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EPOXI Team Develops New Method To Find Alien Ocean
Matt_dk writes "Astronomers have found more than 300 alien (extrasolar) worlds so far. Most of these are gas giants like Jupiter, and are either too hot (too close to their star) or too cold (too far away) to support life as we know it. Sometime in the near future, however, astronomers will probably find one that's just right — a planet with a solid surface that's the right distance for a temperature that allows liquid water — an essential ingredient in the recipe for life. Now scientists looking back at Earth with the Deep Impact/EPOXI mission have developed a method to indicate whether Earth-like extrasolar worlds have oceans."
Great...extraterrestrial beach resorts...
Funny may not give karma, but +5 Informative never made anyone snort coffee out their nose.
why should water be essential for life? and how do you define life anyway?
As far as I know, most of the techniques used for detecting exoplanets depend on the planet being ~Jupiter mass and pretty close because then
-you get gravitational "wobble"
-you're more likely to be in line for a transit
-mass is enough for gravitational lensing
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"They launch a sunbed at the planet and if a towel appears there are german lifeforms nearrby"
... why not look for oxygen? Oxygen is pretty reactive and, absent some process (life?) that regenerates it, it will combine with other molecules. Find oxygen and there's likely something going on to make it.
Have gnu, will travel.
Water as we know it contains Oxygen. Buy one, get the other for no extra charge.
Life as we know it is the rub here. Are we looking for planets that will potentially have life forms that are some how similar to those we know of on our own world?
Or are we really looking for a place to colonize one day?
If it is the later, then looking for water is logical.
If it is not, then really, open your mind and realize that 'life as we know it' is a very short sighted perspective. Out there in the universe is a silicon based civilization looking for worlds bathed in methane simply because it is quite obvious to anyone intelligent that this is the only type of work the 'life as they know it' could possible have a chance of being created.
Oh, and I would suggest opening your mind to broader horizons because some of those oxygen breathing, water oriented life forms I know can be real bastards.
Considering the likelihood of a gas giant to have many moons of significant size, why do we insist on a planet in the goldilocks zone? Here we are considering Europa and Callisto for possible subsurface oceans, and even life, and how would it be to have moons in that orbital slot?
If we're looking for planets that reflect a lot of blue light, we may end up finding ones covered with blue tarps.
Have gnu, will travel.
So if I got this right from TFA, they can tell there are oceans by how the amount of blue light changes? Doesn't it assume that the planet in question has large continents? I mean if the planet was pure ocean on the surface, then it'd always be a uniform display of blue. So basically what they do is detect different patches of colour, and if they find blue patches in the mix they'll assume they're oceans, am I right?
Also, using this technique of variation of light, couldn't they build a very crude longitudinal colour map of the planet? I mean, it would probably look like taking a map of Earth, squishing it to a height of 1 pixel in Photoshop and stretching it back, but they could get something like that, right?
You just got troll'd!
Yeah sure, or they could breathe lead and drink plutonium, I mean what do you know!
Or maybe possibly these guys have a better idea than you do about what seems even remotely plausible or even likely and they're taking their shot at it?
You just got troll'd!
I just wondered something. Generally, the presence of condensed phase liquid water is considered a marker that tells us "Look for life here." Unfortunately, given our current technology, most planets we find are gas giants that orbit too close to the star to be in the "habitable zone". But gas giants, by virtue of being huge, have hugely high atmospheric pressures in the lower atmosphere. Couldn't supercritical water (i.e. water at a sufficiently high temperature/pressure that there is no distinction between gas and liquid) support life? Or, for that matter, supercritical methane, or any other supercritical medium? After all, we can run useful chemistry in supercritical fluids such as supercritical CO2. And if it can support life, wouldn't the possibility of life in supercritical water significantly extend the habitable zone?
On the other hand this is an actual opinion from a 15 year old! We cant just dismiss it out of hand. After all experts have been wrong before and therefore anyone's opinion is as good as any other. :D
Control is an illusion, order our comforting lie. From chaos, through chaos, into chaos we fly
I'll be extremely happy when they finally find a planet with water, and not that crazy alien XYZ that I keep hearing about...
"Hegelians, who love a synthesis, will probably conclude that he wears a wig." - Bertrand Russell
"he first version uses a red-green-blue filter; the second, an infrared-green-blue. "
What kind of filters are these? if It's a band pass the first just blocks infrared (assuming they use a silicon detector), or are they band pass filters used on sequential images, or are they band blocking taken on sequential images so that you get red + green + ir, and blue + green + ir, and red + blue + ir ? I'm assuming they they have just the one detector.
Nate
I know that it's off topic but can anyone suggest when can one find (simulated) images of what an extra-terrestrial landscape could look like (with oceans or otherwise) that don't look too artificial? Preferably desktop wallpaper sized.
Google Images found several but the picking is slim.