Slashdot Mirror
Hubble Finds Sign That Habitable Planets Could Exist Beyond Solar System
cold fjord writes with this excerpt from the BBC: "Astronomers have detected the tell-tale signs of a shattered asteroid being eaten by a dead star, or white dwarf. The Hubble telescope spotted the event some 150 light-years from Earth. The researchers tell Science Magazine that the chemical signatures in the star's atmosphere indicate the asteroid must contain a lot of water. This makes it the first time both water and a rocky surface — key components for habitable planets — have been found together beyond our Solar System. ... Of the 1,000 planets so far identified beyond our Solar System, none has been definitively associated with the presence of water." More at Smithsonian Magazine.
It seems that nearly every week there is an example of a new solar system with somewhat similar characteristics to our own. We've seen large planets, rocky planets, and now asteroids with high water content.
In 1995 my physics teacher told me we'd never have direct evidence of extrasolar worlds. Now I tell my physics students that I wouldn't be surprised if we found evidence of extrasolar life (probably in the form of a planet with a high concentration of oxygen in its atmosphere).
It's a great time to be alive and to be a scientist!
Great warrior...hrmph! Wars not make one great.
I don't get whats so special about water. Water has a pretty limited temperature range where its liquid, which is the form in which people consider it special. Water is a decent solvent, and thus rips apart lots of interesting structures (Thats a bad thing for life right?). Its shape is bad for building things. If its just that somehow hydrogen bonds + liquid = magic life juice, then there are lots of other choices (and that makes little sense).
Also, why are rocks key components? Even life here had little to do with rocks initially, and we have lots of rocks. We can even live without them.
I just don't buy the idea that life has to be nearly identical to what we have here. Perhaps this is a place we could infect with our life, but thats a whole different story. If you can survive in space via custom make ships, and spread that way, restricting yourself to a planet seems like a dumb idea. There is plenty of water and rocks in comets, and a little fusion reactor will provide all your energy needs. Living in a big gravity well seems counterproductive if you have the choice.
Who would have thought that one of the most common substances in the universe would be found outside solar system! The wonders of science.
The White Dwarf in question had this to say on Science Magazine's Twitter Feed: "I made you a watery body with rocky surface, but then I ated it"
Fuck yeah KILL that ARAB ANIMAL.
So satisfying that Hubble was the telescope to grab this honor as it enters its twilight years.
Sounds familiar. While this is an intriguing find it does not mean that life outside our solar system is anymore possible than it was before.
This is similar to the buzz around finding possible water on Saturn's moon:
Saturn's Moon--Does Water Equal Life?
Or rather, it used to before it totally & tidally got the shit kicked out of it.
Isn't it a bit of a jump from "asteroid with rocks and water in it" to "rocky planet with liquid water on it"?
Not that I don't think they're out there. The aliens have to come from som ...' baling near line 23 ..
W&6 ';@
c a r r i e r . l o s t
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
If by "habitable planets" you mean "one habitable asteroid" and by "could exist" you mean "could have existed"...
That were finding all these possible habitable planets.
That way when the technology will permit it, we can just leave this shithole of a planet and go for a better world.
Because a set of statistics for rocky worlds outside of this solar system with water now has a 1 in the column where it used to have a zero. We now have a data point where we used to have nothing, and that is a beginning. It's really the entire point of the Kepler mission when you think about it, to gather data so that we can better generate state statistics. We need data and in any number of critical fields the slot has a 0 in it.
Science starts somewhere and this is an indicator that were not wasting our resources by looking for rocky planets with water. We now know that they have existed in at least one other place in the universe, even if it wasn't a fully formed planet. For a while when we first started finding planets all we found were gas giants that were far larger than Jupiter and there were calls to stop looking as the costs were considered a waste.
How do we know if something is common or not until we go looking and persist for a scientifically meaningful period of time? When I was in school the idea that we would ever actually take a physical picture of a planet around another solar system was science fiction. Decades later and we have pictures of many planets around other solar systems and even planets that do not orbit a solar system at all.
Excuse me? I'm from Central Europe. I'm not all that familiar with the semantics of English ethnic terminology but I'm pretty sure that none of "nip", "gook" or "shrimpy" applies to my Bavarian ancestors. (Ja, in Bavaria, wo die Bäume aus Holz sind!)
Ezekiel 23:20
Which is more scientifically accurate?
A) Man thinks there might be a new kind of widget outside the solar system - because he thought there might be a new kind of widget outside the solar system.
B) $20 Billion robot says that behind curtain #2 might be a new refrigerator on popular game show
C) $200 trillion space probe thinks there might be something never seen before in history - outside our galaxy.
Why 'C' of course! Neither is more proven, neither has supporting documentation, but $200 trillion is much more expensive than "Free", so let's report that one!
It means that when they get there, astronauts will be able to make Tang.