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Scientists Find Water on Extra-solar Planet
amigoro writes "Scientists have, for the first time, conclusively discovered the presence of water vapour in the atmosphere of a planet beyond our Solar System, according to an article appearing in Nature. They made the discovery by analysing the transit of the gas giant HD 189733b across its star, in the Infrared using data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. HD 189733b is a 'hot jupiter', a gas giant that is roughly the size and mass of Jupiter but orbits very close to the star, so no chance of life there."
All this talk about water on extra-solar planets. Now if they found a trapdoor, that would be something!
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Scientists Find Water on Extra-solar Planet
The only extra solar planet I know of is Pluto, and we've already had that discussion.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
The arrogance of thinking that we're the only possible form of life is ludicrous.
How we know is more important than what we know.
You mean no chance of life as we know it...
Grr! Arg!
Hydrogen is the most common element in the universe and oxygen is the third most common (helium, the second, is inert).
The most common heteroatomic molecule is likely to be water...
HD 189733b is a gas giant planet with 1.15 times the mass of Jupiter and 1.26 its diameter. It orbits its primary in only 2.219 days and in a distance of 0.0313 AU. This is one of the closest planet-star systems known. The planet's surface temperature is 920 kelvin on the poles and 1220 kelvin on the bright side.
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
This is a pretty bold statement. Scientist predicted that life couldn't survive in a number of environments on earth, yet it has been found in each one:
1- In lakes frozen hundreds of meters down in antarctica
2- In the dept of the ocean where NO light permeates
3- Next to Volcanic openings in the earths crust were tempuratues are well over 800 degress c
4- In the highly acidic and poisionus ponds in Yellowstone National Park
I am sure that there are more but I can't think of any.
So for some scientist to say that there can't be life, I just have to role my eyes. One thing that I have learned about life is that life will find away. So just because we can't concieve of the possible forms that life might take its a little presumputous for us to assume that it can't exist.
Earth is a small speck in the universe, it doesn't matter if you believe in God or not but to assume that life, as we know it on this planet, is the only form and location of life in the universe is a very ignorant view point.
I am of the firm conviction that as soon as we have the technology to explores these remote and hostile locations we will find things that we haven't even dreamed could exist.
So to get off my little soapbox here; if there is water there is probably life, and just because the conditions on the planet don't fit are current formula for life doesn't mean that our formula is correct.
The new company is called Space2ohh (TM). Clean, pure, out of this world refreshment.
I'm seeking venture capital.
This is nice and all, but wake me up when they discover water vapour on an extra-solar Rocky Planet.
First, let me state that I am not a chemist, so if there is someone who can do a better job of putting this into laymens term, I would be happy. with that said, how can we be sure its not the interaction of multiple molecules causing this or that this isn't a yet undiscovered molecule leading to this effect? I'm a bit wary of any indirrect measurement, so if someone with the proper background wishes to do some enlightenment, I'd be more than happy to read (even references would be nice).
When all else fails, try.
The only reason anyone cares about there being water on other planets is because of the possibility of that water supporting life, if there is n"o chance of life there", who cares?
According to what lazy science fiction writer's unimaginative extraterrestrial biologist friend?
His name is Vijay
Have the urge to go take a leak?
We should focus the telescope to find Osama bin Laden.
Spitzer's Law: As an online discussion about new findings grow longer, the probability of someone suggesting we find Osama bin Laden approaches one.
Yeah, the National Enquirer of science. Wake me up when Science runs it. BTW, the article is only available to the suckers who'd pay for that drivel.
I can't find the current issue of Nature online, but here's a bittorrent link of the April 26th issue to give you an idea.
And The Enquirer is a freebie.
When they detect beer on another planet, THEN, we'll be talking!
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
But that's just because I think Cthulhu is cool.
Anyway, a race of intelligent squids would probably NEVER be found by us (barring FTL drives). Their environment just would not be able to support the technology needed to communicate with us over inter-stellar distances. They could not send to us, they could not receive from us.
And there aren't many options for them developing a space program of their own.
Given that OUR planet is at least a 2nd generation world (coalesced from a previous sun's death), how many races have gone extinct already?
Just because we can't receive radio signals from them doesn't mean that they aren't out there or were not out there.
If they can find a heat sink, then one can run a steam power station there and with some long wires, we can solve our energy crisis...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
It's simple.
How many planets are out there? Infinite.
There can be only a finite amount of life supporting planets.
Divide a finite number by infinity. You get 0.
So therefore there are no life in the universe and everything is a figment of my imagination!
(Nod of thanks to the Hitch Hikers Guide trilogy of five)
This space for rent
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There aren't an infinite amount of planets -- there's like a golybillion. And everyone knows that infinity less a golybillion is a whopping sum, so your error is truly is staggering proportions.
The universe is largely transparent, and we can see almost all the way to its privates. The decorations are of the same style and motif throughout, so we can pit our local gravity-well spirlies against theirs and make some reasonable guesses about how far away far is. Since it turns out it's in the neighbourhood of 13 billion lightyears away, I think we can -- as civilized folk -- agree that 13 billion is more than a golybillion shy of infinity.
Check my maths if you're a stickler, but I'm pretty sure I'm on solid ground here.
Space is finite (if gummy), therefore the number of decorations whorled up by our familiar physics is finite, therefore the number of little planety lumps inside of them is finite. Q.E.D.
These stories are free but worth money.
How many planets are out there? Infinite.
There can be only a finite amount of life supporting planets.
Just because I feel like nit-picking. If you have an infinite number of planets, you also have an infinite number of planets that support life. Only this is a smaller "infinite" number.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
i'm sick of the naysayers in the so-called scientific community.
Was anyone else pained by the erroneous sentence structure, redundant identical statements in a single sentence with a 'but' in between them, and general poor english?
:(
I mean, I'm not having a go at this journalist directly, I'm sure they were half asleep proof reading at 3am or something. But haven't you noticed more and more science articles being written with less and less grammatical prowess? In the past month I've cringed more times than I've said 'wow!' when reading science news.
It hurts
Make it stop
infinite = infinite, therefore EVERY planet harbors life :P
also, slashdot admins and such, instead of just saying 'you have to wait between each posting, it's been 6 minutes since your last post' when someone tries to submit a second comment to a thread, how about you say how long one has to actually wait in that notice so I don't have to keep hitting the submit button every minute to know if I'm allowed to post another comment yet or not?
Sure, a planet with water and no life... I'll be impressed when we find a planet with life and no water. Only because for once we would have looked away from water, not because I thought water is necessary. Why not have a life form that survives purely on beer?
ohhhh, right, the banner ads...
Still it would be nice to know what that wait limit is, for those of us who don't post all the time
Still it would be nice to know what that wait limit is, for those of us who don't post all the time
It's around 20 mins for anonymous posts. 2 minutes if you are logged in.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
... I, for one, welcome our new hot, wet overlords.
Why not?
What?
Speaking of past debates, this is a tidally locked planet with conclusive proof of water vapor. I remember a few months back when Gilese 581c was talked about here there was a rather large debate on whether a tidally locked planet was likely to have an atmosphere with water.
Being that this new planet is also tidally locked, I guess we have our answer.
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Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
Who isn't to say we are the first intelligent and that now in parallel a lot is appearing ? Nothing. We can't draw conclusion either way right now. It is pure arrogance to go either way (we are alone (aka: we are the first)/ we are not alone). Both are as ludicrous as you put it.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
put up an article about the mechanical turk being run by Oxford to classify deep space objects?
/. has passed it by.
/.ers want to be the first humans to see a new galaxy?
I put an item in yesterday morning, and it was in the Register by lunch-time, but
Don't
I said this to the other guy. Being arrogant is believing you are special.
How we know is more important than what we know.
What if I am truly special? Wouldn't say you're arrogant for trying to tell me all the time I'm not but it does at least makes you a pain in the ass.
You don't know if we are special. Maybe we were the first intelligent race in the Universe, maybe we were the last, maybe we were the only one... do you know? Can you prove it?
Thought so... lets all be more humble, not just the others.
rm -rf /home/leia
The universe is infinite, but the number of planets certainly isn't.
That's as dumb as saying "If you have a set of infinite numbers (say all of the positive integers), then obviously you have infinite negative numbers in that set; however, it's a smaller infinite". It's obviously false. You could have infinite planets, with NOT ONE supporting life, just as you can have infinite integers, with NOT ONE being negative (if you just take the positive integers.) Foo.
Life as we know it has so much variety, a sensible definition of life (e.g. wikipedia.org/life) must by very generic (and a little bit vague). How can they say there can be no life on that particular planet? Even water isn't strictly a requirement for life, it's just that there is plenty of water here on earth and important to life on this planet. The only thing we can be sure of is that on a planet that is wildly different from ours, life will be so different we will probably not recognize it.
You're missing the point. Of course no one knows if we are special or not. The point made was that it was idiotic to assume that we are special, considering the probabilities of that. Continue feeling special if you want to... it doesn't affect anyone else.
CfkRAp1041vYQVbFY1aIwA== RV/hBCLKKcSTP5UFK3kqsg==
I am a lazy science fiction writer's unimaginative extraterrestrial biologist friend, you insensitive clod!
Well, you're right about Earth being a statistic improbability of many factors being just right, but methinks you're slightly wrong about Venus. Which is somewhat of a pity, since Venus is the perfect illustration of how many factors must be just right to get an Earth instead of a Venus.
On Venus too, it was the magnetic field -- or rather, lack thereof -- that did it. It's not just that some water gets split into hydrogen and oxygen, in which case it would just recombine sooner or later. It's that on Venus the lack of magnetic field allowed the solar winds to gradually wipe away the hydrogen. Venus is heavy enough to hold on th the slightly heavier elements, like Oxygen and Carbon anyway, even without a magnetic field. Hydrogen is a different story.
Outgassing CO2, well:
1. Earth spewed enough of that too, which is how it thawed back when cyanobacteria turned the atmosphere to O2 and the whole planet got deep frozen. (The Sun started a lot "cooler" and gradually warmed up. _Now_ it's warm enough to support life without a greenhouse effect, but in the beginning it wasn't.) I don't think there is any evidence that Venus spewed much more CO2 than Earth. On Earth just a lot of it got, well, buried right back. Say, in the Carboniferous era coal deposits.
The somewhat interesting corolary is that if we had too _little_ outgassing, then we'd have been really screwed. It took, IIRC, some 30% CO2 in the air to thaw that snowball Earth. Too little of it, and the deep freeze might just have continued long enough to be a total extinction event. Or at the very least a 1 billion year (or maybe more) pause in life evolution until the sun output went up some more.
2. Earth's original atmosphere was _methane_, which is a greenhouse gas about 200 times more potent than CO2. So if Venus would have been screwed by its outgassed CO2 atmosphere, the Earth should have been screwed 200 times harder (or close enough. Well over 100 times anyway.) In practice, that atmosphere on Earth just helped keep it warm enough at a time when the Sun was a lot weaker. If Venus had had a CO2 atmosphere at the time, well, it would have been a frozen snowball, quite the opposite of boiling off its water. In practice, it's a lot more likely that Venus started with a mostly Methane atmosphere too, only the hydrogen was swept away whenever some of it got broken up.
Pretty much if you start with water, methane and CO2, and continuously lose hydrogen, you end up with just the oxygen and carbon left, which means a lot of CO2. That's likely the short story of what happened on Venus.
3. There's an interesting extra factor there, which could have doomed Earth anyway, and that is: timing. If life or photosynthesis had started any later, for example, that methane and CO2 atmosphere would have sealed its fate. As I was saying methane is an _extremely_ potent greenhouse gas, so given enough extra time of gradually increasing solar output, it would have just boiled off the oceans. No liquid water, no life, game over.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I am special. Neal Stephenson says I am a "stupendous badass."
Take that, Mr. T.
Volcanoes? That's impossible! Al Gore told me that excess CO2 can only come from SUVs.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
My all time record is currently 231 minutes.
is not that it is water vapour they found. It is that they were able to successfully detect and determine water vapor is in the atmosphere of a planet 63 lightyears away. The fact that we can tell what is there is significant.
FOXTROT UNIFORM CHARLIE KILO
Scientist predicted that life couldn't survive in a number of environments on earth, yet it has been found in each one:
1- In lakes frozen hundreds of meters down in antarctica
2- In the dept of the ocean where NO light permeates
3- Next to Volcanic openings in the earths crust were tempuratues are well over 800 degress c
4- In the highly acidic and poisionus ponds in Yellowstone National Park
I think the problem is not that life is unable to adapt so that it can survive in these extreme environments. The problem is that it's very difficult for life to begin in these environments.
Here on Earth, we've got lots of very hospitable little niches where life can get started - tidal pools, mud flats, etc. Once it gets going, then it can spread and adapt. Life will spread right up to the very edge of the environment, right at the point where it's too hot/cold/acidic/poisonous to support life, and then competition and evolution leads to the ability to go out into the Zone of Death and set up a home there.
If the entire planet were frozen/boiling/acidic/toxic/etc., with NO temperate, chemically neutral, energy-rich environments AT ALL, then the thermodynamic hurdles are much higher for establishing a self-contained, self-replicating, energy-utilizing cell, so there would be much less of a chance for any life to occur. Probably a non-zero chance, but much closer to zero than on our own pleasant home.
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them. - Mark Twain
You could have infinite planets, with NOT ONE supporting life
Yes but there is AT LEAST ONE planet that we know about. So it's possible. Keep adding planets and you're bound to hit more.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
Its not water... Its just pictures we think are water
The article states that there's no chance of life since it orbits so close to the star but I'm sure if there was life they would call their planet HD 189733b.
"Who isn't to say we are the first intelligent and that now in parallel a lot is appearing ?"
Simple probability. Our solar system is relatively young compared to the rest of the galaxy/universe. If there is any intelligent life out there, it is most likely millions/billions of years more advanced than we are.
I.e., problem exists between fish and brain. You must have had the babel fish inserted the wrong way, because Gore never said that. I realize that's supposed to be a joke, but to me, it's about as funny as "super serial" or "manbearpig".
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
If hydrogen composes roughly 90% of the known universe, I would suggest that it is abundant. I think that would make oxygen fairly common
Just my 2 cents.
I find the similarities between belief in extraterrestrial life and God to be ... interesting, and I say this as an atheist who does believe that extraterrestrial life probably exists out there.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Well, yes and no. Volcanoes do spew all sorts of stuff into the air, the question is just how much of it.
Thawing up snowball earth I mentioned before took up to 30 million years, and that's with zero photosynthesis or other processes getting it out of the air again. So we're talking geologic timescales. Admittedly that required accumulating some 13% CO2 in the air (looks like I was remembering wrong when I said 30% before), or about 350 times more than today.
Global warming, on the other hand, is something that spiked in the last 100 years or so. Well, slightly over 100 years.
Doing some quick approximative maths, 30,000,000 / 100 = 300,000. So we're talking about an interval of time 300,000 times shorter than that. Even taking into account that 350 factor mentioned earlier, we'd need a little under 1000 years of outgassing for the current levels of CO2 to be entirely volcano-made. And even then: if we didn't have any plants or rocks that can fix that CO2.
Now of course, all that is assuming that the outgassing rate is the same right now as it was back then, which probably isn't true. So take all that as just some very inaccurate guessing at the rough ballpark figure. Still, it does illustrate that you can't take a phenomenon that happened over 30 million years, and needed some remakably unique conditions at that, to be necessarily relevant for something that happened in 100 years or so. It's just not nearly the same scale.
Now I'm not telling you whether or not to believe or not that the warming is entirely man-made. That, you can decide for yourself. But volcanoes just don't seem to spew enough CO2 and methane (which eventually is oxidized to CO2 and water in the presence of O2 and ultraviolet light) to be responsible for it.
Shorter version: do volcanoes spew CO2 in the air? Yes, most certainly. Did they spew anywhere near enough of that over the last 100 years to be responsible for global warming? No, unless we're missing a _major_ vent somewhere, not likely.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Actually, scratch the division by 100 years, or the result doesn't even have the right units. So it would need a little under 100,000 years, not a little under 1000 years.
Just shows I shouldn't write in a hurry, and I definitely should engage the brains first.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
If you have an infinite number of planets, you'd also have to have an infinite number of stars, therefore the night sky would be blinding white.
Part of the problem (IMO) with religious faith is that faith demands no evidence. I suspect that most of those of us that reject such faith without evidence would be willing to accept it with evidence. Of course, at that point, it's no longer exactly "faith". For the record, I was raised Methodist and have devoted a lot of time towards inspecting my own personal beliefs. I have no desire to convert others to atheism, up to the point that their religious beliefs start impacting public policy in an undesirable way (e.g., with regards to science and evolution).
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Only if they all exist at the same time, at the same distance.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
of life in the universe.
There is no proof of any God.
So to say there is life here, there for there is a high likelihood that life did/does/will exist elsewhere is a distinct possibility. One that increases with each planet.
With time, the probability that other life exists approached 1
When I say 'life' I am not talking about sentient life, I'm talking about any life.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I'd definitely argue that the existence of life on other planets is pretty much a foregone conclusion, although even that argument does rest on a certain belief structure. There are several unknown quantities involved, so I don't think one can argue rigorously that there must be life on other planets.
OTOH, I was definitely talking about sentient life, which takes an additional amount of belief. Just like you're certain that life must be out there because as you keep adding more planets, life is a statistical certainty, I would argue that as you keep adding more planets with life, sentient life is a statistical certainty. Maybe only an average of one per galaxy on average, but that would still mean that the universe has billions of races of sentient life. (Who will in that case, of course, never hold a meaningful conversation with each other - except possibly for those lucky few hundred thousand who happen to share a galaxy, in which case it will depend on how close they are to each other, how advanced their interstellar travel is, and/or how one defines "meaningful conversation".)
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
As a follow-up for those of you who are actually curious about such things, this sort of problem is actually covered by mathematics in the form of set theory. Google cardinality of infinite sets (and maybe aleph numbers as well).
For a quick example, let's say I have a set 'A' containing all the integers greater than 0, which I'll call the set of "natural numbers". This set has an infinite number of elements. I also have a set 'B' which contains all real numbers greater than 0. B also has an infinite number of elements. A is a "proper subset" of B; that is, every member of A is a member of B, but the reverse is not true. At the same time, a proper subset of B (namely the subset consisting of integers) can be put into a one-to-one correspondence with all of A, but the reverse is not true (since the set of real numbers is not countable). So somehow, B is a "larger" set than A, even though both contain an infinite number of elements. Mathematicians would say that B has a higher cardinality than A.
Going back to the parent post, the number of planets is definitely countable, though whether finite or infinite may yet be in dispute. If the number of total planets is finite, then the GP's argument doesn't apply. Otherwise, if the total number of planets is infinite and the number of life-bearing planets is finite, we have a situation where "for some reason, exactly n planets in this infinite universe have life." Personally, I don't find that very convincing; I'd expect it to be more of a proportional basis, even if it's a one in a billion chance. Technically, if the number of planets is infinite, and the subset of inhabitable planets is also infinite (say for example if one in a billion, of an infinite number of planets, has life), then one is not "smaller" than the other; they have the same cardinality, since the set of natural numbers has the smallest infinite cardinality. It's counterintuitive, but I'll leave it to you to find out for yourself why this is true. Of course this infinite number of planets may be so far away that we'll never find them before the flame of the universe burns out, rendering this a moot point.
Go research this stuff on your own, if you haven't already. It's quite fascinating, and quite relevant to this discussion, though I can't guarantee it won't give you a headache.
I see this a lot in articles like this. It's like they're saying "Don't worry there's no life anywhere out there." I can't wait for the day when they finally find something.
This was originally reported back in April '07. Weird to stumble upon it again and find a heated debate months after the information was originally released.
Why does this post say no possibility of life just because the planet is close to the sun? Although there's at least some credit to the idea that life can't exist without water (because we've never seen any without it), there's no credit to the idea that it can't exist in extreme temperature/lighting situations. We have them on our planet! Google "extremophiles." If the comment was made to instead mean "No chance of humans," well, duh... I hope that's not your expectation. If it was meant to mean "No chance of us living there," that again is false. Orbital and magnetic field conditions may prevent it from being habitable but its proximity to the sun should not.