Scientists Find Water on Extra-solar Planet 220
amigoro writes "Scientists have, for the first time, conclusively discovered the presence of water vapour in the atmosphere of a planet beyond our Solar System, according to an article appearing in Nature. They made the discovery by analysing the transit of the gas giant HD 189733b across its star, in the Infrared using data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. HD 189733b is a 'hot jupiter', a gas giant that is roughly the size and mass of Jupiter but orbits very close to the star, so no chance of life there."
Some miscellaneous information: (Score:5, Informative)
Re:No Chance Of Life?!?! WTF? (Score:1, Informative)
The simple fact is that there is *NO* supporting evidence for life elsewhere.
Until some is uncovered, your thoughts are just pure speculation.
A century or so ago, everyone just assumed there was life on the moon. Guess what? We didn't find any. Not too long ago people assumed there was life on Venus and Mars. Guess what? We're not finding any.
I hate to burst your bubble, but "life" is just a relatively thin "bio-film" on this planet. Astronomically speaking, it's really, really, really thin. Almost non-existant. You may think life find "away", but it really hasn't been able to spread very far.
Re:No Chance Of Life?!?! WTF? (Score:4, Informative)
"so no chance of life there"
but in the article it clearly says:
"This is a far from habitable world," she adds.
Which means it's a no for us. As well:
"Although the planet is an unlikely candidate in the search for life"
Which is no the same as "no chance"
Your post makes perfect sense but to assume that it is a scientist saying that there can't be life is incorrect.
Re:"conclusively"? (Score:5, Informative)
Here is an excellent article to get you started:
http://astrophysics.suite101.com/article.cfm/wate
And, of course:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Spectro
Re:Hrrmph! (Score:5, Informative)
Hydrogen is fairly common in the universe (90% of its composition), but oxygen isn't except in and near stars (because it is only created by fusion inside the stars and ejected free by supernovas). It makes sense that gas giants will pick up traces of oxygen and then form some water and it makes sense that rocky planets will have the potential to form water since the major constituent of silicious minerals is obviously quartz or SiO2. Any rocky planet that has had some differentiation process would likely have the silicious minerals float to the top like with the Earth and thus have a great potential of having liquid water form if the atmosphere could support it. Mercury, Venus, and Mars are great examples of places where the atmosphere could not support liquid water. On one side if do not have a powerful enough geomagnetic field, the solar wind will strip the atmosphere leaving the surface bare like Mercury and Mars. On the other side, if you gas the atmosphere too much with CO2 from volcanoes, the atmosphere will superheat allowing the water vapour to rise and be broken up by UV light like on Venus. So there is a sweet spot where the Earth exists to have a rocky planet with a strong enough geomagnetic field and enough gassing by volcanoes to support the atmosphere.
Re:I can prove there is no life on any other plane (Score:4, Informative)
There can be only a finite amount of life supporting planets.
Just because I feel like nit-picking. If you have an infinite number of planets, you also have an infinite number of planets that support life. Only this is a smaller "infinite" number.
Re:hmm (Score:2, Informative)
Apparently we've already had this one [slashdot.org], too.
Re:no change of life like us (Score:5, Informative)
I'm surprised parent got modded down. There is an enormous amount of evidence to imply lack of extraterrestrial life. Lack of radio waves is the major one, for me, and no one has explained this so far.
Absent an amazing discovery of microbial bacteria or fossils on mars or titan, I think it's very likely that our first indication of life will be the discovery of a planet with a stable oxygen/nitrogen/CO2 atmosphere like our own.
Assuming that all life and civilizations evolve at about the same rate, and all life eventually leads to intelligent life, we're likely to find millions of Alien Life Forms (ALFs) before we find any that are within a few hundred years of us in technology. Why is any more explanation needed?
Yes, we have been to Venus (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Flawed Proposition (Score:3, Informative)
If the universe isn't macroscopically homogeneous, you wouldn't necessarily see light everywhere. For a degenerate case, imagine a universe such that there is an infinite number of galaxies which are all coplanar. You would have one bright band in the sky, but most of the sky would be dark.
If you assume the universe is infinite in space but finite in time, then it's possible that there simply hasn't been time for light from objects more than ~14 billion light years away to reach us.
Really, all Olber's paradox teaches us is that the universe cannot have all of the properties of being infinite in space, infinite in time, and macroscopically homogeneous. Our observations indicate that (to the limit of our ability to perceive) it is macroscopically homgeneous, so at least one of the other two must not be the case.
Yes and no (Score:3, Informative)
Well, yes and no. Volcanoes do spew all sorts of stuff into the air, the question is just how much of it.
Thawing up snowball earth I mentioned before took up to 30 million years, and that's with zero photosynthesis or other processes getting it out of the air again. So we're talking geologic timescales. Admittedly that required accumulating some 13% CO2 in the air (looks like I was remembering wrong when I said 30% before), or about 350 times more than today.
Global warming, on the other hand, is something that spiked in the last 100 years or so. Well, slightly over 100 years.
Doing some quick approximative maths, 30,000,000 / 100 = 300,000. So we're talking about an interval of time 300,000 times shorter than that. Even taking into account that 350 factor mentioned earlier, we'd need a little under 1000 years of outgassing for the current levels of CO2 to be entirely volcano-made. And even then: if we didn't have any plants or rocks that can fix that CO2.
Now of course, all that is assuming that the outgassing rate is the same right now as it was back then, which probably isn't true. So take all that as just some very inaccurate guessing at the rough ballpark figure. Still, it does illustrate that you can't take a phenomenon that happened over 30 million years, and needed some remakably unique conditions at that, to be necessarily relevant for something that happened in 100 years or so. It's just not nearly the same scale.
Now I'm not telling you whether or not to believe or not that the warming is entirely man-made. That, you can decide for yourself. But volcanoes just don't seem to spew enough CO2 and methane (which eventually is oxidized to CO2 and water in the presence of O2 and ultraviolet light) to be responsible for it.
Shorter version: do volcanoes spew CO2 in the air? Yes, most certainly. Did they spew anywhere near enough of that over the last 100 years to be responsible for global warming? No, unless we're missing a _major_ vent somewhere, not likely.