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Carbon Dioxide and Water Found On Exoplanet
Off the Rails writes "The BBC reports that evidence has been found for both water vapour and carbon dioxide on a planet 63 light years away. The planet is a 'hot Jupiter' with a surface temperature of 1173K and an orbital period of just 53 hours. The gases were found spectroscopically once its orbit had been deduced from observation. NASA hailed the news as proof that Kepler will be able to do its job of finding planets capable of supporting life." Wikipedia also has an entry on the planet, dubbed HD 189733b.
I for one welcome our new 1173 Kelvin alien overlords!
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
Seriously?
My preferred name is frazz, but someone keeps taking it. If you see him, tell him I said hi.
Wow, that's really.um hot? oh wait, kelvin measure cold. no. wait.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
NASA hailed the news as proof that Kepler will be able to do its job of finding planets capable of supporting life.
So the announcement about the discovery of a planet not capable of supporting life... is proof that Hubble's replacement will be able to find planets that will support life?
Space Utility Vehicles? Man, I would love to get my hands on one of them, too.
Ezekiel 23:20
.. Bush has ordered troops to liberate the planet and then declare "Mission Accomplished" in a desperate attempt to secure a 'legacy' *somewhere* in this galaxy.
NASA hailed the news as proof that Kepler will be able to do its job of finding planets capable of supporting life.
I guess all you need to support life these days is water vapor and carbon dioxide. Never mind that the planet is hotter than the surface of some stars.
"NASA hailed the news as proof that Kepler will be able to do its job of finding planets capable of supporting life."
Seeing as it can only seem to spot super massive planets the size of Jupiter or larger, this will likely not help one whit.
Is it a good first step? Sure.
So there is water vapor and CO2? Big deal. It is also over 1000 degrees K, a bit hot no? It is also not solid, sometimes a problem. It is also frickin huge, so unless you want to transform yourself into a diamond due to being crushed by unbelievable pressures, you may want to look else where.
To my understanding (which may be limited) this stuff is figured out by observing the "wobble" of light from a star. This is apparently caused by small gravitational effects caused by planetary bodies. How they get composition I am not entirely sure. However it seems that unless your planetary body is of a significant mass, the "wobble" isn't as easily seen. Which is why we are getting news about a super massive hot Jupiter being proof that a technology will fulfill its roll in finding planets suitable for life.
Perhaps they mean to do it by subtraction. Simply identify all those that are unsuitable, subtract that from the total, and what you are left are bountiful earth like paradises with green amazon women.
"Although they are keen to stress the planet is far too hot to support life, they say the finding represents an important proof of concept, showing that it is possible to detect CO2 in the atmospheres of distant planets orbiting other stars, and that the same method could be used to look at planets which might support life."
whats the point in putting error bars on spectrum if your just going to ignore them?
spectrum of HD 189733b
Surely the line has to go through those points, so either thier detector is broken and there should be huge error bars OR there is a major peaks at ~10, ~12, in fact the only place where the spectrum seams to be a reasonable fit is in the useless tail end where the error bars are huge.
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
Kepler will be a small telescope (about 1 meter) in orbit, with the sole mission of looking at a few fixed areas on the sky and searching for planets by the transit method: take thousands of pictures and look for stars which become dimmer for a few hours due to a planet crossing their disks. This small mission will launch in spring 2009 and is NOT a replacement for HST.
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is Hubble's replacement. It will be much larger (with a mirror around 6.5 meters in diameter) and carry out many, many different types of observations. This mission will launch, uh, some time around 2013, if all goes well.
Michael Richmond "This is the heart that broke my finger."
mwrsps@rit.edu http://stupendous.rit.edu
Wikipedia also has an entry on the planet, dubbed HD 189733b.
Notice that astronomers are not typically confused with the lives of the party.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Are they sure that someone didn't spill soda pop on the lens, when they took the measurements? Hmm, this spectroscopic analysis seems remarkably like the spectrum of Pepsi.
Unless, of course, our new alien overlords also drink Pepsi!
Attention all planets of the Solar Federation! We have assumed control! - Neil Peart
I believe I speak for everyone when I quote a certain Ms. Hilton on this one: "That's hot!"
That explains the greenhouse gas (CO2) and global warming (1173K)
Some see the vessel as half full; others see it as half-empty; We pour it out on the floor and laugh
Maybe they fucked up their planet big time and bailed. Wonder where they went? Maybe we can get someone to educate them on the problems of abusing the environment and temper the fever their old planet has so they don't mess up another one.
Or, maybe they just bought too many carbon credits from the Kang and Kodos Intergalactic Planting Company.
Doxide is what you get when Linux documentation geeks consume Doxygen.
At this point, aren't they all SUVs?
Those that have the capacity to reach orbit that is.
How amazed would you be to suddenly find that you just forgot what I wrote and you needed to reread my post.... again.
...our doxide and water vapour overlourds...
In this case, I think the word "proof" is being applied to the ability of the Kepler photometer to detect life-supporting compounds on exoplanets, not that the planets themselves can support life.
Proverbs 21:19
Water and CO2 are substances that pretty much form all by themselves, from very common elements. Wake me up when they find stuff that wouldn't occur on a "dead" world (oxygen/fluorine/chlorine, for example).
" NASA hailed the news as proof that Kepler will be able to do its job of finding planets capable of supporting life."
Somebody's trying to avoid funding cuts from the new administration
If you think
Carbon dioxide, on the other hand, is a surprise: at the temperatures and pressures encountered in an exoplanet atmosphere of this type, all carbon should be present as methane (if cool enough) or carbon monoxide. Giant planet atmospheres are generally far too hydrogen-rich for CO2 to form in any appreciable quantity. So its detection requires an extra-ordinary explanation for its origin.
Here is a Nature preprint from the same research group, describing H2O, CH4, and CO detection. I was hoping to find a research article (and not just a news story or press release) describing CO2 detection, but haven't found any yet...
The story should probably mention that this is just confirmation of findings from back in Summer of '07 (July 11, 2007 according to Wikipedia). Before I realized that I was staring at the article for a long time going "what? That happened years ago!"
... molecular oxygen. Hereabouts, most of it is created by life. And since it is consumed by oxidization, its presence would be a good indicator of an ongoing process to replenish it.
Have gnu, will travel.
Well, one of the first things most people do when they get a new boss is try to justify their position in the company. This is especially true if there are blank pink slips in his hand. so this is a pretty typical response.
Unfortunately I haven't seen anything where Obama is going to ditch crap government programs that don't have half the scientific return of NASA. And with the winking that the public did in the face of earmarks I don't expect anything to change as far as government waste.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
640K should be enough for anybody. Wait. What?
Thus proving that scientists are smarter than Dubya
Great, when we get there those aliens are already cooked.
That may well be true, but that doesn't take away the negative impact SUVs have on the environment. An SUV is far heavier and emits far more greenhouse gasses than a regular car.
Just because other things are even worse doesn't mean we shouldn't do anything about massive, unnecessary cars. Get a smaller car, use transit, get a bike, it does have an impact. If you constantly argue that anything you do has a smaller impact than other things, we'll never get anywhere.
Is it really not obvious what they were saying? Does it really need to be spelled out? Apparently, so here goes. They were able to identify a planet that has both water and carbon dioxide. It happens to be very hot, and thus this particular planet is unlikely to host life, however it is a proof of concept for the technique of doing spectroscopy on distant exoplanets. They are going to be fielding better telescopes in the future, which should be able to detect smaller and cooler planets that are capable of supporting life.
Hope that makes sense!
The enemies of Democracy are
But how can we be sure of that until someone goes there to check that it returned the correct results?
Not so good for terrestrial life forms, but the inhabitants of Venus (if there are any) might like it.
I'd been wondering lately if water vapor and carbon dioxide could still exist in a familiar form at 1,600+ degrees outside of a highly contained lab.
This is just the news I've been waiting for. ~
If it has tires or tits, it will give you problems.
Consistency; As our ability to measure remotely grows, we can do more tests. If the results are inconsistent, we'll have to come up with new theories.
In other words, we can't be sure, but we can make reasonable assumptions.
Tie two birds together: although they have four wings, they cannot fly. (The blind man)
Which isn't proof...proof is something which is 100% irrefutable.
You could've just said, "But I LIKE my SUV."
You want to know how to help your kids? LEAVE THEM THE F*&K ALONE. --George Carlin
Carbon Dioxide and Water + 100 tons per square inch atmospheric pressure != NO LIFE (look at the ocean floor)
Carbon Dioxide and Water + 100 tons per square inch atmospheric pressure + 1173K = NO LIFE
In the not too distant future, next Sunday A.D.