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Alien Life Could Thrive In the Clouds of Failed Stars (sciencemag.org)
sciencehabit writes: There's an abundant new swath of cosmic real estate that life could call home -- and the views would be spectacular. Floating out by themselves in the Milky Way galaxy are perhaps a billion cold brown dwarfs, objects many times as massive as Jupiter but not big enough to ignite as a star. According to a new study, layers of their upper atmospheres sit at temperatures and pressures resembling those on Earth, and could host microbes that surf on thermal updrafts. The idea expands the concept of a habitable zone to include a vast population of worlds that had previously gone unconsidered. "You don't necessarily need to have a terrestrial planet with a surface," says Jack Yates, a planetary scientist at the University of Edinburgh in the United Kingdom, who led the study. Atmospheric life isn't just for the birds. For decades, biologists have known about microbes that drift in the winds high above Earth's surface. And in 1976, Carl Sagan envisioned the kind of ecosystem that could evolve in the upper layers of Jupiter, fueled by sunlight. You could have sky plankton: small organisms he called "sinkers." Other organisms could be balloonlike "floaters," which would rise and fall in the atmosphere by manipulating their body pressure. In the years since, astronomers have also considered the prospects of microbes in the carbon dioxide atmosphere above Venus's inhospitable surface. Yates and his colleagues set out to update Sagan's calculations and to identify the sizes, densities, and life strategies of microbes that could manage to stay aloft in the habitable region of an enormous atmosphere of predominantly hydrogen gas. On such a world, small sinkers like the microbes in Earth's atmosphere or even smaller would have a better chance than Sagan's floaters, the researchers will report in an upcoming issue of The Astrophysical Journal. But a lot depends on the weather: If upwelling winds are powerful on free-floating brown dwarfs, as seems to be true in the bands of gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn, heavier creatures can carve out a niche. In the absence of sunlight, they could feed on chemical nutrients. Observations of cold brown dwarf atmospheres reveal most of the ingredients Earth life depends on: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen, though perhaps not phosphorous.
Where would they get the proper matter to feed themselves and reproduce with?
And if it developed space travel I wonder if it would notice our kind. Would it even interact as well as the aliens in Blindsight?
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Science really should read science fiction.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Table-ized A.I.
I've got alien life in my bowl too...
I thought it was funny.
... it might not.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The Integral Trees/The Smoke Ring, Larry Niven.
i prefer a beowolf cluster of natalie portmans covered in hot grits, myself
ph wait
*triggered*
port*MAN*?!?!
me man-boobies efuse to assume gender, but this mee-mee is despicable!
There is a possibilty of alien life some where in space. We don't know where. I no longer care. There is no alien life until we encounter alien life. I no longer care about the possibility of life existing in the most hostile places in the universe. I don't believe it. The so called scientist don't have any proof for it. Stop making up things and just study the objects in space using all tools we have and suggest the tools we still might need to get a better understanding of the universe. That's all that we need. I don't even know why those people look at stars. Is it still to try to understand the universe, or is it like the pop science articles seem to suggest only trying to find extraterrestrial life?
I really hope it are only the articles who give a wrong a wrong impression about astronomie. I really hope they aren't a bunch of crazy scientist believing in things like alien life they can't proof
Wait a minute. Maybe alien live could BE the clouds of a failed star. Think about it!
>> Alien Life Could Thrive In the Clouds of Failed Stars
Yeah I think they're called Scientologists.
Asshole.
Shouldn't you be picking out your cabinet or something, Donald?
Oceans have life at different layers, so why not gaseous atmospheres of varying densities?
Unless there is something magical about life, its seeds are embedded in the fabric of the universe. Earth coalesced out of a dust cloud and without any human intervention, life appeared and evolved to what we have today. This is a natural process. That it could occur in circumstances other than earthlike does not strike me as farfetched. OTOH, we still can't spontaneously make life in the lab so we don't know all its secrets, and perhaps in reality, our knowledge is very limited (you don't know what you don't know).
No phosphorous, it's as absolutely essential to any form of life as we know it as carbon is for more than one reason. It's a dealbreaker not to have it. No phosphorous, no life. And no there is not replacement for it, the hoopla over supposed replacement of it with arsenic in a certain bacteria has proven to be false. Replace phosphorus with arsenic and you get dead organism.
This is a purely academic exercise. Perhaps life could exist there (that is, after all, the definition of a habitable zone), but how would life originate in such an environment? Biochemistry needs liquid water (OK), available energy (OK), and a "stable" environment. On Earth it might have occurred in warm ponds (unlikely) or near black smokers. What is the analogous stable place in a the atmosphere of a cooling brown dwarf? Water droplets? How long are they stable before they evaporate or precipitate?
- proffmw
The Integral Trees/Smoke Ring books explore a similar idea, though it is based around a gas torus surrounding a neutron star. Definitely a fun read as Niven incorporates the physics of such a system in his world building. He did the math and thought through the model exceptionally well.
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
I bought a product from the cheap Chinese website pensu.com and their product was tainted with poisons that send my family to the hospital.
This sounds like it would make an absolutely amazing VR world that you could cruise around in. Even more fun would be designing such a world!
I can see how theoretically some balloon type structures could float on Venus ... but on a brown dwarf those structures would get quickly yanked down into the high pressure death zone.