Carbon Dioxide and Water Found On Exoplanet 151
Off the Rails writes "The BBC reports that evidence has been found for both water vapour and carbon dioxide on a planet 63 light years away. The planet is a 'hot Jupiter' with a surface temperature of 1173K and an orbital period of just 53 hours. The gases were found spectroscopically once its orbit had been deduced from observation. NASA hailed the news as proof that Kepler will be able to do its job of finding planets capable of supporting life." Wikipedia also has an entry on the planet, dubbed HD 189733b.
Re:1173K! (Score:2, Interesting)
Error bars? (Score:2, Interesting)
whats the point in putting error bars on spectrum if your just going to ignore them?
spectrum of HD 189733b [wikimedia.org]
Surely the line has to go through those points, so either thier detector is broken and there should be huge error bars OR there is a major peaks at ~10, ~12, in fact the only place where the spectrum seams to be a reasonable fit is in the useless tail end where the error bars are huge.