Slashdot Mirror
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.
____
~ |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.
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.
His name is Vijay
When they detect beer on another planet, THEN, we'll be talking!
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
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.
Especially if they're overladies!
-Mike
I'm sorry; I don't know what I was thinking!
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.
Volcanoes? That's impossible! Al Gore told me that excess CO2 can only come from SUVs.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
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?
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.