical bonds will break in such an environment. Other elements don't behave right for life- they either form little molecules with a dozen or so atoms, or long simple polymers like asbestos. At thousands of degrees you won't even see that. Oxygen and fluorine can produce stable compounds with high bond energies but even those will break, and ceramic-based life has generally been a non-starter. Carbon itself will for the most part only exist in a free state although carbon monoxide (surprisingly stable) appears in stellar spectra.
Of course the definition of "life" is abstract in a general sense and doesn't necessarily involve electron chemistry at all. But if there's life anywhere on the sun, it's the sort of life that college-age geeks imagine existing at some level in the cellular automata programs they write for homework.
But try to get a plumber in over the weekend.
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"Urgh!"
"Urgh!"
"Urgh!"
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"Get lots of money immediately"
"Build a decoy ship"
-Lasse
The Drake equation suggests there would be lots of intelligent life out there. The real question then becomes, Where are they?
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
This Summer, from director Danny Boyle and written by Alex Garland...
Five hundred years into the future (2507), the Milky Way Central Black Hole is failing, causing Earth XXVIII to enter an ice age. A spacecraft, the Icarus IV, with a crew of eight men and women is launched as a last hope, carrying a massive stellar bomb with a thermonuclear payload equivalent to the mass of Ballmer's ego in order to re-ignite the Black Hole.
I have questions about the methodolgy employed these discoveries. How much can we really know about these planets? For instance take the wobble method, we can infer the orbital period from the wobble (periodic changes in the star's spectrum). However, we still have some difficulty with the size of the planet and its orbital radius. First, if we are using Kepler's Third Law (P^2=4pi^2*OR^3/(G(M+m)), we would need know the mass of the star. What are the methods for determining that and how accurate are they? Then, we need to know either orbital radius or the mass of the planet to get the rest of the picture. Maybe the mass can be infer by the amplitdue of the wobble, but how is that calibrated? What if there are more than one planet (our system has 8 with four big ones)? How will the other planets affect the wobble? What about normal periodic solar activity like sunspots producing periodic changes in the spectrum that we are inferring as being cause by the wobble? (Our star spectrum changes every 11 years which is also the period of Jupiter). How accurate is the transit method? This being slashdot and all, we might better benefit if those with knowledge discuss the details behind these exoplanet "discoveries".
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there are no niggers on them
I think it is a statistical certainty that there is other life in the universe. I think it is a statistical liklihood that there is other life in the galaxy.
I also think it's a statistical certainty that we'll not find any in our lifetimes. And sometimes that makes me sad.
Obviously, this is a left wing conspiracy to make us believe aliens created life on Earth! Everyone knows Jesus was born to kill all of the dinosaurs that were eating God's chosen creations. When He was old enough, He started the NRA and breathed life into Charlton Heston. Together, they used every assault rifle imaginable to hunt down the dinosaurs and vegetarians.
Before the first exoplanet was discovered the fraction was 1/8 (or 1/9 if you're referring to what we called planets at that time). Still, your point is valid as the fraction is now down to 2/249. Neither Mars nor Venus lie in the habitable zone, although they are both close.
For those not keeping up with the news, Gliese 581 c is the other planet we know of that is in a star's habitable zone.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
There's more than that. A planetoid in an eccentric orbit will be moving faster than the surrounding medium when it's closest to the star and slower than the medium when it's farthest. This means the orbit will be circularized, because the proto-planet will be slowed down by the dust in the accretion disk when its speed is highest and accelerated when its speed is smallest.
In the early stages of the formation of the planetary system, with lots of matter in the accretion disk, this effect will circularize any orbit pretty fast, compared to planet formation times.
All planets will be formed in circular orbits, it's the elliptical ones that are exceptional. Those planets suffered strong perturbations from one or more other bodies without being totally expelled from the system.
But perhaps there is a reason why we are finding planets with such high eccentricity. We are finding first the very large planets with very low period orbits, this might be an improbable way for a planet to be formed in the first place. In our system the giant planets orbit more distant from the sun than the smaller planets. Perhaps those big planets we are finding were originally formed in the same distance from their suns as our gas giants, but were thrown into those very small period orbits by external perturbations.
Now that our stellar neighborhood is becoming a little more complex than points of light, are there charts or (sky) maps out there that diagram these newly discovered planets and how their orbits might look?
I've also often wondered why we don't have Eve Online-style maps of our own galaxy. Even if we don't know distances for some stars to any meaningful degree of accuracy, surely we could come up with a best guess, or represent stars as lines representing the range of possible distances.
Mass of the star can be calculated from its spectrum and brightness. We have models for star formation, based on studies of the nuclear reactions that happen at the core. These stars are all relatively near, so the distance to several of them can be measured directly from the parallax. Knowing the type of the star and the distance, the mass can be calculated from the brightness.
This book shows in an introductory way how it's done, with examples of all the calculations in BASIC. It's a very interesting book, highly recommended.
If the presence of the planet can only be inferred by the wobble of the star, how do they come to the conclussion that it's half rock, and half ice? The distance and mass can be inferred by the magnitude and periodicity of the wobble, but the composition? Whatever they are basing this supposition on, until it can be verfied by another means (you know, scientific method and all), isn't just speculation?
> Why are we even LOOKING at other planets when we haven't solved the problems on our own?
Space offers solutions to many of those problems. Some problems are related to lack of resources and others to social problems. Space offers unlimited resources compared to what we can get here on Earth. Projects like asteroid mining and space-based solar power are not all that far off from today's technology and they could solve some of our major problems. On the social side, exploration of space can be a unifying theme which will help people to put aside their differences.
Some other social problems, which come from human nature, will never go away and we can't let that hold us back.
For 30-40 years we have been searching the space and we were not able to find many planets until last few years. And suddenly we find 26. what the heck is going on ? Were these already found and being hidden from the public ?
Read radical news here
Mea culpa. I shall bow to the wisdom of the Great Minds. :) Seriously, now it's written out in both the parent and grandparent post to this, it's pretty clear-cut. (Being wrong is never fun, but it gives me a chance to learn from the experts.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I don't care about all this high-fallutin' life finding. I'm interested in finding a planet that's like our beautiful Earth, and not genetically altering myself so that I can live on a volcanic vent like exotic bacteria.
We should want more Earths, so that we can have more green pastures to graze in and enjoy ourselves on. We can't get there from here anway, you say? Bah, where there's a will, there's a way. Once people see there are other places worth getting to, they'll set about finding ways to get there. Even if they have to probe physics more deeply, to find ways past the limitations that currently bind us.
There's no reason why we can't look for deeper physics that could be useful for interstellar travel. Certainly, once we find other worlds beckoning us with their beauty, we'll feel all the more motivated to do so.
Did anyone else read the headline as "28 New Patents Found Outside Solar System"?
I gotta stop reading all these GPLv3 drafts....
Sure is a relief. Breaking news: 28 Planets Found Inside the Solar System! That would be the time to worry.
I want to go to the crappy planet where I'm a hero!
Shipping all the beaners, niggers, and towelheads to another planet will solve our problems.
I'm pleased to note that no hippie luddites responded in agreement.
How ironic, since the very science tasked with discovering that planet is astronomy.
Seriously, after re-writing your statement to be more consistent and logical, something like "The probability against such a planet existing is astronomical", your argument is somewhere on the continuum from downright wrong to true but unprovable. After all, the number of planets to consider is also astronomical, even without our own galaxy. Add other galaxies (there are multiple galaxies in the volume of space occluded by the head of a pin at arm's length, generally all of which are so far away we don't even see them as point light sources) and you have an essentially infinite number of planets.
Since we know there's a finite chance of life developing (unless you prefer the deity-created-us-all-and-nobody-else argument, which I'm not even going to bother debating right now) it is pretty much a staticistical certainly that life has developed elsewhere. Might be bloody far away, but in an expanding universe where new stars and planets are constantly being formed, life is out there. Until the universe collapses (or the human race ceases to exist) all we can say is that we haven't found life yet. On the other hand, once we find even a single example, we'll know Earth wasn't alone.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
what kind of backward planet full of ugly beings does she come from?
Engineering is the art of compromise.
At least I'm not the only one who though of Star Tekkin' by The Firm when I read that.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=FlTMXiqbDZU
Nothing is inexplicable; only unexplained -Tom Baker, Doctor Who
>(From OMNI, April 1991. This story, which was a 1991 Nebula nominee, has been appearing around the internet lately without my name attached. Several people were kind enough to alert me, but the truth is I'm more flattered than offended. ) THEY'RE MADE OUT OF MEAT by Terry Bisson "They're made out of meat." "Meat?" "Meat. They're made out of meat." "Meat?" "There's no doubt about it. We picked up several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, and probed them all the way through. They're completely meat." "That's impossible. What about the radio signals? The messages to the stars?" "They use the radio waves to talk, but the signals don't come from them. The signals come from machines." "So who made the machines? That's who we want to contact." "They made the machines. That's what I'm trying to tell you. Meat made the machines." "That's ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You're asking me to believe in sentient meat." "I'm not asking you, I'm telling you. These creatures are the only sentient race in that sector and they're made out of meat." "Maybe they're like the orfolei. You know, a carbon-based intelligence that goes through a meat stage." "Nope. They're born meat and they die meat. We studied them for several of their life spans, which didn't take long. Do you have any idea what's the life span of meat?" "Spare me. Okay, maybe they're only part meat. You know, like the weddilei. A meat head with an electron plasma brain inside." "Nope. We thought of that, since they do have meat heads, like the weddilei. But I told you, we probed them. They're meat all the way through." "No brain?" "Oh, there's a brain all right. It's just that the brain is made out of meat! That's what I've been trying to tell you." "So ... what does the thinking?"
"You're not understanding, are you? You're refusing to deal with what I'm telling you. The brain does the thinking. The meat."
"Thinking meat! You're asking me to believe in thinking meat!"
"Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal! Are you beginning to get the picture or do I have to start all over?"
"Omigod. You're serious then. They're made out of meat."
"Thank you. Finally. Yes. They are indeed made out of meat. And they've been trying to get in touch with us for almost a hundred of their years."
"Omigod. So what does this meat have in mind?"
"First it wants to talk to us. Then I imagine it wants to explore the Universe, contact other sentiences, swap ideas and information. The usual."
"We're supposed to talk to meat."
"That's the idea. That's the message they're sending out by radio. 'Hello. Anyone out there. Anybody home.' That sort of thing."
"They actually do talk, then. They use words, ideas, concepts?"
"Oh, yes. Except they do it with meat."
"I thought you just told me they used radio."
"They do, but what do you think is on the radio? Meat sounds. You know how when you slap or flap meat, it makes a noise? They talk by flapping their meat at each other. They can even sing by squirting air through their meat."
"Omigod. Singing meat. This is altogether too much. So what do you advise?"
"Officially or unofficially?"
"Both."
"Officially, we are required to contact, welcome and log in any and all sentient races or multibeings in this quadrant of the Universe, without prejudice, fear or favor. Unofficially, I advise that we erase the records and forget the whole thing."
"I was hoping you would say that."
"It seems harsh, but there is a limit. Do we really want to make contact with meat?"
"I agree one hundred percent. What's there to say? 'Hello, meat. How's it going?' But will this work? How many planets are we dealing with here?"
"Just one. They can travel to other planets in special meat containers, but they can't live on them. And being meat, they can only travel through C space. Which limits them to the speed of light and makes the possibility of their ever making contact pretty slim. Infinitesimal, in fact."
"So we just pretend ther
Some other social problems, which come from human nature, will never go away and we can't let that hold us back.
Man, I wish I had mod points. The whole post is damn insightful, but this last sentence should be emblazoned on cards to hand to every person who rants "Why are we even doing X when we haven't solved Y yet?" -- especially since the whiners are usually the ones doing nothing to solve Y OR to do X.
How can a post be modded "overrated" or "underrated" when it hasn't been rated yet?
How many stars out there are named Sol? There must be many to all be called Solar Systems, instead of just regular star systems.
Can any of this research be used to find other planets in our own solar system?
Doesn't it seem far-sighted that we claim to see so much way outside our system and yet can't track our own trans-neptunians? Let alone look for killer meteors like Apophis?
I was just referring to the habitable zone as defined by the article I linked to. I do agree that it is overly conservative - depending on the mass/magnetic fields of the planets in questions (and hence the type of atmosphere they're likely to have), planets in the Venus or Mars zone could also contain liquid water. Similarly, planets in the Earth zone might not be able to contain liquid water.
However, if you want to argue that it was 2/8 or even 3/8, then now it's at least 3/249 or 4/249. I.e., the number has gone up by 1.
Ben Hocking
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The "extreme" in "extremophile" refers to being "just" outside the relatively narrow temperature range that most life we know needs to work best. So while human enzymes need about 36 degrees Celsius to do their stuff best, an extremophile microbe might have enzymes that work best at 60 or at 6 degrees Celsius. That doesn't contradict the observation that it's just too cold for most chemical reactions to occur at a speed necessary for life on a frozen iceball like Pluto, and that temperatures over, say, 200 degrees Celsius are not very conducive to forming the long molecules that life needs.
That's somewhat inaccurate, as far as I know. AFAIK CFCs aren't greenhouse gasses, but make a hole in the ozone layer.
Mind you, at least one mass extinction is assumed to have been because of losing the ozone layer to a gamma ray burst. Still, this probably wouldn't wipe out all life (and it historically didn't.) UV only goes so far into water, and not at all into Earth.
If you want to do better than CO2, may I humbly suggest the tried-and-tested methane? It does some 200 times better than CO2. No doubt some synthetic stuff might do better, but this one's at least cheap. There's a shitload of the stuff in frozen peat bogs in Siberia. Warm the planet just enough to defrost Siberia by other means (e.g., CO2), and you might just see a helluva lot of methane escaping.
Who knows? With a bit of luck we may even do better than Venus. Venus has to do with only CO2, since it lost all hydrogen. With methane we can actually end up warmer.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
"rare" is relative term, high mass stars can have sulphur and silicon in their core. There are billions of those in the universe. Just like there are high chlorine content stars, big universe, lots of possibilities. Still, the nuclear binding energy curve (google for it, I'm too lazy) shows plainly _why_ there's more carbon and oxygen than other heavy elements. Both elements lie at a local maximum of the binding energy curve. The elements for life "as we know it" are much, much more abundant than those for life that works with oddball chemistry, so it's a very good guess to say that alien life is most likely carbon based, too.
Imagine the possibilities !
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