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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.
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"
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?
Who would have thought that one of the most common substances in the universe would be found outside solar system! The wonders of science.
Yeah; if you do a bit of googling, you'll find that various "authorities" list water as the 3rd or 4th most common molecule in interstellar space. So the real mystery is why anyone would consider it news that water is found in the signature of some remote object. The default assumption should be that anything not hot enough to break up a water molecule into its constituent atoms (or H + HO) will contain lots of water molecules.
But I suppose that's too complex an idea for your typical media writer to get their mind around.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
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.
I like the sentiment of your post, but we currently don't even have a 1 pixel picture of a planet around another star than our sun. The current methods, at least until we get James-Webb and better telescopes out there, are using the wobble effect from the gravitational effect of the planet on the star, spectral analysis, and such indirect methods of observation.
Still it is pretty cool to look at the current list of habitable exoplanets and think of the types of worlds there are out there. The discovery in the article proves beyond doubt that water can exist like on earth on the surface of a large rocky body.
You are quite right about the wobble effect used to help find candidates. It's extremely difficult to get direct pictures, however we have done it. Since it sounds like you have some interest in the subject I'll provide some links for you to read on. Interestingly enough the planet first planet we directly pictured had been captured by Hubble and overlooked for years as we didn't have the technique for combing through the data at the time!
http://www.universetoday.com/26353/new-technique-allows-astronomers-to-discover-exoplanets-in-old-hubble-images/
I like the list of habitable exoplanets, as this is where the future of humanity has to go someday.
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/bad_astronomy/2012/11/exoplanet_pictures_astronomers_have_photos_of_alien_planets.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2452217/A-lonely-planet-Giant-gas-world-sun-orbit-floating-space.html
http://www.google.com/imgres?biw=1920&bih=963&tbm=isch&tbnid=kjlHVn7dUiT4lM:&imgrefurl=http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/3453478/First-direct-pictures-of-planets-outside-our-solar-system.html&docid=WY-uZHkJtvY5FM&imgurl=http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/01113/HR_8799_1113907c.jpg&w=460&h=288&ei=qp5aUonvOYnM9QTa1IHICw&zoom=1&ved=1t:3588,r:89,s:0,i:354&iact=rc&page=3&tbnh=178&tbnw=284&start=76&ndsp=38&tx=85&ty=84
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2008/nov/13/first-bona-fide-direct-images-of-exoplanets