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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."
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
You've mistaken the poster for the scientist
"so no chance of life there"
but in the article it clearly says:
"This is a far from habitable world," she adds.
Which means it's a no for us. As well:
"Although the planet is an unlikely candidate in the search for life"
Which is no the same as "no chance"
Your post makes perfect sense but to assume that it is a scientist saying that there can't be life is incorrect.
It's called Spectroscopy, and is extremely cool stuff. It's used in everything from detecting compositions of stars/planets to identifying really old manuscripts.
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Here is an excellent article to get you started:
http://astrophysics.suite101.com/article.cfm/wate
And, of course:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Spectro
The parent really isn't a troll.
Hydrogen is fairly common in the universe (90% of its composition), but oxygen isn't except in and near stars (because it is only created by fusion inside the stars and ejected free by supernovas). It makes sense that gas giants will pick up traces of oxygen and then form some water and it makes sense that rocky planets will have the potential to form water since the major constituent of silicious minerals is obviously quartz or SiO2. Any rocky planet that has had some differentiation process would likely have the silicious minerals float to the top like with the Earth and thus have a great potential of having liquid water form if the atmosphere could support it. Mercury, Venus, and Mars are great examples of places where the atmosphere could not support liquid water. On one side if do not have a powerful enough geomagnetic field, the solar wind will strip the atmosphere leaving the surface bare like Mercury and Mars. On the other side, if you gas the atmosphere too much with CO2 from volcanoes, the atmosphere will superheat allowing the water vapour to rise and be broken up by UV light like on Venus. So there is a sweet spot where the Earth exists to have a rocky planet with a strong enough geomagnetic field and enough gassing by volcanoes to support the atmosphere.
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 surprised parent got modded down. There is an enormous amount of evidence to imply lack of extraterrestrial life. Lack of radio waves is the major one, for me, and no one has explained this so far.
I don't even think that's good evidence for a lack of life. Just rounding here, but let's say humanity has been using radio waves for 100 years. 100 years from now we may well be using some other form of communication entirely. Of course I don't know what it could be, but nobody using smoke signals would've guessed radio waves would be the next big thing. So if, as a planet, we're only using detectably artificial radio waves for 200 years of the 4+ billion years the earth has existed and hundreds of millions of years that life has existed, and other planets develop in a very similar way, we're now looking for a stray quark in a haystack instead of a needle in a very large haystack. Hell, it's not very likely that the first extraterrestrial life we detect will be within 200 years of us in terms of technological advancement.Absent an amazing discovery of microbial bacteria or fossils on mars or titan, I think it's very likely that our first indication of life will be the discovery of a planet with a stable oxygen/nitrogen/CO2 atmosphere like our own.
Assuming that all life and civilizations evolve at about the same rate, and all life eventually leads to intelligent life, we're likely to find millions of Alien Life Forms (ALFs) before we find any that are within a few hundred years of us in technology. Why is any more explanation needed?
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